Scientific American Covers Itself with Shame Again, This Time by Using Term ‘Birthing Parent’
Another of its recent published pieces was a hit job on Charles Darwin and Western science.
Friends from Legal Insurrection may recall I refer to Scientific American as the Bud Light of scientific journals. That particular article stemmed from the magazine’s editor using an example of a bird that has 2 distinct genders based on 4 chromosomes to argue the avian’s existence supported “non-binary” gender identities. She was heavily critiqued for the example by an exceptional evolutionary biologist.
The publication is back at it again, this time using the phrase “birthing parent” in reference to mothers.
The term was apparently also used in a Nature Neuroscience study that was being described in the magazine.
The study, published in January in Nature Neuroscience, followed more than 100 new mothers from near the end of their pregnancy until about three weeks on average after they had their baby. Previous research had examined birthing parents’ brain before they gave birth or during the postpartum period, but this study observed them both before and after birth, and it also took into account whether they had a vaginal birth or C-section.
The findings reveal temporary changes in some brain regions and more permanent ones in a brain circuit that activates when people are not engaged in an active task and that is also involved in self-reflection and empathizing with others.
Why not use the term “women” for mothers. 100% of all babies born to humans so far have been born by women. Until that scientific fact changes, the term ‘birthing parent’ is a signal that you are about to read woke blather and pseudoscience.
To promote the article, Scientific American released an X-post. The ratio it achieved was spectacular, and the comments were mix of mockery and derision for the use of the term ‘birthing parent’.
‘Scientific’ … Women give birth and only women.
Stop dehumanising us to please a few individuals with mental health issues.
You’re a disgusting gaslighting rag.— Lanee (@OakTreeLaneN) March 17, 2024
What a journalistic mess — the story uses “mothers” and “women who gave birth” on most first references and then tosses in the meaningless “birthing parent” on second references and the headline — possibly a serious reporter paired with an unserious editor?
— CindyHoedel (@CindyHoedel) March 17, 2024
“Stephen why don’t you put more stock in what scientists say?”
Gee I wonder
— Stephen Schutt (@schuttsm) March 17, 2024
Scientific American has been busy promoting agenda-driven pseudoscience. At my personal website, Temple of Mut, I did a detailed analysis of one recent review of sexual dimorphism research that was a cover for undermining the seminal work of Charles Darwin, an icon of Western science.
My post went deep into the science weeds, so head there for links to actual science and supporting documentation.
… English naturalist Charles Darwin studied and published at during the Victorian era. His seminal work, The Origin of Species, was written in an era when the modern approach to science and research into biology were being developed. And perhaps it is worthwhile to take a look at the data he collected and analyze it with fresh eyes.
By why? Is it for the love of science?
No…apparently it is an attempt to fight the patriarchy.
The next paragraph heads into the anti-Western/anti-Male territory that is sadly dominating current “scientific” thinking today:
“There’s been this really strong inertia toward the larger male narrative, but it was just based on Darwin’s hand-wavy statement, and the evidence doesn’t really support it,” says the study’s lead author Kaia Tombak, a postdoctoral evolutionary biologist at Purdue University. That this narrative has endured for so long “may reflect Western societal biases that tend to look at issues through a male lens.
As I concluded in that piece: Little wonder trust in both science and journalism is collapsing.
— Leslie Eastman ☥ (@Mutnodjmet) March 17, 2024
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Comments
I just now checked out SciAm’s X acc’t. I hadn’t looked at an issue in many years. How disappointing that in the meantime, SciAm has become a veritable sewer of woke.
Sadly, this wokefestation is permeating everything, and I don’t think most know why. Nobody questions it; they just go along like sheep.
The soft “sciences” were already in the bag, and now medicine has fallen and the hard sciences are close behind.
This generation is lost, I am afraid.
I let my subscription lapse and stopped reading Scientific American years ago when they decided to stop writing and reporting about actual science and decided to become just another PopSci magazine on a rack that was already littered with too many PopSci magazines at the time. Haven’t bothered to look at it recently but is sound like its gotten even worse with its woke nonsense.
SciAm is Thailand now.
I’ve never been able to understand a single article in Scientific American.
