Talk:Pregnancy/Archive 10

Archive 5

←

Archive 8

Archive 9

Archive 10

Archive 11

Transgender in lead

I have twice tried to add information on transgender pregnancy to the lead and it was deleted. The second time it was deleted was by an editor that does not work on this or related articles and yet shows up here to say it is undue. The lead is supposed to cover the body. How can it be that information that not only has a section heading but also includes a link to the main article be said to be undue? I would hope that the editor that deleted the information that I added will explain why s/he watches this article and yet only makes an edit when transgender is mentioned. Sectionworker (talk) 03:48, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

Please don't assign or imply motive. You could be right about the motive; as well, you could be wrong. Absent evidence of disruptive editing, best not to make the claims/implications. I rarely edit "related articles" to this as well. That's not a fair rationale for assuming motive. cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 03:55, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

I have been standing up for transgender rights since 1969. The vast majority of reliable sources discussing pregnancy do not discuss pregnancy by transgender men. Therefore, in my opinion, the content does not belong in the lead, although it certainly has a place in the body of the article. Cullen328 (talk) 04:22, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

Thank you Cullen. You are one of our best editors and I take note of your opinion. I've tried to find RS that discusses pregnancy but have found very little. Do you have any ideas that you can share? Thanks in advance. Sectionworker (talk) 04:38, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for your kind words, Sectionworker, but I hope that my arguments stand for themselves without reference to your opinion about my reputation. There is a widely cited article that you can read here. There may be better articles. I do not claim to be an expert in this topic area, although I have gone through several pregnancies as a father and a grandfather. Cullen328 (talk) 04:54, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

I've read that one. Reading it again, I do note that they make this comment: "...suggest numbers of transgender individuals who are seeking family planning, fertility, and pregnancy services could certainly be quite large". I've also read several other similar medical articles. I've done a lot of reading to try to understand this issue. I've also talked to my daughter and granddaughter.

However, when you wrote "The vast majority of reliable sources discussing pregnancy do not discuss pregnancy by transgender men" I thought you meant a source that covers pregnancy much like we do here and yet says little about trans pregnancy. Sectionworker (talk) 05:47, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

I support having a brief sentence or two in the lead and note that this is entirely typical for our lead to summarise the body in this way. Remember our lead does not work like some other publications, where it contains just the key teasing facts to grab the reader, but serves to summarise the body. Wrt WP:WEIGHT the problem we have is most "sources discussing pregnancy" are in fact only discussing an aspect of pregnancy or are aimed at a particular audience (those trying to become pregnant, midwives, etc). Pregnancy is a huge topic and the question really is, as Sectionworker notes, whether a comprehensive resource dealing with pregnancy in all its aspects would consider trans pregnancy. Remember, even a professional textbook is unlikely to have a section on pregnancy in the arts and culture or deal with legal issues such as employment rights. I would expect a professional textbook on midwifery in 2022 to contain a chapter on LGBT pregnancy issues. I would expect midwives in 2022 to have received training in handling LGBT and trans patients in particular. If you go to NHS Pregnancy, a link-box at the top right is Having a baby if you are LGBT+. If the NHS home page on pregnancy has LGBT+ matters with as much prominence as "Trying for a baby" and "Finding out if you are pregnant" then that's a sign this is an aspect of pregnancy that is important. The HFEA: Information for trans and non-binary people seeking fertility treatment has a large page dealing just with fertility treatment. Sectionworker, in the long discussion on WAID's sandbox, we encountered midwifery journals that were addressing trans issues. In particular I found this podcast where the Journal of Midwifery & Women's Health had designed their new cover to be trans inclusive. So, a midwifery journal now has its permanent cover design including a trans man. Is that prominent enough for us? -- Colin°^Talk 09:12, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

Agree with Colin's comment directly above. Well said! Littleolive oil (talk) 18:14, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

Indeed, very well said. This is how I feel but it is said a lot better than I could have done. Sectionworker (talk) 02:05, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Sectionworker, I have been watching this page for a while (I don't actually recall why) but I've also previously commented here. Putting the transgender topic in the opening paragraph was UNDUE. It would make far more sense to put something like infertility or artificial insemination etc into the lead given how many women deal with the former and try to address it with the latter. Taking a more policy based angle, transgender pregnancy is a subtopic towards the bottom of this article. Why would it be given such prominence in the article lead? If the objective is dealing with the cultural/emotional issues associated with pregnancies then trans issues are a minor topic per NPOV vs infertility, teen pregnancies, unwanted pregnancies, high risk pregnancies etc. If the objective is to say people with female reproductive anatomy can get pregnant, why does that rise to the level of lead worthy material? Are we going by the weight of RSs on the large topic of pregnancy or based on what editors have decided is important? Springee (talk) 18:32, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

I'll try to answer your concerns. You say, " It would make far more sense to put something like infertility or artificial insemination etc into the lead given how many women deal with the former and try to address it with the latter." This article does not really deal with those issues. You say, "trans issues are a minor topic per NPOV vs infertility, teen pregnancies, unwanted pregnancies, high risk pregnancies etc." We do mention high risk pregnancies and abortion. You say, " Taking a more policy based angle, transgender pregnancy is a subtopic towards the bottom of this article." Just because it is located at the bottom of the article in no way means that information at the bottom of an article is less important than that that is located above it. And lastly, you say, "Putting the transgender topic in the opening paragraph was UNDUE....Why would it be given such prominence in the article lead?". It was not in the first para, it was at the end of the lead. Sectionworker (talk) 01:57, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

To your last point, initially you added it to the first paragraph of the lead [1]. Later you added it as a stand alone paragraph to the lead [2]. Either way, I think you failed to show this subtopic vs other topics related to pregnancy that were not in the lead. Certainly a HUGH topic like infertility (broadly construed) should be more significant to the lead given that 11% of women have fertility issues per the NIH [3] Springee (talk) 02:28, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

This article is about pregnancy not Infertility. Sectionworker (talk) 02:45, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Are you suggesting infertility is not a significant topic under the heading of pregnancy? Springee (talk) 03:02, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

I don't know what Sectionworker thinks, but I think that a whole category of people who can and do experience pregnancy are by definition in scope for this article and ought to be reflected in the lead. A whole category of people who cannot experience pregnancy- the relevance of that seems less obvious. Newimpartial (talk) 14:12, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

They are in the article. Why it's the whole category of females who try and fail to become pregnant not in the lead given its a far larger topic. Springee (talk) 14:38, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

I don't see infertility discussed in the article. Please point me to the section. Sectionworker (talk) 16:20, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

To revert a contested section without being willing to discuss your reasoning is disruptive. Sectionworker (talk) 21:56, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Wrt undue, the lead must summarise the body. Whether it belongs in the first paragraph or later is a matter really of composition. I agree the article is not about infertility. The lead section is large and makes room for defining basic terminology and the last paragraph is chock full of stats. I doubt very much if "most sources discussing pregnancy" give any prominence, never mind mention, of "The number of pregnancies in women aged between 15 and 44". I think there is a danger editors over-think the inclusion of a sentence or two on trans or LGBT+ pregnancies, because the topic is controversial and a recent addition, rather than concentrating on more constructive discussion about the content of the lead in general. And I think we should cut the article-builders some slack here, as they are the ones writing the body and then trying to summarise it in the lead. -- Colin°^Talk 07:15, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Colin is right. Those of us that have worked on a particular article for years have watched them evolve. Clayoquot would agree with me that the Breastfeeding article is nothing like it looked like only a few years ago. For example, after many years of knowing about the benefits of putting the naked baby on the naked mother's chest, all of a sudden it took off to where every health source is recommending it. Many of us would not dream of making a lead edit as our first edit to an article we had never worked on while it was being discussed. I wouldn't. And, I do feel that I am more qualified to make a decision about what does or does not belong in the lead than someone who has never made an edit to this article. Sectionworker (talk) 17:27, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but this is not how wikipedia works. Can you point me to where editors formally 'move up the ranks', such that they become decision makers? No editor is more qualified than any other editor to edit any article. The quality of an editor's actual contribution is the only measure, and that is distinct from any past history on a given article, or anything else.You seem to be describing a class system here; again, this is news to me and thousands of other editors. We are all peers here.

This is a serious problem as I see it. User Colin asked us to "cut the article-builders some slack here". I'd love a clear explanation of what that actually means. User Crossroads is an 'article-builder' here based on the statistics page, so does that mean he gets cut some slack?

I guess I am going to have to slog through effing wikipedia bureaucracy. We have endless, endless circular and vaccilating arguments here, with no formal consensus or consensus building, which this topic requires. This talk page is longer than the article itself. Editors proclaim consensus when there is obviously none, and I point to both "sides". Continuing in this manner is suggestive of the chestnut that 'insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result'. The results are not changing. cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 20:37, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Well it kinda is how Wikipedia works, per WP:NOTHERE. And I'm not just linking that because I think the WP:UPPERCASE is appropriate. Go read what that linked section says and consider the edits and activism on this page and talk page. I don't see Crossroads at Page Stats. You can examine Crossroads sum total of edits here. Seriously, please examine those edits. Are they the edits of an "article builder" at pregnancy or the edit history of an anti-trans WP:ACTIVIST at pregnancy? The one time Crossroads added a source was after realising that their fallacious STICKTOSOURCES edit summary was actually dealing with a sentence that was uncited, so had no source to stick to. So they went and added a source that says the word "woman" to retrospectively make the article text magically align with their source. (Oh, and if anyone wants to throw stones in my direction, I'm well aware I haven't edited the article, but then I'm not one of the two (here's Springee) non-article builders who are currently edit warring over the trans sentence in the lead.)

I think commentators and edit warriors need to take a step back. I just earlier got called an "ultra-libertarian" for saying this was the encylopaedia anyone can edit, which is literally the first sentence at Wikipedia:About. And above, someone is persistently demanding that non-pregnancy (infertility) be included in the lead rather than a specific kind of actual pregnancy. When folk start saying crazy stuff like that, it, em, looks awkward. Especially when we all know this is a culture war topic. That is why I do think that the decision over whether trans pregnancy should be in the lead (summarising the body) should be left to people who are at the coal face, reading the sources, building the body content, and the rest of us who have opinions about trans issues like everyone here does, should give them the space to work things out without being edit warred at or reverted by activists. -- Colin°^Talk 21:05, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

At what threshold of edit count does an editor 'graduate' to "article builder"? Seriously - please provide a link to the newfound class system. I just made an edit to the article - a productive one at that, I'm now up to five. Who do I petition for access to this club? Yes, I'm being facetious, and perhaps a bit cheeky - I say this without rancor.

Edit counts are an artificial threshold. We all know that an editor can make hundreds of edits to an article, and all of them constituting grammar fixes, typo fixes, and punctuation fixes. Are they article-builders?

Please stop declaring that only one of the POV's here is "activist" without acknowledging that there are those on the "other side" who are similarly "activist". It's important to use clarity and avoid conflation and inferrence as well - Crossroads most certainly did not call you an "ultra-libertarian". You may have inferred that he did, but it's unreasonable to mischaracterize other's words.

As to WP:NOTHERE - I see identical behaviors on 'both sides'. Contrarily and perhaps ironically, I don't see those behaviors. The vast majority of discussion on this page, by both sides, has been In Good Faith. Strong disagreements, blunt language, speaking directly - these are not inherently disruptive or hateful or absent Good Faith.

And here we are again, discussiondiscussiondiscussiondiscussiondiscussiondiscussiondiscussion. My culpability indisputable. This page, growing ever longer than the article itself.

And lest I be lumped in with the "activists", let me state openly and clearly: I have absolutely no objection to the most recent addition of transgender pregnancy to the lead. I believe the article, at this moment, is fair, NPOV, and gives appropriate weight in all respects to the subject matter and content. cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 21:38, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

After the fact notation, with a huge sigh added: If I am "counted" as a person who has supported any "consensus" in justification for a change, I will dispute it vigorously. The general tone of one's comments, or even an explicit declaration about a specific edit does not lump me into either activist column. So using me as a prop for any claim of consensus will be, to put it colorfully, bullshit. cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 22:03, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Just to chime in here, I consider the talk page very important and I 've always been that way since I first started editing. I follow it and my position develops by what I see as wisdom of others. All of the talk page editors have helped me, and that includes Crossroads, whose positions I value as much as my own. We just don't agree and that is OK. Sectionworker (talk) 22:14, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

No, I did not count you as either supporting or opposing the change. Newimpartial (talk) 22:21, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. I was speaking mostly in general, but - same. cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 22:24, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

And Crossroads, you had been asked to participate in the discussion here in Talk. It was scarcely to be assumed that your previous removal, which you explained as being based in UNDUE placement within the lead, would also translate into an objection to that same content as placed at the end of the lead section - at least not within the bounds of WP:AGF. Newimpartial (talk) 23:55, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Do you seriously believe I supported mentioning it in the lead at all? What gave you that impression? Crossroads ^-talk- 00:06, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

When you find content UNDUE for the first paragraph I assume that to imply neither support nor opposition for that content to be placed later in the lead section. I WP:AGF that you will say what you actually mean, rather than moving goalposts and STONEWALLing as you do so. It isn't the first time my good faith has been misplaced, I must admit. Newimpartial (talk) 00:46, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

I expressed the exact same view on 29 September: [4] Nothing changed or moved on my part. Crossroads ^-talk- 00:52, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

If your view didn't change, why was your rationale different? It is scarcely reasonable to assume that something you have said to one editor about one proposal applies to all editors for all proposals, regardless of context. (Although if you do assume that, it might explain some things.) Newimpartial (talk) 00:56, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

Because "first paragraph" is even more egregiously UNDUE than the lead in general. If I didn't say I'm good with later in the lead there's no reason at all to think my view changed. Crossroads ^-talk- 00:58, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

Fine then, five to three. You are aware that editors have actually been asking you to participate in Talk page discussions, yes? Newimpartial (talk) 01:08, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

I've already described problematic behaviour here (and elsewhere) at User talk:WhatamIdoing/Sandbox 4#Avoiding a trans hostile environment. I don't agree with your assertion that both sides are activists (in the Wikipedia problem behaviour sense) or equally to fault. WP:ACTIVIST outlines some ways to identify problem behaviour on this issue. As far as I can see, only one editor is crossing that line, an editor who is now on their second revert in a slow edit war (here and here), and who's 19 previous contributions to the page are almost universally removing transgender. Yes, it takes more than one editor to have a war and I would ask all editors to stop that. But those other editors are at the talk page trying to work towards a consensus, whereas this one had to be dragged here to justify their revert on talk.

Consider this:

"I've seen this time and time and time again with people who try to please such activists without fully submitting - activists are inflamed, not placated, by such moves, because doing even a little signals agreement with their premises and worldview that language must follow certain new rules, and hence vulnerability to further pressing on this point."

and

"It will not stop trolls and crusaders from saying it's still inappropriate and trying "degender" the article - as I already explained, it has a high likelihood of spurring them on more because they already see this concession and they'll call it misgendering or something to leverage it further. Activists are inflamed, not placated, by such moves, because doing even a little signals agreement with their premises and worldview of what words mean, and hence vulnerability to further pressing on this point. And it creates a very concerning precedent - if this is put here, it will be seized on and used to argue that we need to add similar undue gender identity acknowledgements across up to thousands of articles that discuss sexed anatomy."

