Politicians backing a bill to define the terms ‘woman’ and ‘man’ in law reckon they’re doing it to support new mothers. Alice Neville isn’t so sure. 

In announcing his party’s support of the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill, Act leader David Seymour referenced a vulnerable section of society few would deny deserve support and empathy: new mothers. Beginning his Facebook post with a helpful description of breastfeeding (“we are mammals because the female of the species has mammary glands that produce milk for feeding offspring… most people call these glands breasts”), he went on to rail against the term chestfeeding. “New mothers have been made to sit back and nod at this nonsense for fear of offending someone. When you’re forced to pretend things you know are not true you are no longer a thinking and valuing being in a free society.”

Powerful stuff. The sentiment was shared by NZ First’s Jenny Marcroft, who introduced the bill – which seeks to legally define the term woman in law as “an adult human biological female”, and man as “an adult human biological male” – in parliament last week. “It’s clear a woke contagion infected the health department, deleting the word ‘women’ to be substituted with ‘pregnant people’, ‘people with a cervix’, ‘individuals capable of childbearing’, and ‘chest-feeders’,” she said, offering no actual evidence of this alleged infection. Marcroft’s colleague Casey Costello had struck a blow a year ago with a letter to Health NZ, she said, but still the woke contagion persisted.

It’s odd, then, that if you look at the comprehensive maternity and pregnancy section on the Health NZ website you’ll see multiple mentions of women and men, with nary a “pregnant person” or “person with a cervix” to be seen. But I guess the contagion can be sneaky. “Morning sickness is different for everyone,” reads one sentence. This should clearly be “morning sickness is different for every woman”. Yes, the extensive breastfeeding section does not once use the term chest, but nor does it mention mammary glands. Makes you think.

It’s heartening that the coalition – the bill passed its first reading with the backing of all three governing parties – is looking out for new mothers. I was one once, back during that dark era when the Labour government ruled over us, and can attest that it’s a vulnerable time. The year was 2022, and wokeness, apparently, was at its peak. Yet oddly, while gestating future human capital, I don’t recall once being referred to as a pregnant person by any health worker. True, maybe it happened but I didn’t take note of it – because, you know, I was a pregnant person and I had more important things to worry about. Like having to awkwardly explain my situation after almost every member of the health workforce made the repeated assumption that I had a partner who was an adult human biological male and the father of my unborn child. Funnily enough, I didn’t. I was, wokely, having the kid on my own, using donor sperm. 

This assumption certainly didn’t change when my baby entered the world, inconveniently six weeks early, and nor did any wokeness rear its ugly head. Mercifully, I was not helped with chestfeeding – phew! I wasn’t helped with breastfeeding either, to be fair. My daughter had entered the world on a Friday, and the lactation consultant didn’t work at Auckland Hospital at the weekend. I didn’t have a midwife, as I’d made the deeply unwoke and privileged decision to engage a private obstetrician as my lead maternity carer. A postnatal midwife was included in this expensive service, but only once my baby and me had left the hospital. 

So there I was, on Ward 98, with whispers of Covid spreading on the ward. A long-time staffer said it was the busiest and most chaotic weekend they’d ever experienced at the hospital. Over four days, recovering from a caesarean while my baby was down the hall in NICU, her weight dropping under 2kg due to my useless mammary glands not doing their job, I didn’t see much of any representative of the health department, woke or otherwise. The occasional stern message was sent from NICU that my baby needed colostrum, but nothing much was coming from the aforementioned glands, which were bruised after hours spent desperately trying to squeeze out a drop of liquid gold into a plastic teaspoon. So I kept my eyes glued to the swing doors in my shared room in the hope that someone, anyone, would burst through and help me. 

When finally a ward midwife blustered into the room looking extremely stressed, I politely asked for help. “Where’s your partner?” she said in a distinctly pissed off tone. “We can’t help you.” She ranted a bit about the health system being broken. Yeah, no shit, I thought. Then she left. 

There wasn’t room for a partner, to be fair, in my curtained-off corner of a room shared with a pregnant woman who had preeclampsia (she made a complaint on my behalf after overhearing the above reprimand, bless her). But my sister (who, having birthed three children of her own, was certainly of more use than a baby daddy anyway), joined me for long stretches, squished up against the industrial breastpump and unhelpful sterilising set-up, which comprised a massive basin of water I couldn’t carry due to having just undergone major abdominal surgery.

On account of this absurd arrangement, it was impossible to keep the curtain closed, which led to an even more absurd situation where I was told off for exposing myself while pumping, which I had to spend approximately 98% of the day doing. Thankfully my sister was there to witness this particular episode, otherwise I would have dismissed it as some sort of trauma-induced hallucination. “Close the curtain!” a passing staffer (nurse, midwife, I wasn’t really sure) reprimanded me. “Someone might see your breasts!”

We laughed in disbelief. We were in a fucking maternity ward. It was probably the least woke moment in a thoroughly unwoke time, though being yelled at by a healthcare assistant for bleeding on the floor was up there too. But hey, at least nobody called me a chestfeeder.

The point of this fun walk down memory lane is not to elicit sympathy but to underline that in my experience, wokeness is not a problem in maternity care in this country. But I guess there must be a good reason for our government to progress this bill, and I’m sure this week’s budget will address the “significant strain” the maternity sector has been under for decades, which has resulted in experiences like mine being not even that bad in the grand scheme of things.  

I can’t help but shake the feeling, though, that maybe, just maybe, the backers of this bill aren’t really doing it for new mothers, or to protect their daughters from playing netball against “someone who should be playing blindside flanker for the first XV”. 

Maybe, just maybe, it’s not about women’s rights at all.