OLDCORN: ‘A pregnant person is a person who is pregnant’ — Ottawa's fear of the word 'mother' has become a Monty Python sketch

Somewhere, John Cleese is taking notes.At a recent meeting of the House of Commons science and research committee, Conservative MP Vincent Neil Ho asked the head of the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) a simple question. What, exactly, is a "pregnant person"?Nancy Hamzawi, whom Prime Minister Mark Carney appointed to run the agency in June 2025, had four senior officials at the table with her. She had the whole federal public health apparatus behind her. Her answer? "A pregnant person is a person who is pregnant."Ho tried again. How is a pregnant person different, medically, from a pregnant woman?"A pregnant person is a pregnant person," she said.You could not script it better. Picture the old dead parrot sketch, except the shopkeeper is a senior bureaucrat insisting the bird is simply "a parrot that is not alive," and a Liberal MP keeps interrupting to ask whether parrots are relevant to the study.That last part isn't much of a stretch. When Ho pressed on, Liberal members raised points of order questioning whether his line of questioning had anything to do with the committee's work. Ho's reply was sensible. A witness had already told the committee that losing public trust is itself a threat to public health. If the agency can't explain its own words, why would anyone trust its advice?.It got stranger. Asked about the term "birth parent," Hamzawi said the individual who gave birth to the child is the birth parent of the child. Asked whether Canadians should stop using the word "mother," she didn't give a straight answer.The word games come from a document PHAC published in April 2026. The National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI), which advises the agency on vaccines, released a lengthy summary of its approach to "inclusive language" in vaccine advice on pregnancy and breastfeeding.Under that approach, writers of federal vaccine guidance are told not to write "pregnant women" on its own. Writers are to say "pregnant women and pregnant people" instead. The document even instructs them to repeat the word "pregnant" before each group, apparently to avoid confusion.Nobody was confused until Ottawa got involved.The same document floats "chestfeeding" as a possible term. Then it admits the word shouldn't be used when talking about antibodies passing through breast milk, because "the biological basis may be unclear." Read that again. The experts concede their new vocabulary can muddy the science, and they adopted it anyway.What evidence drove this? NACI's literature review included just 12 articles. Only one was original research, and that study had 16 participants. Sixteen people. That's smaller than most minor hockey rosters, and it now shapes how the federal government talks to every expectant mother in the country.The policy is labelled "interim," pending a global consensus. Nobody should hold their breath.Consider the numbers. The 2021 census found 100,815 Canadians aged 15 and older were transgender or non-binary. That's about one in 300 people. Of those, 27,905 were transgender men. The language is also meant to include non-binary people. Every one of them deserves healthcare like any other Canadian. However, none of that requires the federal government to rewrite basic English for the other more than 99%..There's an irony buried in NACI's own report. It warns that purely gender-neutral language “may exacerbate” inequities for indigenous, black, and other racialized women. In plain terms, the authors admit that scrubbing the word "women" from health advice can hurt women. Yet when the head of the agency was handed a chance to simply say the word, she wouldn't.This is what happens when a government department cares more about sounding politically correct than being clear. Taxpayers compensate Hamzawi approximately $296,000 per year, but she can't tell us that only women have babies.Public health runs on trust. A newcomer reading English as a second language, a teenager in a rural clinic, a grandmother helping her daughter book a vaccine: they all understand "pregnant woman." They shouldn't need a glossary to read a government pamphlet.Ho was right to ask. Hamzawi had every opportunity to give a straight answer, and she chose a word salad instead.The word is "mother." For most of us, it was one of the first words we ever spoke. If the people running Canada's public health agency can't bring themselves to say it in a committee room, Canadians are right to wonder what else they're too afraid to say.

OLDCORN: ‘A pregnant person is a person who is pregnant’ — Ottawa's fear of the word 'mother' has become a Monty Python sketch

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