Leaving aside the actual debate at the time, about an info box, look at what is being said. Editors who come here unhappy that it is cisnormative are called "trolls and crusaders". And how "doing even a little signals agreement with their premises and worldview". And how important it is not to give an inch on this article because then they will run a mile over "thousands of articles that discuss sexed anatomy". I wasn't aware we even had thousands of sexed anatomy articles. This should be ringing alarm bells loudly and clearly. WP:ACTIVIST tells us "Editors operating in good faith, not seeking to promote specific views, will usually try to find some way to cooperate, collaborate, and compromise with almost all other editors". Most editors on this page are doing that in good faith. One editor has clearly signalled that this is not their intention, has now engaged in edit warring, and their advocacy in promoting one view is explicit both on talk and in edit history. -- Colin°^Talk 09:06, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

Oh, it's now three reverts, and they are off to AN/EW to report the other guy. -- Colin°^Talk 08:58, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Colin, you have engaged in personal attacks and ASPERSIONS multiple times on this page, on a topic covered by discretionary sanctions. Now you've moved on to outright saying I'm an "anti-trans WP:activist" (with a 'just asking questions'-esque question mark) while your own edits on this page consist almost entirely of arguments defending activist language practices, those who wish to impose them, and edits implementing them, while accusing anyone who rebuts or reverts such people of instead being or 'aligning themselves with' a conservative/"gender critical" activist.

And I did not call you an "ultra-libertarian" in a contextless sense; I was speaking of the attitude toward writing which results in non sequiturs from you like Let's please not regulate. Anyone can edit this article. I don't know what else to call someone who believes we should have no regulation for a particular thing because people want to do it however they individually please.

All the stuff about 'those who helped build the article' is, to be frank, a fancy form of WP:OWN. After talking about me and naming another editor, saying but then I'm not one of the two...non-article builders who are currently edit warring over the trans sentence in the lead you neglect to mention that there's actually an editor who has never edited this article before except to edit-war in content about gender identity - funny how this escapes your condemnation and assertion such a person has no say.

Back to the actual edit on its merits - no, it is WP:UNDUE, both as defined by sources and by article content. There are three and a half sentences in the entire, huge article about transgender issues; adding a chunk two sentences long to the lead is undue. And it's obvious that such a thing can and will be used as a thin end of the wedge (or precedent) to either add "people with uteruses", add trans disclaimers to a multitude of other articles, or both - even if not by someone in this discussion, by others. These sorts of "small group exception disclaimers" are not a thing we do in our anatomy articles. Crossroads ^-talk- 22:39, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

After reading this discussion, the content being proposed for adding to the lead, and the existing related content of the article which is a stub that points to Transgender pregnancy, I believe that two sentences at the end of the lead is fine. Ideally we should also wikilink to that article somewhere in one of those sentences, possibly in the words Pregnancy is possible. I would also try to include non-binary people in the first sentence of the proposed addition as well, as the main article on this makes clear that AFAB non-binary people can also become pregnant and give birth. Sideswipe9th (talk) 22:35, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Would you mind explaining how you found your way to this dispute? I don't see you in the edit history for the article or this talk page. Crossroads ^-talk- 22:41, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

I expect that Sideswipe9th follows my edit history from time to time, as any sensible editor might. Right, Springee? Newimpartial (talk) 23:56, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Please AGF and do not accuse editors of being sensible. ;) Springee (talk) 00:11, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

Why? Are you going to baselessly claim I'm WP:HOUNDING you again? Perhaps you should take that sort of to my talk page, or one of the relevant noticeboards if you think you have proof.

In any case, I've had the page on my watchlist since the #Changing pronouns and gendered language discussion and it overspilling from WAID's sandbox that we've both contributed to. It's taken me a while to read the full extent of the discussions on this talk page, which are lengthy and yet sadly predictable. Sideswipe9th (talk) 00:19, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

Two lead sentences seems a bit much based on the length of the section relative to the article; it's not a great metric, but it's what we have! Could we try folding it into a couple of lines on other subgroups? Crossroads mentioned the issue of other such groupings not being mentioned. A rough starting point could be something like: " Complications of pregnancy ... nausea and vomiting. Some groups of people experience additional challenges, including teenagers, older women, and transgender people." I pulled in the other two groups as they also have subarticles (both of which probably need brief summary here per WP:SUMMARYSTYLE, but feel free to tweak. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 01:53, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

Were it not for the dedicated section being limited in scope to "legal and social aspects" I would suggest pulling more in from the main article per SUMMARYSTYLE. And you are right, there is content from the teenage, older women (which has at least two articles) that should be included per SUMMARYSTYLE that aren't.

Skimming over the entire article, with the sheer number of sub-articles focusing on specific aspects of pregnancy, and the inconsistent length of summarising a great many of them, I wonder if perhaps we would best be served with a total re-write? Sideswipe9th (talk) 02:01, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

"additional medical or social challenges"? Social challenges also apply to teenagers (as mentioned in the sub-article). Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 02:06, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

I do believe editors here are in serious danger of examining the body of the article and attempting to summarise it in the lead. That will never do! :-). But I don't think it is appropriate to fold transgender in along with teenager or older women, considering that neither of those have any degree of article content (which itself may be an issue). If editors are suggesting or volunteering a "total re-write" then really the place to start, as article builders here already know, is to build up the body text to give appropriate comprehensive coverage of the whole topic. The lead tends to get too much attention from fly-by editors and really it is actually fairly straightforward to summarise good body content, as long as you aren't getting interference. -- Colin°^Talk 08:34, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

I don't know that one to two sentences in the lead is a good summary of a five sentence section. Anyway we should really be summarising the whole "Legal and social aspects" section not individual subsections within that section. Maybe Many countries have legal regulations in place to protect pregnant woman and their children, including maternity leave and protections against discrimination. Despite this many groups, in particular teenagers, African Americans and transgender people, experience additional challenges." Aircorn (talk) 16:20, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

So there's two issues here. One is that the transgender pregnancy section is limited in scope because of its placement within the "Legal and social aspects" section. The main article for it has significantly more content on the effects of HRT in transmasculine individuals, both on the birthing parent and on the foetus. That is content we should be including here per WP:SUMMARYSTYLE and WP:SPINOFF, however we cannot include it in the legal and social aspects section, because the effects of HRT is not within the realms of legal or social aspects.

The other issue is that we also have sections with their own sub-articles, that we are summarising in far too much detail. For example the maternal changes section is 8 paragraphs long, even though it has its own stand-alone article. Per SUMMARYSTYLE we should be looking at trimming that down to the core information from the sub-article. Were there not already the presence of sub-articles, with an article size of 144kb, WP:SIZESPLIT suggests that we should split the article.

The reason why I've suggested a total article re-write is to address this issue. It's not a case of just these two sections being too short and long respectively. There are other sections, with their own dedicated sub-articles that are also too short or too long. A full re-write would allow us to more accurately summarise the core information from each sub-article, and ensure that each subsection that has its own sub-article is properly balanced in length with the others. Such a process would naturally involve restructuring as well, which would allow us to summarise not only the core aspects of trans pregnancies, but also those of teen and older pregnancies, and any other sections that I've missed in these lengthy discussions for which I've seen several editors advocate for inclusion. Once that is done, then naturally the lead would be re-written to summarise the new article content.

That will naturally take time, but I think it is the best way forward to address all of the issues this article currently has. Sideswipe9th (talk) 18:21, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Sideswipe9th, you may be making good points but now is not the time, and it is very insensitive to suggest the article requires a total rewrite. If you personally feel energised to overhaul pregnancy in collaboration with the longstanding article builders already here, then please engage after the week's protection is finished. Start a new section. And work on it bit by bit. Sectionworker has noted on their talk that they are fed up. Saying that, well, the whole article is so crap it needs rewritten, is not helping. Could you consider striking that. -- Colin°^Talk 18:54, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

I dunno if I agree on the timing aspect. One could argue that because the article content is locked for a week, this is a good time to survey the current state of the article and figure out what needs addressing. I was thinking about starting a new section on this however, as it does seem to be getting lost in the noise of the rest of this section.

I'm not sure where I've said that the whole "article is crap", though perhaps I've implied it. If there's a specific sentence you think I should strike and/or rephrase, could you identify it please? I do recognise the fantastic work that Sectionworker has been doing, and I'd love to help them with that further. It's more a case of that I think that it'd be better to take stock of the various pregnancy sub-articles, both already included in the article and not included in the article, and then instead of trying to make those fit the existing article structure we go for a clean slate approach and use the relevant sub-articles to inform a new structure that better fits the other content that we have. Sideswipe9th (talk) 19:03, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

I don't think you can say "I wonder if perhaps we would best be served with a total re-write" without effectively saying that none of what is here is worth saving. Perhaps the article could do with a comprehensive review, but I think to suggest every single sentence is beyond salvation, is unkind. -- Colin°^Talk 19:09, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

I disagree. By saying "I wonder if perhaps", I'm suggesting that we should look more closely at the article structure and its content. That would naturally be part of a comprehensive review. The problem that I see though is not at the individual sentence level, it's at the article structure level.

This is at the point where we should have a separate section for this sort of discussion, which I'll create in a moment re-stating some of the key points. However for the sake of this reply, I will say that a clean slate approach does not mean abandoning every sentence as "beyond salvation". The problem that I see is a structural one. There are sections that are summarised in too little detail, and there are sections that are summarised in too much detail. There are sub-articles that we do not summarise and should consider, and there are those that we summarise only one aspect of. Whenever I asked if we would be better served with a total re-write, it is so that we have a clean slate when looking at the entirety of the article structure. Such an action would not prevent us from taking well written content from the current state of the article, into a relevant section in a re-written article. Instead such an approach gives us the freedom to look at this more holistically. Sideswipe9th (talk) 19:32, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

((edit-conflict, written concurrent with Sideswipe9th's, in reply to Colin))If this were not a collaborative project (sigh, at least, in spirit!) I would agree. However, in any collaborative project, it's reasonable to discuss and speculate on the value of an overhaul. I don't interpret the phrase "total re-write" to mean that every word is rubbish, by any measure; I also don't see it as unkind - we're working on a project here, so we have to expect criticism, whether positive or negative, and take it in the spirit of collaboration. From my perspective, 'total re-write' suggests - at least for this article - is that it suffers a common weakness found in collaborative projects: scope-creep and poor focus. Over time, I see so many articles have lost their way, due to this or that editor expanding material that is 'dear' to them.

For example, have a look at Candida albicans. Sure, it's a science article, but it is really quite loopy, as if written for a post-graduate course in genetics. After a brief etymology, it jumps into its genome, then into a really dense discourse in morphology, then back to something a bit more real world like 'disease'. Then at the end, it jumps back into genetics, extraordinarily densely. It is not an article that the general reader has much of a chance of reading top-to-bottom before deciding they'd rather be in Philadelphia.

Total re-write can mean an overhaul of the organizational structure of the content, ensuring that bloated material is appropriately trimmed for readability, and weakly covered material is expanded within scope.

I write all of this largely in order to write about something other than the current shitstorm that has enveloped the talk page.

I think user Sectionworker is/was making good contributions; with any contribution, one must expect criticism, whether positive or negative. Some of the lede changes were good in my estimation, and some of them were poor in my estimation. We get to a better article by taking in what we hear and learning from it.

I wonder how the weather is in Philadelphia right now. cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 19:54, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Oh so many words, to justify "total re-write" being just absolutely fine. You know, I'm going to take my own advice on this and unwatch. Ping me once the "total re-write" by Sideswipe9th/anastrophe is done, and I'll be happy to review it for GA/FP. -- Colin°^Talk 20:26, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Ya know, approaching this with a GA/FA in mind, especially as this is categorised as Category:Top-importance medicine articles, is not a bad idea. It seems like an article on a subject that a sizeable proportion of humans experience should be one of our best. Sideswipe9th (talk) 20:48, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

I want to underline what Sideswipe9th has suggested on two points in particular: (1) the time when the article is locked may actually be the best time to discuss "strategic" questions of article content and development, and (2) the section and sub-article structure with which this topic is addressed has made it difficult to arrive at a DUE and BALANCEd lead section. In particular, editors have not been able to resist the temptation to use the length of sub-article summaries as a lever to argue for the removal or inclusion of lead section content, which clearly wasn't what the summaries (and subsections in general) were designed for in the first place. Newimpartial (talk) 19:10, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

This article is nowhere near badly written enough to merit a clean-slate approach, and burying such a proposal in a thread of heat not light just adds more heat at the expense of light.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:50, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

I suppose one reason for including transgender (somewhere) in the lead may be that the first sentence specifically refers to "women", which is often a gender term, rather than a biological term, thus mentioning that (transgender) men can also become pregnant could be considered a useful addition, at least on those grounds. Pyrrho the Skipper (talk) 19:07, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

I tend to agree with this; as I suggested below, taking "woman" out of the first sentence strikes me as appropriate, given pregnancies among transgender and intersex people. I was told this would be WP:UNDUE, which I understand to some degree, but starting out from the broadest point and narrowing down from there does not seem to violate the policy to me. Still, reasonable minds may differ. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 19:17, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

It is certainly possible to define "pregnant" without mentioning "woman". Merriam-Webster: "containing a developing embryo, fetus, or unborn offspring within the body" and American Heritage Dictionary: "Carrying developing offspring within the body". The argument for including it is up to editors to find consensus. Today is perhaps not the day to fight that battle. -- Colin°^Talk 19:22, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Pregnant trans men make up such a minuscule percent of the pregnant population, it's not relevant to include it in the lead. Masterhatch (talk) 23:12, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

Agreed. Putting it in the lead is WP:UNDUE.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:01, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Also agree with Masterhatch and SMcCandlish. Jusdafax (talk) 01:14, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

I'm not sure where the canvassing is coming from, but I now count 7 to 6 in favor of inclusion. Newimpartial (talk) 02:05, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Speaking for myself, I got here from the edit warring reporting page, which I have long had watchlisted, so I suggest you assume good faith and strikethrough your comment referring "canvassing" which in my view can be read as casting aspersions about Masterhatch, SMcCandlish or my own appearance here. Further, re: your tallying, do I have to point out WP:NOTAVOTE? Take care. Jusdafax (talk) 03:17, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

To me the policy-based case for inclusion is obvious, but I was actually tallying your content-free !vote, which is a courtesy. Would you rather I ignored it? Entering a ditto-vote citing two knights of POV isn't exactly a virtue. Newimpartial (talk) 03:23, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

@Newimpartial, please. "Canvassing" ?"two knights of POV isn't exactly a virtue"? Seriously? That's grossly uncivil and not assuming good faith. Everybody here has assumptions about everybody else; a good number of people here approach these matters as a battleground, 'us' vs 'them'. I bite my tongue most of the time because of the aspersions tossed about with abandon, which is definitely the best way to gain a consensus on divisive topics, right? /s. Hell, I apologize for that right there, my use of sarcasm. The discourse here has teetered - moderately successfully - on the razor thin edge of civility for a long time. Amping up the heat isn't helpful. cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 03:51, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

I'm sorry. I have let my interactions with these editors elsewhere in the project thin my patience. I apologize. Newimpartial (talk) 11:41, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Yet you continue below with further aspersion-casting.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:50, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Canvassing of whom, where? For my part, I regularly keep tabs on certain editors, since the debates they get into tend to also interest me. This is true across a lot of topics, and I'm hardly alone in this. My own talk page has quite a number of "stalkers".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:45, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Agreed with this. Pretty much the definition of UNDUE. (BTW, I found this after skimming the EW noticeboard following a discussion on another editor's TP regarding a completely different edit war; no canvassing here) JoelleJay (talk) 02:26, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

When the lede is 6 paragraphs long, it seems reasonable to include one sentence about transgender pregnant people, given that there is a subsection about them in the article. Jackattack1597 (talk) 01:30, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

A WP:LEAD is only supposed to be about four paragraphs long, so it is much too long and UNDUE stuff should be cut all the more so. Crossroads ^-talk- 04:26, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Indeed. It's a variant of the WP:OTHERCRAPEXISTS pseudo-argument to shoehorn more undue stuff in the lead just because it's already bloated with other undue stuff. And this is undue; the trans section of this article accounts for less than 2% of the article (not counting lead and refs sections). It could probably be compressed further.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:06, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Seems WP:UNDUE to include in an already arguably bloated lead (as said above, it should more be along the lines of four well written paragraphs). It's fine as content for the body of the article, but not everything has to be in the lead. TylerBurden (talk) 10:31, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

It seems there is no consensus for its inclusion in the lead, yet it was re-added. I think it should be removed until, or unless, there is consensus for its inclusion (restore the page to "pre-war" status). Masterhatch (talk) 11:13, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Absolutely; unless consensus for it develops (and I am counting a majority against the two-sentence version in there currently and locked-in for a week) it must be removed, per WP:ONUS and WP:NOCON. Crossroads ^-talk- 15:42, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Especially given that the admin who locked it says they just mis-clicked in locking it at the version with the disputed language in it, I've removed that language now that the lock has expired, pending an actual consensus developing for its inclusion. Even some of those who wanted to include some kind of langauge like that wanted a shorter version, so there's not even really a 50/50 split; the language removed has less than a 50% support rate, judging from the discussion here.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:52, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

SMcCandlish do you have a diff for where the admin said they "mis-clicked in locking it at the version with the disputed language in it". Given WP:PREFER permits but does not require a revert in this case (the text was fully in compliance with policy, and a reliably-sourced uncontested medical fact), they didn't actually make an administrative mistake. An admin's decision to lock one version or the other is very much supposed to not indicate any preference as to which version should arise when the lock expires. Your opening remarks seem to be lacking not only in evidence, but any actual policy support that it is in any way relevant even if true. It would be quite in keeping with this discussion so far for votes and edits to be justified by entirely made-up claims.

