The Patriot Post® · Of 'Birthing People,' Mothers, and the Unborn

This Sunday, Americans everywhere will honor the mothers among us. We’ll honor their singular, God-given ability to become pregnant and to give birth, and we’ll honor their innate gifts for loving, for protecting, for nurturing, and for telling us we grabbed the wrong chicken broth at the grocery store.

Nowhere, though, to the disappointment of woke leftists, will we be honoring “birthing people.” Nowhere will we be saying, “Happy Birthing People’s Day.” And this is as it should be, despite the best efforts of Democrat Congresswoman Cori Bush.

During her testimony yesterday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Bush did violence to the English language when she said, “Every day, black birthing people and our babies die because our doctors don’t believe our pain.”

First-term South Carolina Republican Representative Nancy Mace, herself a single mom, was among many who took issue with Bush’s weird locution. “‘Birthing people’ — you mean women or moms?” she tweeted. “The left is so woke, they’re stripping from women the one thing that only we can do. Leave it to libs to botch highlighting an important issue [people] in both parties can agree on by catering to the fringes.”

Bush also had a predictable defender: “When we talk about birthing people, we’re being inclusive,” tweeted NARAL. “It’s that simple. We use gender neutral language when talking about pregnancy, because it’s not just cis-gender women that can get pregnant and give birth. Reproductive freedom is for every body.”

NARAL’s anti-science contortion notwithstanding, we suspect Bush did indeed mean “black mothers,” and we’ll cede that the point she was making couldn’t have been more deeply felt.

But what ultimately came out of her testimony was probably not what she intended. Instead of an attack on white supremacy and institutional racism — elements of which were certainly in there — her three and a half minutes before the committee rendered a deeply moving and powerful affirmation not only of motherhood but of life. See for yourself, and try to look past the partisanship:

Every day, Black birthing people and our babies die because our doctors don’t believe our pain. My children almost became a statistic. I almost became a statistic.

I testified about my experience @OversightDems today.

Hear us. Believe us. Because for so long, nobody has. pic.twitter.com/rExrMXzsSQ

— Congresswoman Cori Bush (@RepCori) May 6, 2021

Bush spoke of pregnancy, warning signs, indifferent prenatal care, and of going into preterm labor. “At 23 weeks my son was born,” she said. “One pound, three ounces. His ears were still in his head, his eyes were still fused shut, his fingers were smaller than rice, and his skin was translucent. A Black baby, translucent skin — you could see his lungs. He could fit within the palm of my hand. We were told he had a zero percent chance of life. The Chief of Neonatal Surgery happened to be in the hospital that morning and saw my case on the surgical board and she decided to try to resuscitate him. It worked and for the first month of his life, Zion was on a ventilator fighting to live. For 4 months he was in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.”

Not long afterward, Bush became pregnant again, and she again went into preterm labor. This time, she says, “The doctor told me that the baby was going to abort. I said, ‘No, you have to do something.’ But he was adamant, and he said, ‘Just go home. Let it abort. You can get pregnant again because that’s what you people do.’”

It’s hard to believe that a doctor trained to deliver babies would say something so callous and racist, but that’s Bush’s story. In any case, she chose life, and her son is now 21, and her daughter, Angel, is now 20.

“Though it’s difficult to know the exact number,” writes David Harsanyi at National Review, “somewhere around 10,000 late-term abortions are performed on viable babies who could otherwise survive outside the womb every year. The number of near-viable babies — babies whom science will soon be able to save outside the womb — accounts for thousands more. This is properly described as infanticide. And no matter how many times the myth is repeated, the vast majority of late abortions are not performed to save the mother’s life.”

It’s worth considering that Planned Parenthood aborts 247 black children every day in America — and this despite its ardent support of the anti-family Black Lives Matter cause.

Still, when it mattered for Cori Bush, she chose life. She chose motherhood.