Sal Rodriguez: Are we really still doing ‘birthing people'?
If Democrats should have learned anything in the last few years, it’s that Americans are really done with the “woke” language that has made Democrats sound unbearable.
Last August, the centrist group Third Way gave Democrats pretty good advice: ditch ridiculous jargon and speak like normal people do.
“For a party that spends billions of dollars trying to find the perfect language to connect to voters, Democrats and their allies use an awful lot of words and phrases no ordinary person would ever dream of saying,” the group explained. “The intent of this language is to include, broaden, empathize, accept, and embrace. The effect of this language is to sound like the extreme, divisive, elitist, and obfuscatory, enforcers of wokeness.”
Not everyone has gotten the memo, apparently. Take Assemblymember Tasha Boerner of the 77th Assembly District is indeed still stuck in 2020. In a social media post touting some of her bills, she highlights Assembly Bill 1910 which will “allow birthing people in California to have direct access to pelvic floor therapy resources through the California Department of Public Health's website.”
Birthing people, people of birthing capabilities, individuals who may birth - this is not how normal human beings speak. That’s how far-left ideologues or people who mistakenly take far-left ideologues seriously communicate. Normal people refer to women, pregnant women and mothers.
Now, this bill, which simply puts some information on a government website, is fine, I guess. The proposed law simply reads: “The department shall post information about pelvic floor therapy resources to a web page on its public internet website relating to pregnancy and reproductive health.”
Ah, yes, people who have given birth. Those are called mothers. Boerner herself celebrated Mother’s Day two weeks ago and used the term herself. She knows.
If Democrats want to look like out-of-touch radicals, they should keep using this jargon. But if they want to sound like normal people, they’ll use the words “mother” or “women” instead of “birthing people.”
Sal Rodriguez can be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com
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This story was originally published May 29, 2026 at 2:54 PM.