In your comments about the text you removed, you describe it as "language". That's a strange way of describing the disputed two sentences, which were added by an established editor on this article. It would seem more relevant where editors are fighting over which words to pick for an existing sentence. The only "language" I can see that would upset a certain group of people finding it in the lead of an article on pregnancy, are "transgender" and "cisgender". Are you sure "language" was the correct choice of words. I can only assume so, as you do so four times. -- Colin°^Talk 18:25, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

My mistake; someone else (Aircorn) said they mis-clicked, then the admin locked the page. Whatever. The point is: there is clearly not a consensus to add that material to the lead.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:55, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

Well you weren't just wrong about who "mis-clicked" but entirely wrong in thinking that it mattered which version the admin protected. This is basic stuff, SMcCandlish. On a practical level, after an edit war has led to protection in order to allow consensus to be established/determined without fighting at the article, it is wise to ask on talk to see if those involved in the edit war would agree on your assessment. After all, the edit war existed because editors could not agree. There really is no rush wrt this sentence. It would have been much better to leave this for, or request, a neutral party. Both steps would ensure your edit yesterday wasn't just regarded as a resumption of edit warring by highly opinionated editors. -- Colin°^Talk 09:35, 6 November 2022 (UTC)

Support a version similar to firangledfeathers above. Much better than shoehorning a sentence into a paragraph and fits with due. The lead could probably do with some work. In the United States, some actions, such as beating a pregnant woman, are considered crimes is probably one of the most pointless I have seen in any lead. Why single out the United States, "some actions" is so vague as to be meaningless, when is beating anyone not considered a crime? Aircorn (talk) 05:31, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Okay I see these changes are recent. They do not improve the article so I have reverted them. Aircorn (talk) 05:36, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Good call.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:45, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Aircorn, did you mean to restore this version [5] or this version [6]. The latter is basically the same as the lead on Oct 8th while the former has new content. Springee (talk) 11:37, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Yes, Aircorn, why did you restore the version with two sentences in its own dedicated paragraph about transgender issues? Given what you say here I can only assume it was an error, but just so your own views are clear, best to clarify. Crossroads ^-talk- 15:39, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

I just restored to the version before Sectinworker made their recent changes to the lead; the revert should not be read as an endorsement of the current wording. I understand that the disputed part of this is the transgender paragraph but this is being discussed and will be decided here so I saw no need to continue the edit war over that or any real harm to leaving it in while we discussed it. I did strongly feel that the other changes drastically deteriorated the article though (although I can see some merit in reducing the length of the lead that was not the way to do it). FWIW my comment above still stands that mentioning transgender men in a sentence along with other groups that experience challenges is perfectly fine and how actual leads should be written. Aircorn (talk) 16:01, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

The version before Sectionworker's changes is this version by Masterhatch; you restored this version by Newimpartial. The only difference between those two versions is the paragraph at the end of the lead about transgender men. But thanks for clarifying that this shouldn't be read as an endorsement and that you prefer the 'in a sentence with other groups' version. Crossroads ^-talk- 16:14, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Ah, you are right. Seems I misclicked. Aircorn (talk) 16:23, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

I made the mistake of wandering into this discussion... but since I'm here, I agree with Jackattack1597: the lead of this article is too long. It would benefit from some tactful moves of content to the body, and some rewriting to smooth out the gaps that would be created. After that, it might be clearer what to do about the transgender pregnancy issue. PhotogenicScientist (talk) 18:41, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

I thought I would try to give something of an outside perspective here, and forgive me, as I have skimmed the discussion above but not exhaustively read it, so repetition is possible. While I think the material absolutely belongs in the article, I do think the lead is two long and as currently presented, the transgender section strikes me as a slightly stylistically discordant. By my lights, I think we could get away with leaving it out (of the lead, not the article), by a simple rewriting of the very first sentence, from "...inside a woman's womb" to either "inside a person's womb" or simply "inside a womb." If we were to leave that a bit more open, I don't think the transgender male bit is as necessary in the lead. I am mindful that everyone is likely to hate this, and only ask that your personal insults be directed to my talk page, so as to spare the wider Wikipedia community. Happy Friday Eve to all. Dumuzid (talk) 16:35, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, doing this was already discussed above and there definitely wasn't consensus for it. It's much worse WP:UNDUE because rather than just being mentioned, trans pregnancy is made equivalent to women such that women aren't even mentioned in that sentence and we incorrectly imply it has nothing to do with the female sex, and that it just happens to "people" in general even though sources overwhelmingly connect it to women. And we say "woman" because we are talking about humans, not all mammals, in this article. Crossroads ^-talk- 16:51, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

I personally don't see how simply leaving it open in the first sentence creates an issue with WP:UNDUE, but consider me duly chastened and the suggestion withdrawn. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 17:13, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Crossroads is one of our most effective POV-warriors on this topic. And he brings his friends! Newimpartial (talk) 17:45, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

WP:NPA, WP:FOC Crossroads ^-talk- 17:59, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

My mistake. I thought this Talk page section was all about you. Newimpartial (talk) 18:10, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

I'd prefer attacks on me, honestly. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 18:12, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

And here's Newimpartial asking the LGBT WikiProject for comment on what they call a "raucous discussion" despite that group not being listed on this page as a relevant WikiProject. Hmmmmmmm. Crossroads ^-talk- 18:33, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

I'm curious why you think discussion that has largely focused on trans and non-binary pregnancies is not in scope of the LGBT WikiProject. Especially when the current section on transgender pregnancies is limited in scope to legal and social aspects, which very much do fall within the scope of that WikiProject. Sideswipe9th (talk) 18:36, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

I also posted a notice at WP:NPOVN. Crossroads, you can post a notice at WikiProject:TERF if you like, if you haven't already. Newimpartial (talk) 18:39, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Your notice there is full of WP:ASPERSIONS, as is your comment here where you are implying that not supporting your favored edit makes one a TERF; either way, not a good look. Crossroads ^-talk- 18:42, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

You seem to be misinterpreting my edits, perhaps due to a Hermeneutics of suspicion. I am not implying that anyone who disagrees with me must be a TERF, nor am I casting any WP:ASPERSIONS on any editor. The influx of low-quality, "+1 to Crossroads" !votes is plain for anyone to see; I am not interpreting that situation but merely pointing it out.

In case it wasn't clear, my reference to "WikiProject:TERF" was an reply to your implication that WikiProkect:LGBT would be biased on this topic-it was also an oblique response to your invocation of the fallacy of the Golden mean on another Talk page. Newimpartial (talk) 18:48, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

All of you guys are just earning diffs for their topic ban. Could I suggest that everyone with an opinion on transgender in pregnancy take a break from the article. It is protected for a week. Use that to get some perspective. -- Colin°^Talk 18:49, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Hopefully someone with more drama tolerance than I have will initiate a T-ban discussion. At least one is long overdue and this level of personal attackery is not sustainable for the project.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:50, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Jumping in from WP:NPOV here; I think the lead only needs reworking in a very minor fashion to address this issue. The concept that mentioning transgender men can get pregnant in some way devalues the female sex or detaches pregnancy from women isn't borne out from actually reading the lead at all; coming from WP:NPOV, I actually expected a lot worse.

Pregnancy happens in more than just the wombs of cisgender women; we know this to be true. (Even the NHS talks about getting pregnant if you're trans, and they're usually a bit crap for this sort of thing.)

As it stands, I think it would be the most useful to describe pregnancy through mechanism with no mention of gender: "Pregnancy is the time during which one or more offspring develops (gestates) inside the womb".

There. Done.

Describing the mechanism of pregnancy with gendered text directly contradicts the lower paragraph that transgender men can get pregnant; if we're going to mention that transgender men can get pregnant, why are we asserting in the first sentence that pregnancy only occurs in women's wombs? It's nonsensical, and it's unnecessary.

If the NHS and other medical sources mention transgender men, then clearly it's WP:NOTABLE enough to mention in the lead, and in the article as a whole – despite there being news stories every three years or so about the First Ever Transgender Man To Get Pregnant, pregnant trans guys aren't a rarity.

This new lead sentence would impartially describe the mechanism of pregnancy, with the following paragraphs accurately and smoothly describing the demographics of people who get pregnant – mostly cisgender women, with some trans men.—Ineffablebookkeeper (talk) ({{ping}} me!) 12:52, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Concerning "pregnant trans guys aren't a rarity", are there statistics or estimates available in RS that say how many there are? If it's a miniscule proportion of pregnancies (say, of order 1 out of 1000 or less), I think it's undue for the lead. NightHeron (talk) 13:16, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Polio only results in paralysis between 1/1000 and 1/500 cases. The Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine was associated with blood clots in around 1/100,000 cases. This isn't how we work out whether something is due. What I see above is all rather obvious examples of editors coming here with a view on whether they think trans pregnancy is important, or other prejudices around the topic, and then desperately trying to come up with some reason for excluding it. While some of those reasons might appear superficially appealing, they mostly don't work when you look at any of the other sentences in the lead. Take the "the trans section of this article accounts for less than 2% of the article" rationale. Go on, pick some random sentences from the lead. Many of them don't even have a counterpart in the body. Some just have an equivalent sentence. Very few in fact have a whole section dedicated to them.

This is how it works on Wikipedia when some culture war issue gets advertised and folk descend on the article to give their 2p. The sentence wasn't added by some trans activist. It was added by a longterm editor and article-builder who was busy expanding the body and tweaking the lead as they went along. If they had been left to carry on, taking advice from comments on this talk page, the body would continue to be worked on and the lead would continue to be tweaked. And the original sentence might no doubt have moved and changed. But instead, an editor who's only actions on this page have been to keep the trans out, removed it without discussion, and subsequently edit warred over it. Editors with views on trans (pro and con) but who know and have contributed diddly squat about pregnancy continued the edit war. The page gets protected. The long term editor abandons the article in despair and disgust. So, I hope you are all happy you got to keep the trans out. You threw the baby out with the bathwater. Was keeping the trans out of the lead that important? I guess it was. -- Colin°^Talk 13:57, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

@Colin: it's exhausting having to fight for miniscule stuff like this to exist in the article when one editor is hell-bent on battering their view into the lead; it's like replaying all the crap that's happening in real life in the UK for trans people, but on Wikipedia. Seeing one of their edit summaries be "do not edit war to force this in" is heavily ironic...—Ineffablebookkeeper (talk) ({{ping}} me!) 14:58, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

I'm sure many people have come to this discussion in good faith. Quite a lot, though, are recognisable for their history of involvement in this matter, so there is a statistical excess of those who regularly battle in that war or write essays mocking minority groups. Littleolive oil says they don't care why people are drawn to this. But it does matter if it is gaming the system. Take cerebral palsy, which occurs in about 1/500 births and 1/1000 full term births. Our lead says "Babies born before 37 weeks are "preterm" and at higher risk of health problems such as cerebral palsy". We do not have a section on "preterm" and don't mention cerebral palsy at all in the article. But nobody is edit warring over that, and dozens of editors who know nothing about pregnancy or cerebral palsy are not descending to the talk page to comment on that "clear UNDUE violation". If an editor started edit warring over the inclusion of cerebral palsy, they'd likely find themselves with a quick block, but edit warring over a culture war topic, admins are steering clear and have chosen to protect the page instead.

I see someone above has shouted WP:OTHERCRAPEXISTS, as though an essay on Deletion Policy is relevant here. I guess they think the shortcut text fits the point they want to make, and by linking to something others might even think was policy, it gives their opinion more weight. People will write all sorts of random stuff to support the opinion they came here with.

It is a problem that an editor with a clear POV can use their disruption to not only get their way, but make the article so intolerable that longterm editors leave. If anyone has come here because of some admin noticeboard that this troublemaking has invoked, why not refused to get suckered into their game. How about sending some wikilove to the editors who have actually contributed article text and who are currently unable to because of the page protection, and unmotivated to because of the culture warriors now camped here. -- Colin°^Talk 15:30, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

@Colin: Statistics on who's contributed the most to this article can be found here; in some cases, these editors have been contributing to this article for over a decade.—Ineffablebookkeeper (talk) ({{ping}} me!) 19:05, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

mostly cisgender women, with some trans men - major understatement right there. This article from a LGBT advocacy group - so, not likely to downplay it - states that hundreds and maybe thousands of transgender men all over the world have successfully given birth or otherwise contributed their eggs to a pregnancy. Compare this to the billions of women who will be pregnant at some point in their lives. Even if this was an undercount by orders of magnitude, it would still be way less than 1 in 1,000 pregnancies. This makes sense, as I can't imagine anything more gender dysphoric for a man than pregnancy, so I'd expect it to be very rare.

Paralytic polio or vaccine side-effects are not a valid comparison. Paralysis is why polio is so infamous in the first place, and a vaccine that has been so important in the fight against a pandemic and which has been the topic of misinformation about rates of side-effects - and for which editors likely sought to emphasize the rarity of side effects - have nothing to do with pregnancy, which only happens to those of the female sex and is inextricably linked to various social issues involving women.

The article human body and many other anatomy article makes statements about the body that of course don't apply to every individual - but we don't add all sorts of exceptions or say things like "humans may have anywhere from 0 to 2 legs." It's misleading and undue. Crossroads ^-talk- 20:07, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

100% agree with this. The lead must be balanced relative to the weight of literature on the general topic; aspects that have received only a tiny fraction of the total coverage in RS are not DUE, end of story. From a purely MEDRS perspective, on Scopus, a title search for "pregnancy" OR "pregnant" returns 304,599 documents. The same query plus "transgender" yields only 24 papers, not all of which even relate directly to pregnancy in transgender men. That's at most 0.008% of all publications specifically on pregnancy. Compare that to 493 results for "acute fatty liver" (0.16%), 1,292 for "teenage" (0.4%), and 7,312 for "diabetes" (2.4%). JoelleJay (talk) 23:29, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Well I don't know why you are 100% agreeing with Crossroads' original-research approach to WEIGHT, which involves an editor explaining to others why they think it is unimportant, and continuing to make analogies that others find offensive despite being asked by multiple editors to stop that. Your own search is naive. A search on "titles" and exact word searches can be misleading. You can add just about anything to the AND clause of a search and get negligible results. I don't have SCOPUS so can't experiment, but I can confirm this with PubMed that adding just about any issue in our lead produces negligible results as the title of an article on PubMed.

