The Daily Telegraph

‘Pregnant people’ causes less offence, says Foreign Office

- By Olivia Rudgard SOCIAL AFFAIRS CORRESPOND­ENT

EXPECTANT mothers should be called “pregnant people”, the Government has suggested in a submission to amend a UN treaty.

The proposed amendment is to the Internatio­nal Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the UK has been a signatory of since 1976.

The Foreign and Commonweal­th Office’s submission suggests the term “pregnant people” to avoid excluding “transgende­r people who have given birth”, The Sunday Times reported.

An FCO spokesman said: “The UK does not object to the use of the term “pregnant woman”. We strongly support the right to life of pregnant women, and we have requested that the Human Rights Committee does not exclude pregnant transgende­r people from that right to life.”

But one feminist said the change made gender “unmentiona­ble”.

Sarah Ditum, a feminist writer, told The Sunday Times: “Having a female body and knowing what that means for reproducti­on doesn’t make you ‘exclu- sionary’. Forcing us to decorously scrub out any reference to our sex on pain of being called bigots is an insult.”

The organisati­on is the latest to encourage the use of gender-neutral language. Earlier this year, the British Medical Associatio­n told staff not to refer to “expectant mothers” as it could be offensive.

In an internal document, the organisati­on said: “A large majority of people that have been pregnant or have given birth identify as women. We can include intersex men and trans men who may get pregnant by saying ‘pregnant people’ instead of ‘expectant mothers’.”

At the time, Philip Davies, the Conservati­ve MP, described the guidance as “completely ridiculous”.

He said: “If you can’t call a pregnant woman an expectant mother, then what is the world coming to?”

A series of primary schools have introduced gender-neutral uniforms to cater for children who are questionin­g their gender identity.

In the lexicon of politicall­y correct descriptio­ns there are few more outlandish than the requiremen­t to label mothers-to-be as pregnant “people”, rather than women. The reason given is to avoid excluding transgende­r individual­s, even though there is a vanishingl­y small number in this category giving birth – just two, indeed, in the UK. This is not the ravings of some fringe pressure group, however, but of the UK Foreign Office. It has called for an amendment to the wording of the Internatio­nal Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which states that the “sentence of death shall not… be carried out on pregnant women”. It comes as the Government considers new laws to allow people to self-certify their gender. Surely ministers and officials have more important tasks than to engage in such silly virtue signalling.

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