Bill Shorten vows to replace ‘birthing parent’ after outrage at Services Australia form erasing ‘mother’

Federal Government bureaucrats have tried to replace the word “mother” with “birthing parent” on official forms - but it’s triggered huge outcry from our readers. See how they voted in a poll.

A huge number of outraged mums and Daily Telegraph readers have lashed out against Federal Government bureaucrats who have attempted to replace the word “mother” with “birthing person” on official forms.

An astonishing 97 per cent of more than 2000 readers in our exclusive poll voted hands down against swapping the time-honoured word “mother” with the woke term.

That’s despite Services Australia saying it had tested the new words “birthing person” and received positive feedback before changing the forms.

And in excess of 440 readers have commented on the news, with the vast majority saying they were “insulted” by the term and many saying they wanted “radical looney ideas” kept out of people’s lives.

It comes as the Federal Government stepped in today to change the form, after a new mum hit out at the language saying it’s like something out of the Handmaid’s Tale by erasing the word “mother”.

Labor MP Bill Shorten reacted to The Daily Telegraph story about mother’s being called “birthing parents”. Picture: Twitter

Minister for NDIS and Government Services Bill Shorten vowed to have the word “mother” replace “birthing parent” after The Daily Telegraph revealed the choice of language in an article published on Wednesday.

In a series of tweets, Mr Shorten noted he had been made aware of the document after reading the NewsCorp publication.

He said that he immediately ordered officials to “cease” using the two-word term that claimed it was implemented as “part of a pilot program launched in three hospitals under the previous Coalition Government”.

“When I was informed of this situation yesterday, I instructed the responsible officials they should cease using the previous government’s forms,” Mr Shorten tweeted.

Sall Grover is the founder of Giggle, a social networking app for women.

“They will be replaced with new forms that use the word mother, not birthing parent, which is consistent with other Medicare forms.”

It comes after Giggle social app chief executive Sall Grover, who has just given birth to a daughter, said she was shocked to be handed the paperwork to include her baby on her Medicare card which asked her to sign off as a “birthing parent”.
“I’m very happy with Bill Shorten’s statement and plan,” Ms Grover said.

“It’s the right thing to do. I hope this win inspires more women to speak up when our rights, language, spaces and sport are under attack.”

She added: “We just have to stand up for ourselves.”

When filling out the forms for medicare, Ms Grover said she crossed out the words and wrote “mother”.

The consent form was introduced in March in some hospitals as part of a trial to upload new baby details to official Medicare records.

Ms Grover, who runs a women’s social podcast network called Giggle and gave birth at the Gold Coast University Hospital last week, called it “dystopian” and “alienating” to mothers.

“Enough is enough,” she said.

Attention women in Australia:

On the form to put our newborn baby on our Medicare card, we are referred to as “birthing parent”.

Enough is enough.

This absolute bullsh*t is exclusionary, alienating and derogatory towards every woman wants to be and is called “mother”. pic.twitter.com/li8vQSWGu6

— Sall Grover (@salltweets) July 19, 2022

“To see the whole role reduced to that one act – in the name of some bizarre kind of diversity & inclusion – is ridiculous,” she wrote.

“My own mum was with me and we both were furious.

“Being called a ‘birthing parent’ on government forms is too close to A Handmaid’s Tale for my liking.”

“The fact is, this ideological language is being introduced to appease a very fringe group of people, many of whom are lobbyists and activists.

“It’s only ‘inclusive’ of gender identity ideologues who want to detach themselves from all traces of femaleness but still want to be pregnant and give birth – a uniquely female act.”

Coalition for the Biological Reality founder Stassja Frei said it was an example of the “public service so completely captured by bad ideology that mothers are erased from language”.

Services Australia, the federal agency responsible for the forms, said they tested the language before going ahead with it and had “positive feedback”.

“The term ‘birthing parent’ is being used in a consent form provided to parents participating in the Birth of a Child pilot,” Services Australia general manager Hank Jongen said.

“This language was tested before being trialled.

New mother Sall Grover, with her baby Isabelle, was not happy at having to sign a government form calling her a "birthing parent" instead of mother.

“We continue to review all aspects of the pilot in line with customer feedback, which has been positive to date.”

He said the pilot was a trial of a digital process to make it easier for parents to register their newborns with Medicare.

Department of Health secretary Brendan Murphy came under fire recently for taking three months to come up with a definition of the word “woman”, when grilled at a Senate hearing.

He had originally said the word “woman” was a “contested space at the moment”.

The official definition eventually provided was “the Department of Health does not adopt a single definition”.

Originally published as Bill Shorten vows to replace ‘birthing parent’ after outrage at Services Australia form erasing ‘mother’