It’s often pointed out that one area of life that needs to be absolutely clear about who is a woman is medical care, including pregnancy.
In most cases, a miscarriage is a one-off event and most people go on to have a successful pregnancy in the future.
…
Among people who know they’re pregnant, it’s estimated about 1 in 8 pregnancies will end in miscarriage.
Many more miscarriages happen before a person is even aware they’re pregnant.
Losing 3 or more pregnancies in a row (recurrent miscarriages) is uncommon and only affects around 1 in 100 people
The words “woman” and “women” don’t appear once on that page.
H/t Milli Hill
Comments
4 responses to “Most people have a successful pregnancy”
And that “1 in 100 people”: is that 1 in 50 women, or have they just s/women/people/g and not bothered updating the numbers? That’s an important distiction.
Graham, I noticed that too. I’m guessing the second, because I’m pretty sure miscarriage isn’t as high as 1:50, but I could be mistaken.
I suspect most doctors (and providers such as PP and NARAL) know that if someone has a miscarriage that means they are a woman, but don’t feel they can risk saying that. And yes, language evolves. But the concept of adult human female/woman has a scientific meaning, and people don’t just get to change it and force scientists to use it.
Also, language doesn’t evolve from forced usage, not usually. That isn’t evolution. That’s artificial selection at its worst.
Iknklast: yes, I assume that it’s just a case of a lazy “replace all”, but things like that can have serious consequences.
Surely is. My doctor can do a blood test and if there is a high level of HCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) he can say “Congratulations, David. You’re pregnant.”
HCG is a maker for both pregnancy, and testicular and prostate cancer. Knowing the sex of the patient is somewhat important.