A sentence on trans pregnancy and a sentence on preterm cerebral palsy both aren't doing any harm in this lead, and the trans sentence summarised a section of the article. Neither sentences are there pushing out some other vital fact. Both sentences are completely accurate and neutral. On a Wikipedia level, it is entirely not urgent to fix this particular issue, except for one editor. Judging DUE is not easy and summarising content is not easy. We don't take a ruler to every sentence in our leads and set some 5% cut-off for body content. We often end up with stuff in the lead that doesn't appear in the body. The lead is after all where most drive-by newbies want to stick stuff. This wasn't added by a drive-by newbie or an activist. There are pragmatic reasons too why a brief mention of trans pregnancy in the lead may reduce conflict in an article that is otherwise entirely cisnormative. None of these arguments are decisive in themselves and I'm not really interested in picking them apart in some argument with a random person on the internet. The point is all our leads are a messy place where the weight of perfectly medically accurate statements is frankly the least of our problems. Anyone think DUE on this one sentence is vitally important to our encyclopaedic mission? Editors were not asked neutrally to examine the lead of pregnancy and work collaboratively to make it awesome. They were, effectively, invited to come join the culture war that one WP:ACTIVIST has poured petrol on. This shouldn't be how a functioning encyclopaedia is built. This sort of mob editing/commenting belongs on Twitter. -- Colin°^Talk 09:38, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Judging what is definitely not DUE in a lead is easy: the subtopic comprises only a minuscule proportion of the main topic's coverage and is not itself inherent to the main topic. The title search demonstrates transgender pregnancy, as the focus of discussion in primary research and MEDRS, is less than 1/10,000th of the literature focused on pregnancy. I deliberately chose for comparison terms that are not inherent to/do not imply pregnancy (where both the term and "pregnan*" might be redundant in a title, e.g. "placenta previa") to ensure the functional effect of using booleans was consistent. Searching titles only rather than abstracts reduces the noise from papers where pregnancy is not the focus. If transgender pregnancy is a major enough aspect of pregnancy or transgender studies to be in the lead, there should be more than a tiny handful of papers directly discussing it. I don't care what the background drama to this discussion is, I don't know who the "activist" is who allegedly canvassed editors here, and everything you say about urgency and other things being more important and lack of harm--not to mention activism--applies equally to putting transgender in the lead in the first place. JoelleJay (talk) 19:40, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Look, I know I'm not going to convince anyone who has come to this discussion with preconceived ideas about the importance or unimportance of trans or LGBT pregnancy. Invent whatever rules you want that magically totally-by-accident happen to align with whatever world views you have. That's what everyone else does in these discussions, while displaying a complete lack of concern that (a) they don't apply those rules when writing their own articles or leads and (b) if we did apply those rules to this article or lead, it would end up weird and brief.

But please, a title search is a dire way to determine the importance of things, and boolean ANDs are a very easy way to get "No results found". Please don't do that. Colin°^Talk 20:36, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Please do show me how we are to determine what is DUE in a lead without surveying the relative prominence of topics in RS. Do you think something like "pregnancy in transgender men" can exist as a major aspect of either pregnancy or transgender topics without there being a large body of papers directly on the subject? FWIW, I initially started out looking at keywords in title and abstract but decided that would catch too many papers incidentally mentioning pregnancy after finding only 38 out of 688518 pregnancy papers (0.0055%) were on transgender pregnancy. I figured narrowing it down to titles would have a greater effect on pregnancy hits than transgender, which it did. JoelleJay (talk) 21:34, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

So "Judging what is definitely not DUE in a lead is easy" but then you say that your initial approach would catch too many papers accidentally mentioning a search term. So instead, you chose an approach that was likely to hopelessly undercount in weirdly indeterminate ways, and got lucky that it confirmed your vote. Why don't you try your title search technique, or indeed any technique, on our sentence "About 213 million pregnancies occurred in 2012, of which, 190 million (89%) were in the developing world and 23 million (11%) were in the developed world".

I think many of us would agree that the number of pregnancies that occur worldwide each year sounds like an absolutely solid lead fact. We might not choose that particular year or choose to break it down by developed/developing world, but some sort of annual global figure for pregnancies seems like the sort of thing our readers could be informed in the lead. Global epidemiological facts like that are routine in our healthcare article leads. Yet it is sourced to Intended and Unintended Pregnancies Worldwide in 2012 and Recent Trends and, no, I wouldn't have thought of that title either. I can't think of title words that would reliably return articles about pregnancy epidemiology generally. I try a PubMed search for "pregnancy epidemiology[title]" and it gives me all sorts of stats about pathological pregnancies.

Indeed, it occurs to me that probably most of the literature on PubMed about pregnancy is about when it goes horribly wrong. Let's see. I search for "pregnancy[title]" and scroll through the first 200 results. OMG does anyone ever have a normal pregnancy? It would seem that my naive attempt to "survey the relative prominence" has informed me that nearly all pregnancies have terrible complications and that only teenagers ever get pregnant. Who knew? How does pregnancy look on that front? Hmm, it seems we spend WAY too much time describing pregnancies where healthy babies are born and the mother is just fine. And the tiny section on teenage pregnancy was only added last Wednesday and has yet to rightly dominate the lead in the way that it apparently dominates the literature.

Anyway, coming back to world stats. I try other searches. They mostly turn up stats about unwanted pregnancies and mostly stats about the US. Or stats about births, which aren't the same as pregnancies. Or about reproductive rates, which are about a person's lifetime. And the best source we have is for 2012. Doesn't anyone have a more modern figure that isn't just about unwanted pregnancies? I google "number of pregnancies per year worldwide" and our own paper with the 2012 results if the first result and nothing after that is relevant. Well, I guess then that in an article on "pregnancy" the number of pregnancies worldwide not definitely DUE. You can rinse and repeat that on other lead sentences.

So, JoelleJay, if we naively survey the literature, without actually reading it, like you are proposing, we end up concluding that our Pregnancy article must be 90% about teenagers getting unwanted pregnancies and it all going horribly wrong. Maybe it is more complicated than that. Maybe the best people to determine WEIGHT are the ones immersed in the sources building article content, rather than random people on the internet with opinions. -- Colin°^Talk 22:27, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Why don't you try your title search technique, or indeed any technique, on our sentence "About 213 million pregnancies occurred in 2012, of which, 190 million (89%) were in the developing world and 23 million (11%) were in the developed world". It's not clear that that particular statistic (# pregnancies in developing vs developed countries in one year) is DUE in the lead. If you can't find similar studies then that means such a compound metric is not considered essential information in pregnancy epidemiology literature, unlike the many papers on unintended pregnancy statistics (more updated values, including total global pregnancies, from the same institute here; unintended pregnancy and abortion info from 1990-2019 here), which netted 786 papers on an INDEXTERMS search.

Additionally: since this is an article on "pregnancy", not "atypical pregnancy", it is irrelevant that most primary and review publications involving pregnancy are on atypical pregnancies; we aren't interested in those sources for the majority of our article anyway. They're only useful when assessing which atypical pregnancy topics should be in the lead. And since transgender pregnancy is "atypical", it is not going to be discussed in the types of secondary/tertiary sources dedicated to "standard pregnancy". Its coverage must therefore be compared to that of other things that are not "typical" but which should still be in the lead due to being particularly prominent in pregnancy literature, especially if they appear regularly even in broad obstetrics textbooks like Williams and Hacker & Moore and The Continuous Textbook of Women's Medicine. As I said, I chose to compare its relative popularity to some other atypical presentations that did not inherently imply pregnancy and so would be reasonably likely to include "pregnan*" in titles, as a way to normalize to the search term constraints necessary for transgender pregnancy.

This methodology was not "naive", it's basically (a lite version of) what we do in the initial steps of a meta-analysis/systematic review when searching which articles to include (see here, where the conclusion is "Screening via a titles-first approach may be more efficient than screening titles and abstracts together."). I looked at the MeSH index terms of transgender pregnancy sentinel articles and then used those in the search terms. For the comparison queries I was very conservative (=low sensitivity) and purposely allowed those to be undercounted in my title searches since I wasn't trying to prove those topics should be in the lead, I only wanted to show how a moderately sensitive search for transgender pregnancy papers compared to a search on other pregnancy topics that was at best equally sensitive and more likely far less sensitive. Gestational diabetes obviously is undercounted due to redundancy between "gestational" and "pregnancy", but as it's already in our lead and had a large presence in tertiary "standard pregnancy" books I decided to include it ("(TITLE(pregnan*) OR TITLE(gestational)) AND TITLE(diabetes)" yields 17353 hits, or 5.63% of "TITLE(pregnan*)" papers). "Teenage pregnancy" isn't directly discussed in the lead but is also common in tertiary books and shares some of the social/psych interest that I anticipated would be attached to transgender pregnancy, so I added that as another control ("TITLE(pregnan*) AND (TITLE(teenage) OR TITLE(adolescent))" catches 4563, or 1.48%). "Acute fatty liver of pregnancy" is listed in our article as a rare complication, and is an obvious choice for another control as it only merits one sentence in our article body and already contains "pregnancy" in its name.

I am not arguing a title search is the way to go for all topics when determining DUENESS, just that it has utility in situations where there are a very limited number of keywords that nevertheless can appear in different false positive contexts if the search is expanded to include abstracts or INDEXTERMS. Which is why I chose the specific comparisons I did. Again, this is a standard approach when filtering results for SRs and I don't see why that wouldn't be applicable to assessing DUE WEIGHT. JoelleJay (talk) 04:08, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

Perhaps you are unfamiliar with our medical articles.

• Measles Measles affects about 20 million people a year
• Myopia Near-sightedness is the most common eye problem and is estimated to affect 1.5 billion people (22% of the world population).
• Stroke In 2013, approximately 6.9 million people had an ischemic stroke and 3.4 million people had a hemorrhagic stroke.
• Infertility Estimates from 1997 suggest that worldwide about five percent of all heterosexual couples have an unresolved problem with infertility.
• Breast cancer In 2018, it resulted in 2 million new cases and 627,000 deaths
• Diabetes As of 2019, an estimated 463 million people had diabetes worldwide [.. and ..] resulted in approximately 4.2 million deaths

And so on. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia. Basic world stats on a health issue are considered by the community to be a lead topic. And you can see from the above small collection that it is in fact hard to get up-to-date global stats on even major health issues. Wikipedia has a global audience, whereas health professionals (unless you work for WHO or the UN) have a domestic audience. It is far easier to get stats on health issues for one country, indeed sheer weight of stats would make Wikipedia very US-specific. But I'm sure you can appreciate that Wikipedia editors prefer our focus to be global and general. None of the above stats would survive an article-title weight test. And really there is not a lot of epidemiology going on that is global vs wealthy domestic. How on earth do you collect pregnancy or measles or stroke stats in war torn Sudan or Syria? So in the end, we often have global stats that are "the best we could find" rather than what we'd want. Nobody would choose or argue that stroke stats from 2013 were DUE vs stroke stats from 2021, say, but perhaps we don't have better, or nobody has looked. Similarly, nobody is arguing whether global pregnancy stats vs developing world is a better stat than wanted vs unwanted globally or teenage vs adult, we've just ended up with whatever someone found.

You said "it is irrelevant that most primary and review publications involving pregnancy are on atypical pregnancies; we aren't interested in those sources for the majority of our article anyway". Hmm, you seem to have decided for yourself what weight to give to the "majority of our article" rather than basing it on counting the number of search results. The article is trying to comprehensively cover all pregnancy, and does include atypical situations (whatever atypical means -- where do you draw the line?). But you earlier told us that a literature search for pregnancy in the title would be the standard you would compare searches for aspects of pregnancy against. And we can both see that such a search is hugely biased toward issues that require medical treatment or healthcare intervention, whereas pregnancy from an encyclopaedic point of view is about a natural life period/process that humans have been doing for millennia. So if doing a title search on journal papers can't determine what proportion we spend on "atypical" pregnancy and what we spend on healthy normal desirable pregnancy, say, why should it be useful to determine what weight we give to LGBT issues?

You said 'And since transgender pregnancy is "atypical", it is not going to be discussed in the types of secondary/tertiary sources dedicated to "standard pregnancy".' Hmm, I think you are veering off into original research land here, and the word "atypical" isn't helping. There are many people who are trans who have not had surgery or taking hormones. In what way would their pregnancy be "atypical"? Certainly not medically. There are, for example, issues surrounding LGBT pregnancy that are social ones (accepting that the partner may not be male or the baby's genetic dad). Teenage pregnancy is a social healthcare matter, but not really a medical one. I think in your second paragraph you are starting to accept that judging what weight to give to aspects is harder than just doing title searches and comparing the ratios of results.

We don't write comprehensive encyclopaedic articles the same way that a researcher does a systematic review on some healthcare intervention or therapy. End of, really. Not sure why you think that is remotely relevant. Pregnancy is not a healthcare intervention.

Perhaps one way of looking at this is that most of pregnancy, that we want to include in this article, is about things we know and have known for a very long time indeed. Whereas most of the academic journal literature on pregnancy is about finding out things we didn't know, but want to know as a healthcare professional (vs as a general reader). You aren't going to get your paper published unless you are telling us something we didn't know already, and that has some impact on how the health profession handles pregnancy. This isn't true of some other subjects. For tuberous sclerosis, we only identified and documented it less than 200 years ago. It is very much a medically dominated topic and the sum-total of literature on the topic can be found in professional textbooks and academic papers, and the WEIGHT these give to sub-topics is useful to us. It is a rare enough disease and compact enough of a topic that you will find review papers that are fairly comprehensive of the whole topic, though not as comprehensive as a dedicated textbook, of which there are a handful.

It comes back to our purpose here to produce a comprehensive encyclopaedic article for the general reader. We wouldn't write an article on car by only reading repair manuals, even though they might tell you a lot about how the car is put together and might go wrong. We wouldn't write an article on man by only reading about war, even though men going to war is a major topic in literature. It is very tempting to reach for PubMed on health topics, but pregnancy is not a disease. -- Colin°^Talk 10:59, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

What exactly is your argument...? You listed a bunch of diseases and how they mention incidence, which you are saying justifies including such stats for pregnancy...but then go on to argue pregnancy isn't a disease. So why would we treat it like one with an "incidence" statistic broken down to "developed" vs "developing" countries, a metric that pretty much only seems to have been reported by one institute in one year? If we want some global stat on pregnancy, there are plenty of others that have received more attention in RS--like the ones I listed.

I'm not just comparing transgender pregnancy to total pregnancy papers. I'm comparing proportion of pregnancy papers on transgender pregnancy to proportion on other pregnancies that are also considered remarkable medically (diabetes) or atypical demographically/psychosocially (pregnancy in men and teenagers). And I am looking in the medical reviews literature because that is where MEDRS discussions on transgender pregnancy occur; textbooks that cover the normal physiological aspects of pregnancy and common complications (like the ones I listed) are overwhelmingly not talking about transgender pregnancy because why would they? Those pregnancies are largely no different from any other pregnancy from a physical healthcare perspective, and they occupy a negligibly small percentage of all pregnancies anyway. So the MEDRS sources that are going to cover pregnancy in trans men are going to be in the research/review literature, which is where medically and psychosocially/demographically remarkable reports go. Our article should be a summary of all the major and many of the minor aspects of pregnancy, and our lead should be an even more concise summary of that (which it fails to do spectacularly, even aside from shoehorning in transgender pregnancy). We know what is DUE based on how much sustained discussion a topic garners in published sources. Normal pregnancy + select conditions are covered in thousands of textbooks and intergovernmental agency reports and other tertiary sources, the most important facts will show up in those and a plurality of research papers. There's no issue determining what's DUE there, and really we should be writing the article solely from those sources anyway. The subtopics that don't regularly appear in standard textbooks are invariably the ones that show up in research papers, and if we want to determine which of them are DUE we must calibrate their coverage to a shared umbrella term ("pregnan*") and compare them to each other. I don't see any fair way to evaluate WEIGHT in the lead outside of a literature review using empirically tested methods. JoelleJay (talk) 04:34, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

You are missing the point about the global stat. We want one. If you asked the community, there would be a consensus that some kind of global stat should be in our lead. The one we end up with is a compromise based on what people found. If you worked backwards, and said to people, I have this random global stat from 2012, is it DUE? Then someone doing a naive search on papers would say "Absolutely not, and why isn't our lead all about teenage pregnancies?".

