Could a mama cat have a baby elephant?

By: American Decency Staff

 “Could a mama cat have a baby elephant?  Could a chicken hatch a puppy?”  These questions were followed by a fit of giggles from my seven and eight-year-old Sunday School students.  “Of course not!” they replied. 

I asked the questions in a recent Sunday School lesson leading to a discussion of original sin.  As each kind of animal gives birth to their own kind, so the first parents, Adam and Eve, (and all people after them) gave birth to humans with sinful hearts just like their own.

The incredulous response to my questions from my elementary-aged students showed that the laws of nature put in place by God are understood innately – even by children.  Yet what is commonsense to a seven-year-old seems to exceed the grasp of those pushing the new morality – forced approval of any and all lifestyles that deviate from natural law and God’s design.

In recent months, the Midwives Alliance of North America (MANA) fell to pressure from the LGBT movement and stripped references to the terms “mothers” or “women” from the organization’s official guidelines.   Midwives who belong to MANA are told to no longer refer to women who give birth as “mothers,” but are now required to call them “birthing individuals.”

Midwives Alliance of North America claims the use of “mother” and “women” are not inclusive and the change was made to avoid offending those who identify as transgender. 

This alliance of midwives seems to think being a woman isn’t really necessary to give birth to babies.  A notion with which my Sunday School kids might disagree.

A group called “Women-Centered Midwifery” also disagrees and is petitioning MANA to change the policy.  Hundreds of regarded midwifery experts, including Ina May Gaskin, the “mother of authentic midwifery,” signed a letter to MANA, seeking a return to commonsense.

The letter states in part:  “women are now all but missing from the language, as if we can separate woman from mother from baby.”

The midwives of Women-Centered Midwifery, who by nature of their profession know where babies come from, go on to remind MANA that one’s sex – either male or female – is set at conception and is an unchangeable part of our DNA.  As they write in their petition:  “We know as midwives that biological sex occurs at the level of our DNA and the gametes we produce, and is immutable.  Sex is natural, biological and objectively factual.  Human beings, like the majority of other mammals, are sexually dimorphic. i.e. there are two distinct biological sexes.”

One such as Bruce Jenner may “identify” as a woman, may change everything from his name to his body, yet biologically he is still a male.  A woman can in the same way “identify” as a man, yet her biological sex will remain female. 

Their letter continues, stating what should be obvious:  “by embracing the idea that any human other than those in a class called women carry offspring to term, give birth to them and nurse them, we are prioritizing gender identity over biological reality.  We are allowing gender identity to be the primary way that we refer to one another, even for a biological process like birth.

“The very few gender-identified males that have given birth … have only done so because they are female-bodied people, and that scientific fact cannot be erased.”

This push by MANA to eliminate the term “mother” is another assault upon the design of marriage and family. 

Words matter.  Definitions matter.  There is a great danger in attempting to change the meaning of words.

German dictionaries today contain a qualifying bracket after certain words with the abbreviation “N.S.” referring to National Socialist – the Nazi party of World War II era.  The Nazis attempted to change the meanings of words and the N.S. notation now designates that definition as Nazi propaganda.

Governments can unilaterally dictate that what is square shall henceforth be called round.  A majority of the population may even vote to affirm that a square is actually a circle, but it doesn’t change the reality.

Yet changing reality is what those such as MANA are systematically trying to do.

In California the “outdated” language of ‘husband and wife’ has been eliminated from state laws and Florida has removed the terms ‘bride’ and ‘groom’ from marriage licenses, replaced with ‘spouse’ and ‘spouse.’  

And the trend doesn’t stop with marriage licenses.  The country of Spain, changed birth certificates from ‘Father’ and ‘Mother’ to ‘Progenitor A’ and ‘Progenitor B.’  And a California bill allows for three parents to be listed on a birth certificate – mother, father, and parent.  A feat that would baffle not only my Sunday School students, but any student of biology.

As Christian commentator Michael Brown reports:  as England began to move towards redefining marriage, the Daily Telegraph reported that, "The word 'husband' will in the future be applied to women and the word 'wife' will refer to men, the Government has decided."

According to John Bingham, "Civil servants have overruled the Oxford English Dictionary and hundreds years of common usage effectively abolishing the traditional meaning of the words for spouses."

In the government's proposed guidelines, "'husband' here will include a man or a woman in a same sex marriage, as well as a man married to a woman. In a similar way, 'wife' will include a woman married to another woman or a man married to a man."

So, a man could be a wife if married to another man (or not), while a woman could be a husband if married to another woman (or not), all of which begs the question: Why use words at all if they have utterly lost their meaning? It's like saying that up is down (or up) and down is up (or down), while north is south (or north) and south is north (or south).

MANA can claim that mothers have nothing to do with giving birth and the Supreme Court can tell us that marriage is not the union of a man and a woman, but that doesn’t change reality.  God’s truth is changeless.  And in my Sunday School class there are five little children who embrace that truth and in that I rejoice.

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