Midwives are no longer allowed to certain words in a new set of rules and regulations released by the NHS recently.
According to media reports, hospital staff belonging to Brighton and Sussex University’s Hospital NHS Trust received a clear set of instructions recently.
Here, they were told to substitute a series of terms that could potentially prove offensive to the trans community. These words include mothers, maternal, parental, breastfeeding and chest feeding too. Moreover, the news comes forward as the hospital’s trans-friendly language policy and will soon be implemented forever.
In addition, staff cannot say ‘breastmilk’ but they can substitute it with words like human milk or breast/chest milk or milk from a feeding parent.
Without a doubt, both Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals from the NHS trust are a part of the country’s first health practices to introduce this change. In the same way, they’re making history as some of the first few to implement a gender-inclusive language policy for the entire maternity services department. Moreover, even the department will get its name changed as the ‘perinatal services.’
On the other hand, some more changes worth a mention include substituting terms like a woman with phrases like woman or person and father with a parent or second biological parent or even co-parent.
In the new document that came out this week, the staff was clearly instructed to refrain from words like a woman or a set of terms that describe motherhood as a whole. Instead, they may consciously begin by adding in words like people with more inclusive forms of language.
Authorities mentioned how gender identity may be a source of oppression as well as health inequality too.point 205 |
For this reason, they’re making it point to consciously use terms like women as well as people together.point 93 | This way, people will have clear minds that they are committed to addressing all sorts of issues pertaining to inequalities in these areas of the health sector.point 227 | 1