Your first sentence in paragraph two is wrong. That is exactly what you were doing. And your second sentence's approach is disqualified by yourself a few words later. Transgender pregnancy is not generally "remarkable medically", as you confirm later when you write "transgender ... pregnancies are largely no different from any other pregnancy from a physical healthcare perspective". So why are you comparing a trans pregnancy with gestational diabetes? No midwife ever says to the patient "The test has come back positive, and I'm afraid you are trans. We'll need you to start on a special therapy. No, the Wikipedia page didn't warn you this could happen; someone keeps removing that sentence. You'll experience a condition known as "prejudice" which may make it difficult to go to the bathroom in some US states."

MEDRS does not require you to look in the medical reviews literature. Look at many of our sources. You did look at them, yes? Before assuming they were all review papers and $60 textbooks? As I said, pregnancy is not a disease. And some aspects of it are legal, some in art and some are social. Trans pregnancy is in an intersection between medicine, general health, social, political and legal matters.

As I said before, I'm not attempting to change your mind; that is clearly made up, I'm really just trying to say it is more complex than you think and claiming that it is easy flies in the face of evidence to the contrary and just ends up looking naive and a bit insulting to those who have worked hard on actual article building on this page. I get that admitting it is more complex than just running a title search on a website means admitting you were wrong on the internet, which nobody wants to do. So, rather than keep arguing on this page, I'm going to duck out before it just ends up repeating the same thing. -- Colin°^Talk 09:56, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

You are missing the point about the global stat. We want one. If you asked the community, there would be a consensus that some kind of global stat should be in our lead. The one we end up with is a compromise based on what people found. ?? It doesn't matter that editors want any old global stat in the lead. If that was the whole basis for including that particular stat then it should be removed. And anyway we already have like six global stats in the lead, how is that justified by MOS:LEAD? Results from one paper that had been cited all of four times before it was added should not be occupying so much of the lead!

Then someone doing a naive search on papers would say "Absolutely not, and why isn't our lead all about teenage pregnancies?". There are an enormous number of primary papers, reviews, book chapters, books, and organization factsheets containing "pregnancy" in their titles, and the vast plurality are on normal pregnancies as opposed to any single non-standard feature. All publications, including ones focused on atypical pregnancies, will also contain significant secondary detail on particular aspects of normal pregnancies. This can be assumed due to the fundamental structure of scientific literature and should not need explaining. Most of the publications on normal pregnancy, especially tertiary ones, will furthermore share a core group of specific details like epidemiology, complications, social facets, etc. that they cover in detail; the members of this group are naturally determined over time as a function of their prevalence and/or scientific interest and will generally constitute a proportional percentage of the "pregnan*" primary/review literature titles. This is also obvious. Those core features are what should be in the lead.

Your first sentence in paragraph two is wrong. That is exactly what you were doing. And your second sentence's approach is disqualified by yourself a few words later. Transgender pregnancy is not generally "remarkable medically", as you confirm later when you write "transgender ... pregnancies are largely no different from any other pregnancy from a physical healthcare perspective". So why are you comparing a trans pregnancy with gestational diabetes? 1. I said I am not just comparing # of trans pregnancy papers to that of pregnancy overall, which is indisputably true. 2. I am comparing the relative representation of various pregnancy subtopics within medical pregnancy literature as a whole. That's what WP:NPOV and MOS:LEAD require. The fact that transgender pregnancy is medically unremarkable is mainly only relevant to the corpus I used for title searches; as a subtopic of pregnancy it is still valid to compare it to other pregnancy subtopics even if they're medically remarkable. In the interest of giving transgender pregnancy coverage an advantage I restricted the search to just titles in Scopus-indexed primary/review literature rather than all pregnancy literature, which would include tens of thousands more books/chapters on the topic that make no mention of transgender men. Also in the interest of increasing transgender pregnancy search sensitivity, and at the expense of sensitivity for the other subtopics, I forced the other search subjects to include the term "pregnan*" in their titles and initially did not include OR operators for their alternate names. Reanalyzing with the addition of just one OR descriptor each ("pregnan*" OR "gestational" and "adolescent" OR "teenage") yielded 10,000 more results for gestational diabetes (240% increase) and 3,200 for teenage pregnancy (350%).

MEDRS does not require you to look in the medical reviews literature. Look at many of our sources. You did look at them, yes? Before assuming they were all review papers and $60 textbooks? As I said, pregnancy is not a disease. And some aspects of it are legal, some in art and some are social. Trans pregnancy is in an intersection between medicine, general health, social, political and legal matters. Do you see where I said From a purely MEDRS perspective way up in my first comment in this thread? And where the comment that started this thread stated If the NHS and other medical sources mention transgender men, then clearly it's WP:NOTABLE enough to mention in the lead, and in the article as a whole? I'm responding to the points in this thread about whether transgender pregnancy as a medical topic is warranted in the lead.

As I said before, I'm not attempting to change your mind; that is clearly made up, I'm really just trying to say it is more complex than you think and claiming that it is easy flies in the face of evidence to the contrary and just ends up looking naive and a bit insulting to those who have worked hard on actual article building on this page. I get that admitting it is more complex than just running a title search on a website means admitting you were wrong on the internet, which nobody wants to do. So, rather than keep arguing on this page, I'm going to duck out before it just ends up repeating the same thing.

Given how much you've complained about alleged canvassing from anti-trans "activists", one would've thought you'd welcome the perspective of a medical scientist with almost no edits in GENDERSEX articles but moderately extensive involvement in medical topics and even more so applications of their WP guidance. And yet you've been on the attack this whole discussion treating me as if I was solicited from some TERF community even though I gave a clear explanation for how I ended up here. So I too am going to duck out before any more of my arguments are mischaracterized with condescending, reductive, accusatory "examples" like No midwife ever says to the patient "The test has come back positive, and I'm afraid you are trans. We'll need you to start on a special therapy. No, the Wikipedia page didn't warn you this could happen; someone keeps removing that sentence. You'll experience a condition known as "prejudice" which may make it difficult to go to the bathroom in some US states." JoelleJay (talk) 01:17, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

"They were, effectively, invited to come join the culture war that one WP:ACTIVIST has poured petrol on." PLEASE STOP. You continue to cast aspersions - which are uncivil - with apparent abandon. Do you have evidence that canvassing took place? No? Then PLEASE STOP claiming so. It is directly uncivil to ALL editors here to throw around vague accusations, because without actual evidence, you are impugning ALL editors, since the claim is unfalsifiable. Other editors have made the same accusation against those in favor of addition of the content to the lede. Again, with NO EVIDENCE. We have fire being used to fight fire, except that there is no fire to fight. WTF ever happened to Assume Good Faith? I'm seeing little here in a comment pointing a finger at one editor, claiming he's an activist, and claiming anyone else who holds the same or similar opinion must also an activist brought here by canvassing, as anything remotely resembling AGF. This is absurd in the extreme. Stop attacking other editors. PLEASE. I apologize for the all-caps, but I'm tired of the relentless attacks on editors, as opposed to edits. cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 20:56, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

You are aware that are attacking me, an editor, and not em, actually discussing whether we should include trans in the lead. Honestly, is this "lack of self-awareness day"? -- Colin°^Talk 21:07, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Calling out an editor's lack of civility is not an "attack". That you see it as one is indicative of the problem here. cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 21:14, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Just want to briefly chime in to say that I certainly agree with Colin, ineffablebookkeeper, et al. insofar as we should either have a sentence to this effect in the lead or should "de-gender" the intro sentence. I tend to think (as mentioned above) that it is logically inconsistent otherwise. To be clear, I don't see a current consensus for this, but I also don't think such a thing is impossible. Cheers all, and Happy Monday. Dumuzid (talk) 21:29, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Who's the one activist? Springee (talk) 00:22, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

"Transgender" is considered somewhat obsolete terminology in many quarters and is not used in most modern papers (something I'd think you should have realized just from the results of your search - 24 papers is clearly not a credible result; I could produce several times that many papers here and now if you wanted.) Try searching for "pregnancy" "trans"; or, if that contains too many unrelated uses of trans in other context, "pregnancy", "trans" "gender" or the like as separate words. --Aquillion (talk) 19:44, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

I am unsure it needs to be mentioned in the lede as it is not a major part of the topic. Slatersteven (talk) 12:41, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

The lead summarizes. I don't think there is a definitive answer as to whether that summary should include Transgender or not although the more content on the topic in the body the higher the possibility for inclusion. I would be fine with including it. I'd add the nature of Wikipedia is that editors are drawn into topics for lots of reasons and I for one don't care why. I did did make multiple edits to the talk page several years ago but the topic was always a fight, so left, while I have the article watch listed. Once again a bit of a fight. Littleolive oil (talk) 14:15, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Add: I delineate between who, and why editors are here and what they do once they are here. Disruption can be blocked. There is a dangerous line we cross when we assume motive and act accordingly. If we don't have admins who will wade into difficult areas we have to ask why? I know why having been around in contentious areas long enough. Our remit is not to control who edits and why unless they transgress our policies and guidelines in some way. Otherwise, we have to argue it our and in the end perhaps compromise. I'll leave this alone now since I've gone off trail. Littleolive oil (talk) 19:32, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

• I don't think a brief sentence or two in the lead is undue. The topic has substantial coverage and doesn't seem particularly more obscure or lower-weight than the numerous other individual medical details related to pregnancy currently given comparable weight there. Weight is relative; a lot of the arguments above are saying that this is only a small part of the topic - but we're also only talking about ~4% of the lead. That seems, to me, to be roughly proportionate to coverage. --Aquillion (talk) 19:44, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

• The "transgender people" section is a brief 128-words subsection of the article's main "Legal and social aspects section". I don't see "legal protection", "teenage pregnancy", and "racial disparities" summarized in the lead. Therefore, I see no justifiable reason for including trans men in the lead. Doing so is definitely WP:UNDUE ("Wikipedia aims to present competing views in proportion to their representation in reliable sources on the subject.... in determining proper weight, we consider a viewpoint's prevalence in reliable sources, not its prevalence among Wikipedia editors or the general public."). Pyxis Solitary (yak). L not Q. 09:41, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

Just to note that teenage pregnancy section was only added on Wednesday, and the article has been protected since then. I'm sure there should be a mention of that in the lead. -- Colin°^Talk 09:59, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

@Pyxis Solitary: thanks for pointing out some issues that ought to be summarised in the lead; you're right, they're gaping holes we could definitely improve on. As Colin points out, this article has been protected since (I think) last Wednesday? So it's no surprise that some content is missing.

Rather than spin round the circular paradox of "it isn't mentioned in the lead → therefore it's not notable → therefore it shouldn't be in the lead → therefore it's not notable and we can't include it in the lead", I think we can all recognise that something being missing from the article is the article lacking qualities it should have – not an indicator that something is non-notable and shouldn't be summarised in the lead.

Say teen pregnancy was mentioned in the lead but wasn't expounded upon in the article. I don't think we'd go around stating that it was non-notable and ought to be removed – as per Wikipedia's policy on medical references, we can look at the sources we have and see we have full justification to write about it in the article. We'd then add a section on teen pregnancy. As Colin as expounded upon above, we wouldn't waste our time talking about whether or not its sole mention being in the lead would make it notable or not – as we all damn well know, this is not how notability works.

Nor is notability defined by how "common" something is; we have numerous articles on the elements in the periodic table, and if we look at a breakdown of something like the universe as a whole, we can see that nitrogen, silicon, magnesium, sulfur and so on comprise a miniscule proportion. But we don't waste our time on points like "they comprise so little of the universe, I can see no reason to write an article about them".

We don't even waste our time on such points for the rarest elements of the periodic table like Astatine, whose isotopes have a half life of just over 8 hours, occur only as a decay product of other elements, and for which a pure sample has literally never been assembled.

We're playing silly buggers if we're deluding ourselves that something's scarcity is how notability is defined on Wikipedia; it's not. Is something written about in reliable sources, enough of them to make a go of it? If yes – then it's notable, and in this case it is. Is something lacking from the article at present, but, looking at the sources available, has enough written about it in reliable sources, enough to make a go of it? If yes – then it's notable and in this case, it is.

The argument that it's not written about in in the article, so it can't be notable at all, is nonsense – articles improve all the time, and we don't decide what can't be added based on existing holes in a given article. The idea that we can't add X because Y isn't in there, and that means X can't be notable, is also nonsense.

And I'm hesitant to do this, but I have to point out that Pyxis Solitary tried very unsuccessfully to have PinkNews re-evaluated as a reliable source in 2021, backing it up with, as one editor described it, a handful of biased and unreliable sources. Due to this, I don't believe they're arguing this point – the non-inclusion of trans men in this article – in good faith.—Ineffablebookkeeper (talk) ({{ping}} me!) 13:56, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

It is clear (and by no means unique to this topic) that merely advertising on some noticeboard that there is a conflict in a culture-war domain will overly attract editors who have strong pre-existing views about that conflict. They then come to the RFC or whatever and just make up random shit, excuse my jargon, about policies and practice that by complete magical chance happen to align with their prejudice. And fixing that one culture-war sentence then becomes so important that we all get drawn into some timesink of a bazillion words explaining why this random shit isn't how people actually write articles on Wikipedia, and if you did, they would be weird. And in the end, I can fully sympathise with any existing article-building editors giving up now, because all their edits will get scrutinised by culture warriors who know nothing about pregnancy. -- Colin°^Talk 14:21, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

Please stop attacking editors you merely disagree with as "culture warriors". And, for someone who previously invoked "anyone can edit" to defend drive-by edits focusing the topic on trans issues, it's odd to see you now privileging "article building editors".

As for "notability", WP:N is about whether something should have an article; WP:UNDUE is what controls content within articles. And she quoted a part of UNDUE talking about representation in reliable sources, same point made by JoelleJay and many others above. Crossroads ^-talk- 15:07, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

Crossroads, I don't attack editors I disagree with as "culture warriors". They earn that badge by an edit history of battling for one side in culture war topics, or writing 'humorous' essays punching down on culture war targets. And as for blanket attacks on anyone who dares include trans in this article, I do believe you are on record further up this page as labelling them "trolls and crusaders", even though you know nothing about them. Maybe "lack of self-awareness day" got extended for a whole week. As for the "anyone can edit" clause you are misrepresenting, I wrote "The fact that Wikipedia is the encyclopaedia anyone can edit means Wikipedia articles will naturally express a variety of contemporary writing styles." I don't think that should be surprising or controversial to anyone here. -- Colin°^Talk 15:36, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

You don't give out "badges". You are an editor same as any of us, nothing more, and your labeling of them constitutes attacks. As for "troll", no less than two other editors used that term before me, as shown by any browser's "find" feature; they also used other unflattering descriptors. I'm not going over the whole 'anyone can edit means any style goes' argument again. Crossroads ^-talk- 16:54, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

I'm going to stop feeding this now. -- Colin°^Talk 17:28, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

No, we should definitely not be adding more content to the lead.

The lead serves as an introduction to the article and a summary of its most important contents...

The lead should stand on its own as a concise overview of the article's topic. It should identify the topic, establish context, explain why the topic is notable, and summarize the most important points, including any prominent controversies. [(Do not violate WP:Neutral point of view by giving undue attention to less important controversies in the lead section.)]...

As a general rule of thumb, a lead section should contain no more than four well-composed paragraphs...

As in the body of the article itself, the emphasis given to material in the lead should roughly reflect its importance to the topic, according to reliable, published sources...

According to the policy on due weight, emphasis given to material should reflect its relative importance to the subject, according to published reliable sources. This is true for both the lead and the body of the article.

