RICHMOND, Virginia (LifeSiteNews) — Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin has issued an executive order reestablishing a state task force aimed at monitoring and improving maternal health services, minus language in a Democrat version of the proposal that would have perpetuated the fiction that men can become pregnant.
On May 17, Youngkin vetoed HB 781, which would have “reestablish[ed] the Task Force on Maternal Health Data and Quality Measures for the purpose of evaluating maternal health data collection processes to guide policies in the Commonwealth to improve maternal care, quality, and outcomes,” over language labeling the recipients of such services as “birthing people” rather than pregnant women.
“Unfortunately, the proposed legislation politicized an otherwise noncontroversial issue,” the governor said in his veto message. “I offered an amendment to address this, but unfortunately the General Assembly did not adopt it. In lieu of legislation, I am directing the Secretary to reestablish the task force.”
On June 26, Youngkin issued his executive order reestablishing the task force without the legislature’s rhetorical gift to transgender activists. The task force, which previously ran from 2021 through the end of 2023, will collect and analyze data to inform future maternal health policymaking, review existing care, and make recommendations for standard quality metrics.
“Mothers play an incomparable role in the lives of their children and families, and it is imperative that we do the necessary, collective work to ensure they are receiving the care they deserve,” Youngkin said. “This begins with knowing where we need to improve, so that we can better maternal health policies throughout the Commonwealth and promote the well-being of women, children, and families.”
The Virginia Mercury reports that Democrat state Del. Charniele Herring, who originally filed HB 781, complained that the issue was “truly being politicized by the executive order,” but acknowledged that Youngkin’s version “did keep some of my structure for the task force.”
It is a tenet of progressivism that “gender” is no more than a matter of self-perception that individuals are free to change at will, with no correlation to sex, which in reality is rooted in an individual’s chromosomes and reflected by hundreds of genetic characteristics.
Only females are physically capable of bearing children, though pro-LGBT activists who assert otherwise would like to reorient society’s understanding of gender to refer exclusively to perception. To that end, the media frequently promotes stories about “pregnant transgender men” (who are actually women suffering from gender dysphoria) and research about transplanting wombs into men who “identify” as women.
Despite such semantic maneuvers or artificial machinations, however, all truly “birthing persons” are in fact mothers.