Is it true that British doctors have been banned from using the words “mother” and “human milk”?

On February 10, 2021, several Russian media reported that the British Health Service (NHS) ordered its employees to use new gender-inclusive vocabulary instead of the words “human milk,” “mother,” and some others. We checked whether this is actually true.

In the winter of 2021, Russian media reported that in the UK they proposed changing the usual terms that have long been used in gynecology and obstetrics. A note about this on Lenta.ru was called “Midwives in Britain will be banned from using the word ‘mother’ because of transgender people,” and material on Life came out under the headline “British doctors urged to call breast milk human. So as not to offend anyone." Didn't stand aside either "Tsargrad" With Radio Sputnik. On the evening of the same day, a story on this topic came out in the “Time” program on Channel One.

In a note on Lenta.ru it says: “Britain's National Health Service (NHS) unit in Brighton and Sussex will ban midwives from using the word "mother" and other words associated exclusively with the female gender when discussing maternity issues with patients. The new language policy for healthcare facilities is designed to protect the feelings of transgender people.” The authors of the material report that when communicating with patients, they suggested replacing “mother” with “more neutral” words, such as “giving birth parent.” It is proposed to call breast milk the gender-neutral words chest milk (English chest means any breast: male or female) or human milk. The publication refers to a press release issued by the perinatal unit of Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals (BSUH) Trust: “We are committed to protecting transgender and non-binary people using our services from additional pressure due to terminology, which has a significant impact on their psychological and emotional well-being.”

In a report by Timur Siraziev, released on Channel One in the Vremya program, it does not directly say that the words “mother” and “women’s milk” are prohibited, but the correspondent claims that the new service instructions “instead of “pregnant woman” it is proposed to say the genderless “pregnant person”, and not to use the pronoun “she”. Siraziev retells the essence of the initiative from an article in The Times newspaper: “Gender identity can be a source of oppression and inequality. We are committed to addressing these health care disparities for all of our patients.”

The document entitled "Gender-inclusive language in perinatal medicine" is indeed published, but it does not apply to the whole of Britain. The recommendations were prepared by one of the departments of the BSUH trust. The organization's activities are concentrated in two hospitals in the south of England: the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton and the Princess Royal Hospital in Haywards Heath. The trust also provides medical services in six more hospitals and seven clinics in Sussex, along with other trusts, but is not a monopolist in the region at all. There are 223 NHS trusts in Sussex and Surrey. act 13 trusts, as well as a dozen other NHS organizations providing medical services to the population, private hospitals and doctors' surgeries. So BSUH is only part of the healthcare system even within its region. And it is incorrect to assert that the official instructions published in one of its departments determine the policy of the entire national medicine.

We must also understand that BSUH is a special trust. Edition The Telegraph reports, that he positions himself at the forefront of LGBT inclusion and works closely with the charity Stonewall, which is at the forefront of the fight for gender self-identification. At the same time, Stonewall’s human rights fervor does not always meet with support even in tolerant Great Britain. It can be assumed that most other organizations within the NHS are unlikely to fight for gender inclusive language with the same enthusiasm as the BSUH.

But what is even more important is that in the BSUH Maternity recommendations (“manual”, like this document called on Channel One), and some publications in the British media on this topic say that the trust does not abandon the usual terminology, but proposes to use new words in addition to existing ones. “The vast majority of those who use midwifery services are women, and we have the right words for them. This will not change, and we will continue to call them pregnant women and talk to them about breastfeeding,” the guide says on page two. New words (among which indeed there are birthing parent, chest milk, and human milk) are proposed to be used in personal communication in cases where patients prefer it, but there are no instructions to apply them to all women in labor without exception, and traditional words should not be used. By the way, the same thing is said in article The Times, which Channel One reporters referred to, for some reason ignoring most of the text.

IN recommendations BSUH Maternity also has a table of examples of how, according to the new rules, people and phenomena related to the topic of motherhood should be referred to in general terms in public statements and documents. This table does not tell you to use the word "birthing parent" instead of "mother" or "human milk" instead of "breast milk." But it says that where “mothers” were previously written in documents, it is better to write “mothers and birthing parents”, and instead of “woman” - “woman or person”, etc. Regarding the word “she”, the abolition of which was mentioned in the Channel One report, the instructions recommend using the pronoun they (“they”) in general statements, but only in those statements where woman or person is already used, and not everywhere. There is no linguistic innovation in this: in English they are universally used in relation to one person when his sex/gender is not known to the speaker.

It is worth noting that not only Russian, but also some British media, including those considered respectable, wrote about the BSUH Maternity initiative in a similar vein: supposedly the NHS trust is proposing to use new words instead of old ones, without clarifying that in fact we are talking about the parallel use of old and new words depending on the circumstances. In this regard, on February 10, the management of BSUH Maternity published additional message further explaining that staff had not been instructed to stop using the words “woman,” “mother,” and other common English words. Moreover, on the division’s website you can still find a large number of publications in which used the word women. BSUH also did not refuse to use the obviously gendered word midwife (“midwife”).

So the fact remains that the BSUH trust's midwifery department has proposed new gender-inclusive language for its staff. At the same time, reports that employees of this department are forced to use neologisms instead of old vocabulary are false. Where it is necessary to name people or phenomena in general terms, the manual recommends using both words, and when communicating with a specific patient, those words that the patient prefers. The wording used by Russian and some world media is also incorrect: “they will ban”, “they strongly recommended to replace”, “they recommended to exclude”, “they rewrote the laws of nature”. It is also not true that the advice published by BSUH Maternity is directed at other parts of the trust, other NHS trusts or British medicine as a whole.

Mostly not true

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. https://www.bsuh.nhs.uk/maternity/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2021/01/Gender-inclusive-language-in-perinatal-services.pdf
2. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chestfeeding-breastfeeding/