NY lawmakers’ gender-neutralizing bill would dehumanize women – and strip us of our most meaningful identity

Americans were assured that if Donald Trump became president, women would be stripped of our rights. 

As it turns out, Gov. Hochul is the one poised to make good on that prediction in New York. 

The Empire State is rapidly becoming a scene out of “The Handmaid’s Tale” — not because of conservatives, but because of Democrats in Albany. 

The New York state legislature has passed Senate Bill 9316 and if Gov. Hochul signs the legislation into law, mothers and fathers will become “gestating parents” and “non-gestating parents.” Leba D Photography

The state Legislature has now passed Senate Bill 9316, and if Hochul signs it, New York law will replace the terms “mother” and “father” with so-called gender-neutral alternatives. 

Under the bill, mothers become “gestating parents.”

Fathers become “non-gestating parents.” 

In the name of inclusion, New York lawmakers have managed to do something remarkably regressive: stripping women of perhaps the most meaningful identity they can ever hold. 

What do we call Mother’s Day? 

Just a few weeks ago, Americans celebrated Mother’s Day. 

Politicians flooded social media with tributes praising mothers for their sacrifices, their love and their irreplaceable role in the lives of their children. 

Schools sent home handmade cards; restaurants filled with families honoring the women who brought them into the world and raised them. 

Now many of those same political leaders are supporting legislation that effectively tells women that “mother” is no longer an appropriate word. 

The issue isn’t merely semantic: The bill has real-world implications in family court and legal settings, where mothers and fathers have historically been recognized as serving distinct roles in the lives of children. 

By reducing motherhood to a gender-neutral biological function, lawmakers are not simply changing terminology; they are redefining one of the most fundamental human relationships in existence. 

What makes this especially offensive is how profoundly dehumanizing the new language is.

Progressives are quick to deploy passionate rhetoric about empowering women, especially in their reproductive rights, but now they themselves have created the term “gestating parent,” reducing a woman to her reproductive organs. 

Doing so strips away the humanity, history, affection, sacrifice and meaning associated with motherhood and replaces it with the kind of sterile language one might expect to find in a medical textbook or livestock inventory. 

As a mother of six, I find that reduction both insulting and bizarre. 

Motherhood is not a biological event that concludes in a delivery room. 

When my children wake up from a nightmare, they don’t call for their gestating parent. 

When they scribble notes on construction paper or write cards for birthdays and holidays, they don’t write, “To my favorite gestating parent.” 

They write “Mom.” 

Motherhood is not a medical condition. 

For decades, feminists argued — correctly — that women should never be reduced to their reproductive capacity. 

Yet somehow we’ve arrived at a moment where progressive lawmakers have taken the most meaningful female experience many women will ever have and reduced it to a bodily process. 

It’s difficult to imagine a more dehumanizing way to describe a woman. 

Motherhood isn’t important because of pregnancy: Pregnancy is merely the beginning of the story. 

The significance of motherhood lies in everything that comes after.

That’s what New York Democrats have taken aim at. 

Law is insult 

The women of New York don’t need Albany’s permission to call themselves mothers. 

They certainly don’t need progressive activists reducing them to reproductive functions in the name of their definition of progress. 

A mother is not a “gestating parent.”

She never was and never will be.

The fact that this insult is now being written into law tells you everything you need to know about which political movement is actually waging a war on women. 

Bethany Mandel writes and podcasts at “The Mom Wars” and is a homeschooling mother of six.