3min chapter

The Waves: Gender, Relationships, Feminism cover image

Incompetent Cervix: The Misogynist History Behind Naming The Female Body

The Waves: Gender, Relationships, Feminism

CHAPTER

The Shift in Pregnancy Language and its Impact

Exploring the impact of using gender-neutral terms in relation to pregnancy and the importance of separating miscarriage from abortion to avoid blame and stigmatization.

00:00
Speaker 2
Wow, it's just way too reductive, it is not precise enough, and it is detrimental to a lot of people experiencing menopause. That is actually, that makes a lot of sense if you just pause and think about it. This is actually a really good segue to language and how it shifts in relation to becoming more culturally relevant. After the Dobbs decision, we have seen a shift in the ways people talk about pregnancy language. Can you talk more about that? Oh
Speaker 1
my gosh, yes, and it was interesting because I stumbled across this when I was looking at pregnancy language, but the language of abortion and the conversation around abortion is inextricably tied up with pregnancy language. So soon after Dobbs, a lot of medical associations and then places like the ACLU even kind of put out a statement saying, we're not going to say pregnant women anymore, we're going to say pregnant people, sometimes people with uteruses. And it wasn't just what you might think saying like, yes, people of all genders, including trans men, can get pregnant. It was also saying that girls get pregnant, like people who are under 18. And it's important to say who is affected, who can get pregnant and therefore who is affected by abortion laws. And even though pregnant people can sound more big to some, it's actually more precise. And now, yeah, like medical journals also, they use pregnant women when that's the criteria that they're looking at. But if it's not, and there could be trans men, intersex people or girls, then they want to say pregnant people, or it's not accurate. Another thing I noticed was there was a bigger move to separate miscarriage from abortion, because the phrase spontaneous abortion means miscarriage in doctors speak. So you would you might get diagnosed with that, it might be on your medical notes. And for some people that had a very different weight, you know, it's complicated because for some people, they felt blamed as if they chose to do this, even though the abortion just means like the ending of a pregnancy. And I think doctors wanted to be sensitive to that and not imply that, I guess kind of like incompetent cervix, it's saying like, hey,
Speaker 2
you did something wrong.

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