Your point about having articles on scarce elements makes zero sense. Pyxis' argument is based on prevalence in reliable sources. An article should not give undue weight to minor aspects of its subject but should strive to treat each aspect with a weight proportional to its treatment in the body of reliable, published material on the subject. If you cannot demonstrate that pregnancy in trans men comprises more than a minor proportion of the RS on pregnancy, then it does not belong in the lead. JoelleJay (talk) 22:07, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

Help review my addition please

I recently added a section on third trimester activities such as attending birthing classes and other things to do in preparation for the birth of the baby. Here is a site that discusses the activities that I mention: [7] My section was deleted saying we are not a guide. It will be easier to discuss if I copy it here:

The parents should begin to plan for the birth of the baby during the third trimester of pregnancy. Some couples attend birthing classes where they learn breathing and relaxation techniques and about what to expect when the time comes for the birth of the baby. A written care plan should be prepared to insure that the parent's wishes are known and respected by the entire birth team. If the hospital is a Baby Friendly Hospital, staff may welcome a visit and discussion about their birthing policies. Emergency situations, including preterm birth and an unplanned cesarian section, should be discussed.

Looking at it at this time I'd agree that it needs some work, most glaringly in the first sentence, but I still believe that most or all of it is worth keeping.

I have come here to this article to do a little editing but most of my time over the years has been at the birth and breastfeeding articles. While there are, in my opinion many places in this article that could be labeled a guide, for one example sexual positions, etc., please see the Breastfeeding article, "signs of a good deep latch" under "Latching". That section has been in the article for years and if my memory serves me correctly, it was one our best editors that made that entry. ...So that is my experience with these articles..

I would like to have some help to improve my addition to where it can be returned to the article. Sectionworker (talk) 02:29, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

I believe it's primarily just the tone of the wording that is an issue. Here's a version that might pass muster:

"Parents may begin planning in earnest for the birth during the third trimester of pregnancy. Some couples attend birthing classes where they learn breathing and relaxation techniques and about what to expect when the time comes for the birth. In some circumstances, a 'care plan' is employed which can ensure that the parent's wishes are known and respected by the birthing team. If the hospital is a Baby Friendly Hospital, staff may offer visits and discussion in advance regarding their birthing policies. Emergency situations, including preterm birth and an unplanned cesarian section, may also be discussed."

I kind of overused the word 'some', that could be massaged further, this is just an example, and possibly still not adequate. I would argue however that much of this is written from a very 'first-world' perspective; none of this likely occurs in any formal context in developing or third-world countries, and many people even in first-world countries don't have the resources—or regrettably at times, the interest—in this level of care.

Regarding the breastfeeding article, certainly there's lots of stuff extant in the encyclopedia that deviates from the expectations we have for proper/appropriate tone and quality, but that obviously isn't a good argument for more of it. cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 03:47, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

I appreciate your input. Re the deviation in the breastfeeding article, Doc James and a couple of our other best editors used to watch and work on that article and it was apparently acceptable to them. For one thing, this is pretty much an article that women would find interesting and men reading it should keep that in mind. Which is not to say that we don't have many, many men and women who are more than capable of understand and writing articles with a well-rounded viewpoint. Sectionworker (talk) 05:09, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

There are good editors and bad editors, but there are no 'rankings' for editors; its important to keep first in mind that we are peers here, and no editors have superior privileges to others, though many seem to think they do. Those editors may have found the material acceptable at the time; that's irrelevant to the guidelines that we don't tell readers what they should and should not do. Just because a particular cohort may be assumed to have more interest in certain content doesn't mean that we suspend our guidelines to please them. We are supposed to write neutrally. Again, as the editor who reverted made clear, Wikipedia is not a guidebook, and should not be written in that tone. Your original told parents that they should do certain things. That's not appropriate. cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 05:30, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

It can be difficult sometimes to relay standard or good-practice professional advice into an encyclopaedic tone. Words like "should" are often a sign that we are starting to give advice in Wikipedia's voice. Changing the text to a passive observation (like "may begin") isn't exactly equivalent, though it might be fine here. I've seen mistakes before where the practice advised by professionals isn't actually what is routine (either in the population or among other professionals), and so a naive copyedit to observational tone can introduce factual errors. I do agree the original text needed a bit of work to avoid looking like Wikipedia was offering antenatal advice, but I am strongly opposed to HiLo48 just reverting out the whole section. If editors identify a problem, there are other less hostile and more constructive ways to deal with that. One is per WP:PRESERVE to go and try to fix it yourself while retaining the content. Ideally in a humble "trying to fix this, revert if I am introducing an error" manner. Another is to post a polite message on the talk page. That would have been all that is required here, and then Sectionworker could, in consultation with the sources, found a different way to write it. Or as anastrophe is doing, people could offer suggestions. -- Colin°^Talk 09:27, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

My concerns about that addition were a lot more than I could easily address in a short Edit summary. As well as being obvious instructions to people (and I really can't see how we can avoid it being that), it was also appallingly culturally biased towards how things work in whichever advanced western nation Sectionworker is from. Remember that this is a global encyclopaedia, and there's another 200 countries out there, where things are done differently, and different language is used. The expression "Baby Friendly Hospital", with its capital letters, appears to be something formal, but I haven't seen it in my country Things are managed differently during pregnancy in every different country in the world. I cannot see anything like that content belonging in the article. HiLo48 (talk) 10:29, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

The Baby Friendly Hospital was wikilinked. You can read about it and perhaps realise that of any of the concepts around pregnancy care in hospitals, that's one that is about as international as it is possible to get. A "Birth plan" is an international concept too and a recognised part of the end of pregnancy. You deleted the section because of your own self-declared ignorance and self-declared lack of ability to fix the problems you saw. This is rude HiLo and not collaborative. It is easier to collaborate on existing text and improve it than to chuck it all in the bin.

Sectionworker has been adding things to this article that have been oddly missing. Like teenage pregnancy. And a birth plan is a common component of the end of pregnancy. It certainly belongs. -- Colin°^Talk 16:25, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

I commented on the expression "Baby Friendly Hospital" they way it appeared in the quote above. It is not Wikilinked there. To attack me for that was rude on your part. Asking me to "to collaborate on existing text..." is silly when there was none before that addition. Your insults have not improved my view here. My opinion remains unchanged. Please try to raise the tone of the discussion, and you might get somewhere. HiLo48 (talk) 21:36, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

If I can make a few comments here...As for Colin, certainly I appreciate what he has had to say since he has been so supportive. On the other hand, HiLO is a well seasoned editor as well and I appreciate his/her input. Here is what happened for me. I wrote the article and then I went looking for refs and thinking that I might get some feedback posts. I did not expect the entire addition to be deleted. But I don't think it was rude of HiLo and I do believe that he/she will be willing to help us improve it. S/he is correct when s/he says Friendly baby etc. is wrong. That shortcut was not acceptable for this article. Colin is correct in that it is one of WHO's most aggressive birth plans to reduce mother and baby deaths around the world. Hopefully we can begin to work together. Sectionworker (talk) 22:16, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

OK. Use Baby Friendly Hospital, but don't just Wikilink it. Somehow mention that it is a WHO and UNICEF program. It first read to me like a marketing term of the kind used by private hospitals. Write the content in a form describing what options are available and what some/many parents do, not as instructions on what they should do. Use a global perspective when writing that description, not one just limited to first world countries. Or, if you really want to do the latter, make it clear that's what you're doing. HiLo48 (talk) 01:46, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

Why should we not wikilink the term? The Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative is a global one through the WHO, and has noteworthy implementations in multiple countries across multiple continents. On the surface it seems like it is a relevant global program to include when writing from a global perspective. Sideswipe9th (talk) 23:37, 15 November 2022 (UTC)

Would this be OK?

Parents may begin planning for the birth during the third trimester of pregnancy. Health care providers advise the expecting mother and her partner or some other support person to attend birthing classes where they learn how to make a birthing plan, how to use relaxation techniques, and about what to expect when the time comes for the birth. In 1991 the WHO launched the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative, a global program that recognizes birthing centers and hospitals that offer an optimal level of care for giving birth. Facilities that have been certified as "Baby Friendly" can be visited to familiarize the expecting parents with the facility and the staff. Sectionworker (talk) 05:10, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

Nope. The second word still makes it read like an instruction manual. Same with the final sentence. The sentence on Baby Friendly Hospitals is good, but the rest still reads like guidance for first world parents. HiLo48 (talk) 05:21, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

OK, I give up. Sectionworker (talk) 05:46, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

Sectionworker, HiLo is not "guardian of the content". Are you adding the introductory sentence on "Baby Friendly" because you think readers need that material in this article, or because HiLo has admitted they deleted the content that referenced a major international pregnancy healthcare program they knew nothing about. HiLo, I know nothing about pregnancy beyond what any dad does at my age, but I don't go around deleting content because of that ignorance. I recognise my ignorance, as you should to. Ignorance can be a good thing, go ask Graham about all my ignorant questions I asked him when he wrote his virus articles. What I didn't do was delete stuff I'm ignorant about or act as gatekeeper on something I know little about.

I think two things would help. Firstly, more eyes and hands from editors who know about the subject and sources and secondly, I think it would be constructive to improve the text in-place in the article. Debating a single sentence on-talk is fine, but debating a whole paragraph in an all-or-nothing approach is just a terrible way of working. I don't think there has been any serious claim that this article does not warrant a "Birth plan" section, so let's have one and improve it. WP:IMPERFECT is policy. -- Colin°^Talk 09:22, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

You have completely misrepresented what I wrote. And been insulting, again. I have to wonder why. HiLo48 (talk) 10:19, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

Colin, I don't think that I will ever be able to satisfy HiLo. Perhaps we can put something together. How about if I handle the first part like this: a few words and then this: "The Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic & Neonatal Nursing writes "Creating a birth plan provides the opportunity to determine personal expectations, develop relationships with providers, and share in decision making [8]". Sectionworker (talk) 15:17, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

I don't think we should attribute to a journal for this kind of thing, and also really this is the view of the author, Judith Lothian, not the journal. I didn't find much better when I looked on PubMed, which makes me think I'm looking in the wrong place. The journals seem more concerned with evaluating the effectiveness of birth plans, than describing what they are and what their intention is.

I think we can describe what a birth plan is in our own words without it being advice or having to attribute that to any organisation. I'd prefer it was less corporate-speak and sounding like it was from the Midwives POV ("share in decision making" / "providers"). Links like [9][10][11] have some ideas for "what is a birth plan" and also how writing one is an opportunity to discuss, learn, and manage expectations. Those are UK specific and not encyclopaedic in tone or POV but could still be useful. I'm surprised we don't seem to have a Birth plan article and that there's nothing in Childbirth about it. It seems like this topic should appear in both articles in summary-form. Maybe it would be easier to write a stub Birth plan and then summarise that here?

I think aspects like this, are what's been missing from this article. It has mainly focused on changes in the body, as though suddenly the baby pops out and without a thought given to where they want to have it, pain relief, what partner comes with them, and other variants in the birth process they would (ideally) want control over. These are all decisions made during pregnancy, though how many of them survive contact with events on the day is another matter.

I wish you had a midwife to discuss this with! Are User:Kporter0918 or User:Clayoquot, who worked on Breastfeeding, around to help? -- Colin°^Talk 16:55, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

I don't like what I wrote either. I'm feeling so unsure of myself now that I thought I'd switch to a quote. I've read all the sites that explain birth plans but I was sure that HiLo would not accept any of the sites. Mayo Clinic was one possible idea but it sounds weird to say "Mayo Clinic says, etc." As for Clayoquot, she is an excellent source person besides good at editing. But she may be too busy with other things. I don't think Kporter has done work other that the breastfeeding article. I've never had so much trouble with editing in all my 15+ years here. Sectionworker (talk) 17:29, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

Let me emphasise that while have criticised the wording, I'd really rather criticise article-text than talk-text. Firstly, it is positive and constructive to have something to build on. Thats WP:IMPERFECT policy after all. But also, it being in the article means lots more people see it. Some of them might improve it. Wrt Kporter, I know they were a student who ended up doing better than we typically see, and got relevant qualifications in this area. I'm just wondering if we drop them a message, whether this might spark some interest in Wikipedia again. I'd rather you had someone to bounce ideas and words off of than some grey-haired dad, frankly. -- Colin°^Talk 22:21, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

I think it would be good, perhaps we can just do a few tweaks so it's not as advice-like (changes underlined): Medical experts [ob-gyns?] recommend that parents begin planning for the birth during the third trimester of pregnancy. Health care providers advise the expecting mother and her partner or some other support person to attend birthing classes where they learn how to make a birthing plan, how to use relaxation techniques, and about what to expect when the time comes for the birth. In 1991 the WHO launched the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative, a global program that recognizes birthing centers and hospitals that offer an optimal level of care for giving birth. Facilities that have been certified as "Baby Friendly" accept visits from expecting parents to familiarize them with the facility and the staff. Crossroads ^-talk- 23:38, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

"Health care providers" works best because it includes midwives and any sort of MD. HiLo still won't like this because s/he thinks it is not globally correct. I wanted BFH's in because the WHO is global and I want'd to fit it in somehow. It is good to have your help Crossroads. Sectionworker (talk) 01:29, 15 November 2022 (UTC)

The nice thing about consensus is that you don't have to satisfy all editors present. If a consensus around a version forms, and one editor dislikes it, then they can dislike it but it's still the consensus version. I think any of the suggested texts by anastrophe, Crossroads, or you (Sectionworker) are fine. Sideswipe9th (talk) 23:32, 15 November 2022 (UTC)

Well I had hoped that for a change HiLo would have posted with feedback but it seems that is not to be. It would have been helpful if s/he had posted when Anastrophe had posted a suggestion using "parents may..." saying that it was not acceptable to guide me in working on the new section, but did not and waited till I used Anastrophe's wording so that s/he could say "nope, not good enough". In fact not once has s/he helped. I expect that if I go ahead and add the section back to the article as Sideswipe suggests that it will be nit picked and tagged. I hate tags and always fix them on my articles. S/he will also tag with not global when neither s/he nor anyone here has come up with anything to satisfy them. As I have mentioned, I wrote the section and then went looking for refs. "In the third trimester" is my own wording and not wording from a source. It seemed reasonable to me. That can be tagged with "not in source". I'm going to do a new re-write from the source that I used in my first post to make sure that my info is all sourced. If HiLo tags it not global I'm going to remove the tag and say to bring it to talkSectionworker (talk) 17:02, 16 November 2022 (UTC).

I would say that tags are not necessary as we are discussing this on talk, so no need to use that method of attracting attention which can look too much like one person is demanding a "fix" till they are satisfied. I don't think any of the text that has ever been proposed for this was ever so bad as to warrant removal. Some sites mention 32 weeks for creating a birth plan, which I think is similar enough to "third trimester". We do need to make sure the text is in our own words and not a close paraphrase of the sources. -- Colin°^Talk 17:38, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

I agree with Colin. As far as I can tell, most non-medical sites that provide birth planning advice use "third trimester" instead of "32 weeks" in their language. They're also close enough that I don't think it matters too much, and would be an acceptable paraphrase.

Honestly, there seems to be a consensus here for a version, regardless of what HiLo has said. I would go ahead and restore the section, and if it gets removed again then I would be minded to see such a removal as edit warring against a consensus. And if it's tagged with something like {{Globalize}} then I'd probably see that as disruptive too. Sideswipe9th (talk) 18:42, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

I concur with Crossroads's suggested revision above.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:55, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

"Womb" v. "uterus" (for, apparently, the nth time)

Medical sources overwhelmingly use "uterus", lay sources also seem biased toward "uterus" at least as the first term when introducing the subject; is there any current reason (the last discussion seeming to have been in 2011?) that we've stuck with "womb" for so long? And aside from the usage aspect, I've always had the impression that "womb" was a rather dated, sexist term with religious/moral overtones (like "loins" for men's genitals) mainly preferred by the type of people who employ euphemisms for anything related to female biology (e.g. "with child" instead of "pregnant"). Then there's its popularization in the problematic woo new agey yoni egg "divine feminine" crowd... But I've also heard that "womb" might be more accepted as a normal word in the UK? Does anyone else have input on this? Am I the only woman who gets Handmaid's Tale vibes from this word? JoelleJay (talk) 03:45, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

While medical sources can be useful for terminology, when deciding whether to use a lay term or a technical term, they aren't really a guide at all, since they are written for health professionals and that isn't our audience. I had a look for uterus on the NHS and found it was nearly always written "womb (uterus)" though I did find the odd page with "uterus (womb)". For example womb cancer, hysterectomy, fibroids, endometriosis. The NHS pages are an example of public-facing health website that is deliberately highly accessible to the entire population. For example, they may say "tummy (abdominal) pain" when perhaps Wikipedian's would think that "tummy" a little too much for an encyclopaedia. Their article on anal cancer talks about your "bottom" and your "poo". The NHS clearly think that educating their reader that the technical term is "uterus" is important, as they don't just write "womb" and avoid "uterus" entirely, but if they explain "womb (uterus)" then they'll only do it once (see the "womb cancer" page).