I a tepid defense, they used to be quite good, but after the 80’s, it started plummeting, and now wallows at the same level as “Radical Teacher” magazine.
When the left talks about “misinformation,” you can be assured it is all coming from them.
Woke progressive leftists in britain trying to cancel or rename Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, to appease they LBGT cry bullies.
Most of the LGBs that I know don’t like the “T’s” much either; they are dragging them down with their perverse antics.
See: Gays against groomers on X.
I used to subscribe to SA. I gave up on them more than 0 years ago because they were publishing too much leftist opinion disguised, usually very thinly, as science.
It doesn’t look like they’ve improved.
The Chronicle of Higher Education is a cesspool now.
Man shall forever seek his own understanding. There is nothing wrong with a quest for knowledge but it certainly needs to be understood that you may find something disagreeable if you dig deeply enough and you should be prepared to accept what is found.
That used to be science.
The modern cult of science is discrediting itself.
“new mothers” implies first births. I doubt that is what they intended but that is the meaning.
What I wonder about is why they are “mothers” and then, in the next sentence, demoted to “birthing parents”. I thought the word “mothers”, itself, was verboten, anyway.
Personally, I get a kick out of all the new euphemisms they try to think up for women. “Person with a vagina” does have to be my favorite, so far. It’s comedy gold … literally. The old joke, “What is the definition of a woman? … Life support system for a vagina.” [though the last word was a little spicier in the original]
I think that, in the end, they will have some insane, 7-letter acronym for women. … Lots of Xs and Qs involved. … Impossible to pronounce in any reasonable way.
By far the most insane dysphemism for women to come from the Alphabet people is, “bonus hole.”
The implication is that having a vagina is a bonus, and thus the default orifice for conjugation is the anus. That’s right; anal is the new normal.
LOL. I hadn’t heard that one. Leftists really have an obsession with identifying holes. It’s beyond weird, really.
And we know that a lot of leftism goes back to poor potty training.
Ask Ketanji. Shocks the heck out of me, that she doesn’t know what a woman is, and she sits on the Supreme Court. THAT is scary as hell.
I wonder how she knows she is one?
That’s one result of quota hiring.
Scientific American is neither scientific nor American.
Not anymore.
Quite true. It’s been owned by some German conglomerate, Holtzbrinck Publishing, through its subsidiary Springer Nature, for a while. Scientific American used to be a quasi-journal. It ceased being that some time ago. The best parts of it were the great illustrations of scientific phenomena, particularly biological pictures of cell membranes, etc. that were useful in lectures and teaching material. It fell off the beam in the 80s and then never came back. It went the way of “Discovery” magazine and became a joke. Now it’s no better than the “Lancet”, a once venerable British medical journal that’s now just pure propaganda (see: George Wakefield).
I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ parents.
That’s the least of your problems.
“Birthing person”? Silly me. For all of my medical training and practice, we referred to them as “mothers”.
In my field of psychology, I see so much psuedo-science that passes as scholarship. I like to call these people the “I have a really strong opinion” crowd. They then do not complete a literature review to even see if the actual research body supports their opinion or not, but instead cherry pick a few articles (regardless of whether or not they have actually read them or they are up to date) to back up their preferred opinion. And presto, they put out a publication that they call “research.” Basically it’s an editorial with a few citations to make it look scientific. Real science means that you have a very deep knowledge of the literature on a topic, are willing to ask interesting questions that are not based on your pet opinions, and most importantly are willing to actually let the data drive the conclusions, not your opinion drive the data. Or to put it another way, you are willing to be wrong. I’ve had so many practicum students I’ve worked with at this point that have no idea how to even formulate a research question, that it’s truly depressing. All these made up terms like “birthing parent” is just an extension of this whole unwillingness to drop your biases and actually think critically about a topic in such a way as to advance knowledge and/or practice.
They blinded me with “science”.
I don’t follow SA any more: no science in it.
“How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!” — Samuel Adams
Even the broad-spectrum journals like Science and Nature are starting to publish questionable articles. The science i them is likely OK, but there seems to be more editorializing in the intro and conclusions parts. In the old days I recall that type of discussion to be limited to the front editorial page rather than part of the manuscript proper. For me, I just send stuff to J. Duh.