Critics blast Washington Post for using the term 'pregnant people'
'Outnumbered' panelists mock The Washington Post for referring to expectant mothers as 'pregnant people' rather than 'women.'
More legacy media outlets have employed the term "pregnant people" in their reporting when referring to pregnant women, in language that matches the Biden administration, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC has repeatedly referred to "pregnant people" rather than women since President Biden took office, and White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki also referred to "pregnant and postpartum people" at the briefing podium. The trend is picking up in the press as well, drawing derision from some who call it a form of gender erasure.
The Washington Post was mocked last week for referencing pregnant women as "pregnant people" in a story that didn't mention the word "women" a single time.
Headlined, "Pregnant people at much higher risk of breakthrough COVID, study shows," it reported on a new study that looked at whether specific comorbidities could affect the risk of a vaccinated individual contracting COVID-19, also known as a breakthrough case.
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NPR pulled off a similar article in September, which the Media Research Center's Tim Graham called "truly woke" in a piece criticizing the outlet.
"More effort is being placed on defining gender that it is taking away from true gender-related issues, such as maternal mortality rates, gender-related cancer detection and mental health issues," Dr. Nicole Saphier, a Fox News contributor, told Fox News Digital.
Due in part to pressure from activists on the left, the notion that, for instance, transgendered men can bear children – due to being biologically female – has contributed to language broadening in major outlets to the term "pregnant people." The left-wing American Civil Liberties Union drew mockery last year when it marked the anniversary of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death by altering a famous quote to remove the late Supreme Court justice's references to women and female pronouns.
WASHINGTON POST SLAMMED FOR REFERENCING PREGNANT ‘PEOPLE’ RATHER THAN WOMEN
"The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person's] life, to [their] well-being and dignity… When the government controls that decision for [people], [they are] being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for [their] own choices," the ACLU posted in a photo on Twitter in September.
"The pronoun wars are bad and silly but editing a Ginsburg quote to remove any reference to ‘women’ looks so clumsy," Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel tweeted at the time.
FILE - This Sept. 20, 2017, file photo shows Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg speaking at the Georgetown University Law Center campus in Washington. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, file) (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, file)
The British scientific journal Nature also repeatedly used the phrase in an article in January about why women carrying unborn children should be vaccinated against COVID-19.
"When the vaccines were first administered to the public in late 2020, little was known about their effect on pregnant people, who hadn’t been represented in the original clinical trials that tested the shots. Although that is standard practice, it left pregnant people grappling with whether getting a jab was the best decision for themselves and their babies," Nature wrote.
ACLU PUMMELED FOR ALTERING RUTH BADER GINSBURG'S ABORTION QUOTE, REPLACES 'WOMAN' WITH ‘PERSON’
In a special video for ABC's "Good Morning America," Dr. Jen Ashton explained "what pregnant people need to know" about the COVID-19 vaccine. At one point she mentioned medical groups "unanimously recommending that people who are pregnant be vaccinated" before later saying "pregnant women" weren't initially enrolled in clinical trials. She then pivoted back to repeatedly referring to "people" who became pregnant.
A 2021 Vox article headlined, "The evidence that Covid-19 vaccines are safe and effective in pregnancy is growing," also used both "pregnant women" and "pregnant people" in the same text.
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The New York Times last year, however, referred exclusively to "pregnant people" in an article about pleas from the CDC for pregnant and breastfeeding women to be vaccinated. Recent headlines in USA Today and CNN also used the term.
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What's inclusive to some is frustrating to others. Women have fought hard to achieve equality with men, Saphier said, often doing so while dealing with gender-specific issues like menstruation and, of course, pregnancy.
"While everyone should have the freedom to live their lives as they choose, the mantra ‘anyone who wants to be a woman, can be,’ undermines the historical efforts of women," Saphier added.
Fox News' Lindsay Kornick contributed to this report.