I looked also at Tommy's website and they also overwhelmingly preferred womb. I looked also at NCT and they preferred womb but not so overwhelmingly. As someone in the UK, I don't get any of the vibes you have expressed that using the word "womb" is dated, sexist, moral overtones or a euphemism, and our public facing websites don't appear to either. -- Colin°^Talk 10:01, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

I think the reason the NHS or Tommy's may prefer womb in public health outreach is similar to the reason they say things like "bottom", "poo", and "tummy" -- they are concerned about being understood by young children and people with limited English proficiency. You would never read something like They may feel your tummy and insert a gloved finger into your bottom to feel for lumps or anything wrong[12] in a general purpose encyclopedia, but you might in a sex ed/health textbook aimed at pre-teens. I think something like the Mayo Clinic contains the kind of language we should be using: see e.g. their articles on endometrial cancer and anal cancer for comparison. Endwise (talk) 11:02, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

I don't think the NHS, Tommy's or NCT are aimed at young children. They are aimed at adults, and Tommy's and NCT very much so. I can look further if necessary, but I suspect there isn't a single UK public facing health website that mostly uses "uterus" rather than "womb". The "womb" is not considered baby talk, at least not in the UK. -- Colin°^Talk 11:27, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

I don't think they're aimed at children, but I don't see why they would use words like "bottom", "poo", and "tummy" if being understood by children or those with limited English proficiency wasn't one of their goals, no? Endwise (talk) 12:02, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

See NHS language use. It might not be accessible outside the UK though I believe a VPN might circumvent that. -- Colin°^Talk 13:59, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

• I agree that this article should use uterus. Which it actually already does for the most part by the way; there's only a couple mentions of "womb", it's just that one of them happens to be in the opening sentence. We have our own Manual of style for medicine-related articles, and my general impression around its advice is that we should generally stick with medical language, with the caveat that when it impedes understanding, unfamiliar technical jargon should either be explained or not used. But uterus is not technical jargon, and it does not impede understanding for anyone but young children, which this article is already beyond the reading level of, so we should stick with the medical name. Endwise (talk) 10:54, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

  The evidence of public facing websites is that they do regard "uterus" as a technical term that will be unfamiliar to some readers (not all of whom are 8 months pregnant). In the UK, they generally feel the need to explain that term, and have a strong preference to avoid it as their first choice of language. MEDMOS says you are writing for the wrong audience when "You use jargon when there are suitable plain English words (for example, consider using "kidney" rather than "renal"). There is further guidance at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles#Technical terminology and I'm not going to quote it all but strongly suggest people here read that short section. In answer to the question that MEDMOS section poses, yes readers will need to know the term "uterus" in order to properly understand "pregnancy".

  My preference, which might be UK specific, is that we should use "womb" in the lead sentence. Whether we use womb or uterus later is not something I feel strongly about, but think we do need to use both at some point, in order for the reader to appreciate their equivalence, which we should not take for granted.

  I don't think this edit is helpful because we are discussing the matter and it is not clear what the consensus will be. The article does not now mention the word "womb" at all, which is certainly a big FAIL when considering MEDMOS or WP:TECHNICAL (this is an article on "pregnancy", a very general major topic, not even a technical article about some obscure complication). The word "womb" has been in the lead for a long time, which doesn't suggest it needs to stay that way, but participants to this discussion should be aware that this discussion is seeking to change that. Endwise, could you please consider reverting your change for now, to make it clear to all what the article state was before the question was raised. There is no rush. -- Colin°^Talk 11:39, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

  could you please consider reverting your change for now -- sure, done. I thought it was mostly okay as a change because there was a consistency issue regardless of your ultimate view on what terminology this article should be (same as e.g. UK vs. US English), but I can see your point.

  The article does not now mention the word "womb" at all, which is certainly a big FAIL when considering MEDMOS or WP:TECHNICAL -- I'm still skeptical that there will be people who can read at a level that they can understand medical Wikipedia articles, but will be confused at this article because of the use of the word "uterus" -- but alright, granting you that, how should we introduce/explain it? At the moment it just starts off with "womb", then for the most part uses uterus after that without explanation. Endwise (talk) 12:15, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

  Just a comment about the opening sentence. Since technically a pregnancy can occur outside of the uterus (ectopic pregnancy for example) it's perhaps technically incorrect to say "uterus" here [13]. I do think uterus is the term that should be used in cases where womb is implied inside of the uterus. Springee (talk) 12:58, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

  Thanks for the revert, Endwise. Maybe the word uterus is more common in the US. In the Collin's dictionary defines the British usage of "womb" as "the nontechnical name for uterus". Compare tummy which they describe as "an informal or childish word for stomach". Or bottom as "informal // the buttocks". So they don't regard "womb" as informal or childish, thus perfectly ok for an encyclopaedic tone, and they do regard "uterus" as technical language. I don't think this is just my opinion.

  On other hand, I don't think there are any English speakers who won't know what a womb is, but may need a good encyclopaedia to tell them it is the same thing as a uterus. We can do that. I suggest the best approach is use womb for the lead sentence and then the first time we use uterus in the lead, we can write "uterus (womb)". I say "first time" because the current first time is a sentence added fairly recently that does nothing more than redefine the lead in US legal language, and I'd argue that is UNDUE for the lead paragraph. The precise US legal definition belongs somewhere in this article for sure, but not the lead.

  Wrt User:Springee's point, I think it is quite acceptable for the lead sentence to cover the typical location and indeed only survivable location for a baby to develop. An ectopic pregnancy is by very definition of the word a pregnancy that occurs outside of the normal place, and is not one that can develop a baby. -- Colin°^Talk 14:21, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

  As I mentioned in the first post, I think "womb" has more acceptance in the UK, while "uterus" is pretty much universally regarded as the preferred term in the US. Here are some examples from public-facing women's reproductive health orgs in the US:

  • Mayo Clinic: "womb", 493 hits (many using it once, as a secondary term); "uterus", 3780
  • CDC: "womb", 1360 (with same caveat); "uterus", 4430
  • National Women's Health Network: "womb", 4; "uterus", 121
  • Association of Women's Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses: "womb", 20; "uterus", 481
  • American Pregnancy Association: "womb", 89; "uterus", 1260
  • Planned Parenthood: "womb", 95; "uterus", 495
  • USAID: "womb", 807; "uterus", 3370

  Global orgs:

  • WHO: "womb", 1490; "uterus", 10800
  • Guttmacher: "womb", 51; "uterus", 337
  • Commonwealth Fund: "womb", 4; "uterus", 80

  Our first 30 references:

  • Eunice Kennedy Shriver: "womb", 395; "uterus", 993
  • Johns Hopkins Manual of Gynecology and Obstetrics: "womb", 0; "uterus", 79
  • Fetal and Neonatal Physiology: "womb", 6; "uterus", 49
  • Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Family Studies: "womb", 5; "uterus", 16
  • "An evidence-based guideline for unintended pregnancy prevention": no results for either term
  • "Multiple-micronutrient supplementation for women during pregnancy": no results for either term
  • "Intended and Unintended Pregnancies Worldwide in 2012 and Recent Trends": " "
  • "Global, regional, and national age-sex specific mortality for 264 causes of death...": "womb", 0; "uterus", 1
  • Mosby's: "womb", 24 (all but 1 within etymologies of "hystera" or "metra", shows up once in prose); "uterus", 75 (majority of hits in prose)
  • Essential Anatomy and Physiology in Maternity Care: "womb", 2; "uterus", 57
  • Mass.gov: "womb", 12; "uterus", 28
  • Handbook of Nutrition and Pregnancy: "womb", 1; "uterus", 3
  • American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists: "womb" (literally all of them seem to be within the phrase "also called the womb"), 83; "uterus", 516
  • WHO: "womb", 1490; "uterus", 10800
  • Global, regional, and subregional trends...: no results for either term
  • patient.info: "womb", 627; "uterus", 1666
  • The Modern Home Physician (from 1939): "womb", 63; "uterus", 4
  • medicinenet.com: "womb", 3250; "uterus", 7190
  • Merck Manual Consumer Version: "womb", 4009; "uterus", 4195
  • "Constipation, haemorrhoids, and heartburn in pregnancy": "womb", 0; "uterus", 1

  Given that this is firstly a medical article, and the vast majority of modern medical sources prefer the term "uterus"; that "uterus" is the more common lay term outside the UK and that it's an unambiguously familiar term even in the UK; and to be consistent with the rest of the article and its sources; I think the lead should use "uterus" with maybe a parenthetical "womb". JoelleJay (talk) 19:39, 23 November 2022 (UTC):

It's hard to not agree to a change when one looks at the work JoelleJay has done here. Plus, as he says, this is a medical article and uterus is the correct term. Sectionworker (talk) 23:35, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

JoelleJay how are you doing these searches and what websites are you using for e.g. WHO. I'm not getting anything like your numbers. Searching some sites like CDC and WHO will return a mix of public facing and for-professional material. Interesting that the Merck Manual Consumer version is almost equal.

I must repeat that MEDMOS does not prioritise professional or academic sources, very much the opposite as we have an entirely different audience which it warns editors about wrt word choice. Search results on professional/academic material are not persuasive in any way other than if there was dispute over what the technical (jargon) term was. I'd fully expect such sources use the technical term. For example, this article says "Low blood pressure" and the technical term outnumbers the everyday phrase on PubMed by 40:1. This article says "Increased urinary frequency" and that's outnumbered by a similar factor. There will be articles where "hypotension" and "polyuria" are terms the reader needs to know but Pregnancy isn't one, so we just wikilink. So I hope you appreciate that we can't decide "uterus" is the term to give to the general reader, based on source or professional/academic text usage, as that same algorithm would persuade us to use hypotension and polyuria also. (A quick search on CDC confirms a 3:1 preference for the medical jargon "hypotension").

Now that I've given it more thought it's worth mentioning that our hemorrhage page is under the term "bleeding" while it would be hard to find that term used anywhere at all. Except here because it was changed during our period of making the encyclopedia more for people and less for those in the medical profession. Sectionworker (talk) 18:15, 24 November 2022 (UTC)

In the UK "uterus" is neither an everyday word nor is so much technical jargon that few will know what it is. If we do decide on "uterus" then we must write "uterus (womb)" at an early point in the lead and again in the body, though I don't think we should do that in the lead sentence, which should be kept simple. -- Colin°^Talk 17:00, 24 November 2022 (UTC)

I used the google site: function to search the websites. As far as I can tell the majority of the articles from the American orgs are public-facing, see e.g. the Eunice Kennedy Shriver results (which today appear to be different (320 v 1040) in number than when I looked yesterday?). We use that source many times throughout the article, I don't see why its 3:1 ratio should be disregarded.

And actually I mistakenly used the built-in search on the Merck Manuals site instead of google site:, which apparently caused numerous issues with the numbers: 1) all instances of the search term were returned rather than the number of distinct articles containing them; 2) the site seems to have its own indexing system that returns all drug monographs and videos with the word "pregnancy" in them/tagged as pregnancy-related, regardless of whether "uterus" or "womb" is actually mentioned; 3) wrapping searches with quotation marks (what I do) on the website apparently has entirely different outcomes than what happens on any other search engine--removing them yielded 82 hits (from 4027) for "womb" and 287 (from 4213) for "uterus". This is more consistent with what I got with site: search, which was 101 "womb" vs 573 "uterus".

So I strongly disagree that "womb" is the more simple or familiar term for "uterus" for the majority of laypeople; half our population have or will/should have annual checkups on our cervix (which Shriver describes as the lower part of the uterus); 10% of us currently use an intrauterine device; and anecdotally, having observed dozens of strangers' pap smears, pregnancy checkups, and labors I've only used/heard "uterus" in conversations with patients. "Womb" just isn't popular as a term in the US except among the right-wing pro-life religious groups, which is part of why it has uncomfortable connotations for me and others. JoelleJay (talk) 22:33, 24 November 2022 (UTC)

". "Womb" just isn't popular as a term in the US except among the right-wing pro-life religious groups". Excellent point. Well, what with Christmas approaching and all, we all know that baby Jesus came out of the Virgin Mary's womb and not her uterus. Things that go on in wombs are God things and anyone that interferes with God will go straight to Hell. Sectionworker (talk) 23:04, 24 November 2022 (UTC)

I wish we had more participants in this than just a couple of people on opposite sides of the pond saying what is familiar to them. You could try a neutral post to WT:MED. I just tried searching bbc.co.uk and got 688 results for "uterus" and "4610" for "womb". JoelleJay, you can "strongly disagree" all you like, but that doesn't change the language people in the UK use. Wrt your views about right-wing pro-life religious groups, do you have a source for that, that the word has that association in the US. Maybe all you are seeing is that those groups use the word "womb" because they know it is an everyday word that is widely understood, and if you use the word "uterus" then you risk losing some listeners. It is likely such groups will talk about that a lot, and they've chosen that word for the same reasons we might.

If you want to talk about weird language in our lead sentence, how about "offspring". Nobody ever says that, surely, on either side of the Atlantic. I mean, that's language from the 1700's (Hark! The Herald Angels Sing). -- Colin°^Talk 10:48, 25 November 2022 (UTC)

For me there has been no better example of the diff in how words are used/seen on either side of the pond than what happened to our smartest, nicest, and most helpful editor, who would still call a spade a spade without any effort to sugar coat his language at all, Eric. I'd always thought that cunt is the most unacceptable swear word and the worst thing you could call someone. For example, in my immediate circle of friends we called Margaret Thatcher and Nancy Reagon cunts . Though we would never have used the word publicly. But when Eric called another editor a cunt the whole place just exploded. Eric said that in the UK it was just like calling someone a jerk, for example, and not seen as a terribly bad thing to say. What really made people mad was that he refused to back down and admit that American English was better than UK English...and that eventually got him kicked out of this place. Sectionworker (talk) 13:45, 25 November 2022 (UTC)

Em, Eric was just plain wrong about that. [14][15][16][17]. Calling someone that could be career ending. There are always people who grow up or work or study in an environment where swearing is everyday, and others who don't. I remember at school some kids who were unable to complete a sentence without "fuck" and "fuckin" appearing in it, and racist terms like "paki" were quite "normal". I guess if you remain in such an environment, you are unable see a problem.

But coming back to our womb/uterus topic, JoelleJay has a strong impression for them that this word is loaded with bias, and I'd be interested to know if that was a common feeling in the US, preferably with sources. It could be that they are just as incorrect about that as Eric was with his views on swear words. -- Colin°^Talk 14:07, 25 November 2022 (UTC)

He was not incorrect. I showed that the word cunt is loaded with bias depending on circumstances. Take this up on my talk page if you want to go on with it. Sectionworker (talk) 19:00, 25 November 2022 (UTC)

It's difficult to search for discussion on "womb" vs. "uterus" usage because most of the key words I would use just return lots of hits on "hysteria".

