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AP Style Guide Updates Reporters on When to Use the Gender-Neutral Phrase 'Pregnant People'

Published: May 06, 2022
  |   By Cassandra MacDonald

The Associated Press updated its style guide for use of the term “pregnant people” on Wednesday, following the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion on Roe v. Wade.

The update says that writers should now only use the gender-neutral term in “stories that specifically address the experiences of people who do not identify as women.”

“Phrasing like ‘pregnant people’ or ‘people who seek an abortion’ seeks to include people who have those experiences but do not identify as women, such as some ‘transgender’ men and some ‘nonbinary’ people,” the new guidance explains.

The term “pregnant people,” along with other phrases like “birthing person,” have been being used by some on the left as a way to include transgender and non-binary people in discussions about women’s issues. The right has been pushing back, asserting that this language dehumanizes and erases women’s experiences.

The more “inclusive” language has been causing some problems within the abortion debate, however, as conservatives mock Democrats who are now going back to using the word “woman” and asserting that men cannot get pregnant.

After all, “no uterus, no opinion,” was once a common rally cry for pro-abortion activists and Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson recently said during her Supreme Court confirmation hearing that she could not define the word “woman” because she is not a biologist.

The timing of the Associated Press update was widely mocked by conservatives on social media, to the point where Kimberlee Kruesi, the AP journalist who tweeted the update, announced that she was muting the conversation.

“LMAO at the AP trying to explain why when it’s writing about abortion, the story is about women, but when it’s writing about transgenderism, the story is about pregnant people,” Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro tweeted.

Another Twitter user mocked the change writing, “The @AP : ‘We’re only partially erasing women, depending on the political context of our writing.'”

Jennifer Van Laar, the managing editor for Red State, wrote, “this is why I do not have my editors and writers conform to new AP style guidance/manuals.”

“We all knew the media were altering the definition of woman whenever it severed the progressive agenda but it’s nice of them to formalize it,” YouTuber Auron MacIntyre wrote.

The criticism was not limited to the right, with some leftists weighing in that the “inclusive language” should be used all the time.

A Twitter user with the handle “Angry Black Lady” tweeted, “the phrasing most certainly should not be confined to stories that specifically address the experiences of trans and nonbinary people. that’s asinine. that’s not iclusive. that’s a carve-out. when writing about repro health care writ large, you need to be FULLY INCLUSIVE.”

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