But I don't understand why you are focusing on my personal testimony as a woman in the US on what "womb" evokes to me as if that's the only evidence I've provided? I showed that "uterus" is heavily favored in a neutral sample of the sources we already use in the article, a large number of which are public-facing orgs. I don't see how we would "lose" readers by using a word every 8th grader should know and that half the population regularly encounters? I highly doubt "uterus" is unfamiliar to British readers, but regardless, most of our readership is not the UK. "Uterus" looks like it's the preferred term in Canada:

• Canada.ca: "womb", 123; "uterus", 2350
• pregnancyinfo.ca: "womb", 0; "uterus", 31
• NovaScotia.ca: "womb", 54; "uterus", 153
• Ontario.ca: "womb", 10; "uterus", 41
• Action Canada: "womb", 6; "uterus", 54

And in Australia:

• Health.gov.au: "womb", 81; "uterus", 966

And here are some other public-facing international pregnancy orgs:

• Mother to Baby: "womb", 17; "uterus", 145
• Preeclampsia Foundation: "womb", 10; "uterus", 90
• Childbirth Connection: "womb", 4; "uterus", 40
• ReproductiveFacts.org: "womb", 190; "uterus", 499

JoelleJay (talk) 18:42, 25 November 2022 (UTC)

I'm just interested about the bias, I'm not saying that is important. I'm curious to know if this is a general thing, where US readers seeing "womb" get anti-abortion-activist vibes. I'm not really persuaded by unsourced claims that our readers should understand certain words by 8th grade, and I don't think half the population encounters it any more than the other half encounter their prostates. If this was a UK encyclopaedia or the article was using British English, then womb would be the word to use in our lead.

If we have reached the point where it doesn't look like anyone else will turn up, then let's change it to uterus. But it needs to mention womb in parenthesis as I note above (many of the search results do that regardless of which word they pick). -- Colin°^Talk 12:05, 26 November 2022 (UTC)

I still have not decided it should be changed. I've learned a lot since I said that the correct medical term was uterus, so we must use that. Yes, NHI uses womb. This google question says this:

"What is the difference between uterus and womb? They are different names for the same thing. Americans use the word uterus, British use the word womb. Uterus sounds more like scientific terminology, womb is used more in spoken language" I would be satisfied to go either way. Sectionworker (talk) 16:26, 26 November 2022 (UTC)

I'm not advocating we use "womb" throughout in preference to "uterus". I do think "uterus" is the technical term any reader about "pregnancy" needs to learn and be comfortable using. I just think, from a UK perspective anyway, that "womb" would be the choice for the lead sentence and initial body text, as we are writing for a general audience. There is no sense that I can see where we would regard "womb" as being a childish or informal word, and we haven't got any sourced evidence to suggest our readers would find it politically loaded. -- Colin°^Talk 17:10, 26 November 2022 (UTC)

JoelleJay, I don't agree with your edit to put "uterus (womb)" in the lead sentence. I've mentioned this at least twice now and nobody had argued that a parenthetical explanation is a good idea for the lead sentence. MOS:LEADSENTENCE has advice. Think of it as a sentence you want Alexa to read out. -- Colin°^Talk 21:50, 26 November 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, I thought by If we have reached the point where it doesn't look like anyone else will turn up, then let's change it to uterus. But it needs to mention womb in parenthesis you were saying this was fine? And anyway we already have a parenthetical in the same lead sentence for "gestates" so I don't see that this is a new MOS issue? JoelleJay (talk) 18:00, 27 November 2022 (UTC)

I also agree that this article should use "uterus", following MOS:MED and strong-majority usage in reliable sources. I have no objection to "uterus (womb)" at first occurrence.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼   — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:51, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

SMcCandlish, can you point me to the bit in MOS:MED that says our body text word choice must follow the "usage in reliable sources". I thought you wrote Wikipedia:Specialized-style fallacy?

I earlier wrote that the parenthetical should not appear in the lead, and JoelleJay points out that we already have "develops (gestates)", which in fact is even worse. MOS:LEADSENTENCE warns us about clutter and to make the sentence easy to read. Neither parenthetical word is required in the lead if we use "develops" and "womb". We don't need to teach the reader about "gestates" in the lead, as nobody who ever got pregnant needed to know they were "gestating", nor has any doctor ever said to a patient "I'm afraid you are gestating offspring". Nor would we need "(womb)" in the lead sentence if we chose a word every single English-speaking reader already knows. But even if one is determined to use this technical language in the lead, we have the whole first paragraph to remind a reader that a uterus is a womb. The lead sentence needs to be readable. It currently isn't and is a bit of a joke with three redundant words, and one archaic one. -- Colin°^Talk 23:12, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

I didn't say to follow the usage in only specialized sources. News sources of all sorts use "uterus" regulary [18] so your implication that it is a word not generally understood by most English speakers is clearly false.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:53, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Newspapers are not reliable sources for biomedical information. I'd agree with you that newspapers can be an indication of what the general reader might understand, and so could be a guide to us for that. That is quite different from your argument about "reliable sources". Your search link is targeting US sites, so only really informs us about US English usage. And nowhere have I ever claimed that uterus is "a word not generally understood by most English speakers". Don't do that. Can I assume you are ignoring my MOS:MED question because there isn't any support in MOS:MED for "uterus" in the body text.

There is still the question of now two parenthetical word-alternatives in our lead sentence. I can't see how an experienced MOS debater would support that. It is terrible prose for a lead sentence. -- Colin°^Talk 10:16, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Speaking as a 70 year old American male, I want to endorse everything that JoelleJay has written about the connotations of "womb" in American English. I cannot hear that word without thinking of the Roman Catholic phrase "fruit of thy womb Jesus". In American English, all serious lay discussion uses the term "uterus", and "womb" is largely relegated to allegorical, poetic, religious and historic usages. Cullen328 (talk) 23:59, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

Yes, though the argument has been made that "womb" has a bit broader currency in British English. The evidence above shows this doesn't seem to be the case in Canadian, Australian, etc., usage, where "uterus" also dominates, so I suspect the claim about UK English is bogus. Nevertheless, I support mentioning "womb" once, just for clarity, on the off chance there really is anyone who knows the word "womb" but not the word "uterus".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:53, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Well, I just Googled "womb cancer" and found that phrase used by several well-known news outlets in the UK, although I have never heard that phrase in my life before now. So, I guess that our British friends are right about usage there. To state the obvious, the US+Canada+Australia+New Zealand equals about 400 million people, while the UK+Ireland equals about 75 million people. And English language sources in India seem to prefer "uterine cancer" as well. Cullen328 (talk) 02:17, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

When you write "I suspect the claim about UK English is bogus" you are not only calling me a liar, but are demonstrating you haven't read the presented facts. Please don't do that. To save you the effort of scrolling up, Here's the NHS on Womb Cancer. I get that some Americans have prejudices about the word "womb", and that there is ignorance about UK English usage, but rejoice you have learned something new, rather than wallow in ignorance. Cullen, we don't do this "UK is small so can be entirely ignored" thing on Wikipedia, otherwise the whole site would be written in US English. -- Colin°^Talk 10:25, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

For the lead, I think we can use "develop" and move "gestate (develop)" to wherever we next use "gestate". Do you think people in the UK would be so confused by "uterus" that the parenthetical womb overrides MOS? I agree that "offspring" is weird, especially as a singular noun; was there a discussion where this word was chosen and "fetus" and "embryo" were rejected? JoelleJay (talk) 03:07, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

I am happy with the way it now reads. I do not want to remove (gestates). It is somewhat difficult to understand how and why gestation is used for the date when the fetus is not actually that old, etc. Best to just leave it as the medical term along with uterus. Sectionworker (talk) 03:15, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

I don't think "develops (gestates)" in any way explains why gestational age is from the LMP. If gestation is equivalent to development, then that would suggest to the reader that gestational age is what we actually call Fertilization age. As far as I can see, the term "gestational age" is something invented for our human convenience, and for other animals we measure from fertilisation.

As has been mentioned before, the lead is overlong and I think spends too much time explaining terms. The difference and meaning of gestational vs fertilisation age is not IMO something that needs to be covered in the lead paragraph.

So I don't think "gestates" needs to be put in parenthesis in the lead sentence, and it isn't helping the reader understand the entirely arbitrary definition of gestational age, which is also something I don't think we need to mention so early on. -- Colin°^Talk 10:33, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

• Womb as the lead term (of course uterus should be in play too). I've got a couple reasons for this:

1) the Google Ngram says that "womb" is a more common term in this century. It's rather an odd Ngram and you could read it various ways but: modern book writers use "womb" more and trend lines are continuing in that direction.

2) OP lost me at "I've always had the impression that 'womb' was a rather dated, sexist term with religious/moral overtones". That's the genesis of this whole thread, and it's arrant nonsense, and I have a limited desire to drill down on conversations that begin like that. I didn't used to care, but I'm a Social Democrat and we are trying to hold the line here and everytime pwogressives pull this nonsense we lose a voter in the suburbs of Pittsburgh and Milwaukee and Detroit. And that matters right now. You people have no idea how annoying all this is to people who live outside South Manhattan (and equivalents) and didn't go to private college, as most of our sources do or did as well as our editors. Yeah I get we're supposed to stop caring about the human world when we open the edit tab, but I don't (which is why I also am a bug about BLP), and you can't make me. Herostratus (talk) 04:58, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Herostratus, I am a retired dirty and dusty construction worker with two serious scars on my fingers who grew up in Detroit and went to a Catholic college and I now live in a very red district in California. Nobody, male or female, that I have known for fifty plus years of adult conversation uses the term "womb" in serious lay medical conversations. "Uterus" is the term I hear universally and I have never lived in any part of Manhattan, south or north. Do your friends really discuss "womb cancer" or "womb fibroids" or "womb contractions"? Anti-elite posturing is not helpful. Cullen328 (talk) 07:24, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Yes, fair points to a degree. I've only got one notable hand scar, courtesy of a coil of sheet metal, so you win, but I'm talking here about the general thing. I think an anti-elite posture is helpful, I mean somebody has to do it, we are supposed to be NPOV, and after all (in my perceptions) there's a lot of "well we can't have material on this, because this is the sort of thing the maid is interested in, er, I mean, it's trivial" type thinking here. Because of course, after all the Wikipedia is a BoBo paradise. If you in particular are an exception, fine.

Re "Nobody... uses the term 'womb' in serious lay medical conversations", well, right. I'm not suggesting we say "womb cancer", just saying what I think the lead term should be generally. This isn't a medical encyclopedia. It's a general purpose encyclopedia for general readers. That is why we have articles such as... [shuffle shuffle]... Womb Realm and Womb envy and Commodification of the womb etc etc. Pregnancy is just a a huge thing in history and society and evolution and gender relations and personhood generally and... the whole human world, really. That is why the lake is named "Womb of the World" and not "Uterus of the World" and so on. Yes the purely biomedical process is the foundation of pregnancy and very important, but isn't the be-all and end-all.

OK, I grant "womb" vs "uterus" is not a huge deal and maybe I'm wrong, but I'm not in the best mood cos just got off a huge discussion here (above) about whether we should stop implying that pregnancy is somehow a woman thing, cos hey men can get pregnant too you know, and lets give the guys equal time including in the lede. It's a bourgeois prog sausage party here (present company excepted), and misguided "male allies" like OP do an awful lot of virtue signalling and mansplaining what's best for women here. I guess this proposal isn't near to that level, but for my part changing "womb" to "uterus" is a downgrade of the term to the level of spleen or liver or whatever, and its not necessarily friendly or inclusive to women, if that's the intent -- at least arguably, and I'm making the argument. Because after all that is why the thread was initiated.

It's not super duper important, so OK go with your sources. My Ngram tells me "womb" maybe, but there's a lot of other sources gi en here, and I'll leave that to the bigbrains I guess. Herostratus (talk) 22:56, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

.....what. JoelleJay (talk) 23:05, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Cullen, just to let you know you are not at all alone...I"m a retired woman and I never heard anyone say womb since we used to all say it when I was young and we said the prayer to the Blessed Virgin in which Jesus was a fruit of her womb. Also, someone mentioned that this is not a medical article and in one sense that is true, however as one of the writers of this and the childbirth and breastfeeding articles we are science based and insist on scientifically correct sources, thus uterus would be the word used throughout the article. Sectionworker (talk) 03:14, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

I may have said it shouldn't be such a medical article as it is, since this is a matter of healthy normal life, and should have more content about social issues. It is still mostly biomedical information. But all that is separate from what words we pick to explain things to the general reader in terms they'll understand. I'm certainly not arguing the whole article or lead should be so dumbed down that we avoid science language. We've got to say "uterus" and get the reader familiar with that word.

I've just had a browse on Amazon for UK pregnancy books. Amazon now thinks I'm expecting a baby, so that's screwed up my recommendation lists for a month or so. I "looked inside" books by midwives and by big publishers and the everyday word the midwife uses to explain things to an expectant mum is "womb". It is even used for technical things like fundal height or embryo implantation. The word "uterus" is used too. I get a sense if you want to describe where the baby is (in the mother's womb, or after birth, outside of the womb) then that's the word we'd use in the UK. Which is also exactly what we are doing in the lead sentence. I think frankly, if someone in the UK described their baby as growing in their "uterus", you'd think they were very odd indeed.

I also discovered that your Roe v. Wade ruling here uses the words "at which the fetus becomes "viable," that is, potentially able to live outside the mother's womb". Granted that's language from 1974.

I just searched CDC for "womb" and there are plenty results. Which does confirm the word is used in the US by healthcare people. And notably whenever it uses the word "womb" it doesn't need to explain to anyone what that is, whereas when it uses the word "uterus", then quite often it has to explain that is the "womb". So, even in the US, top tier public facing healthcare websites acknowledge that "uterus" is not going to be as fully understood as "womb" and needs some help. -- Colin°^Talk 10:33, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Well, the CDC even! I would have bet my bottom dollar that you wouldn't find it there. Colin, as always you make a very well thought out and well presented case. Sectionworker (talk) 12:48, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Did no one look at the statistics I reported on "womb" vs "uterus" usage? The CDC uses "uterus" over three times as often as "womb"; my most recent search actually puts it at 4,550 to 990. So I don't see why this article should reflect the UK preference when the majority of readers are not from the UK; the majority of sources, including public-facing orgs, used in the article vastly favor "uterus"; and the rest of the article uses "uterus" exclusively. And it's not like the CDC clarifies that the uterus is the womb for every topic where "uterus" appears, nor does it never clarify that the womb is the uterus. This also isn't Simple Wikipedia, so even if "womb" was the "more colloquial" term in the US, that isn't a sufficient reason to use it in the lead of a biomedical article that already assumes basic linguistic proficiency. If people are somehow confused by "uterus" they can click the blue link. JoelleJay (talk) 01:47, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

The only time you found "womb (uterus)" was after they had used "uterus" three times wrt menstrual bleeding, and chose to use "womb" to describe where a baby might normally grow (which is my point above and most interesting wrt pregnancy article) and then felt they need to clarify that it is the same thing as the uterus they had already mentioned. Which further demonstrates that not everyone knows fully what a uterus is (whereas they know fine what a womb is, it is where a baby grows). Wrt stats, the tenth result in your "uterus" search is a path slide. The eleventh is some kind of database page, I don't know. The twelfth gives me a page not found. Thirteenth is another database page. And the fourtneeth is another one. I'm not sure what we learn about word usage from that other than that Google is deeply indexing path slides and other minor pages in the CDC data-driven website. So if they dump 10,000 more uterine path slides into the database, your numbers would be 14,550. You are counting slides and lab database records.

My point isn't to say which word they favour. Several US people have said they only expect that word to be used by religious political campaigners, or when singing carols. Well, it turns out, that's not the case, even in the US. And several people suggested that US readers would have absolutely no problem with the word "uterus" so we can freely use it in our lead sentence. And the CDC public-facing pages demonstrate that they don't agree with that. It is a word that even in the US, often needs explaining. This should guide us towards using "womb" in the lead sentence, as the place where a baby grows, because all our MOS guidance steers us towards being as assessible as possible. I'm the first person to complain about editors going too far and inventing baby-language or naive attempts at being Simple English Wiki. JoelleJay, I firmly disagree with you that pregnancy, a fundamental human state that all of us owe our lives to, that is understood by humans before we even invented writing or speech, needs use a technical word in the lead sentence rather than the everyday one that we know everyone will understand, just because it gives a few editors some religious-right heebie-jeebies -- Colin°^Talk 08:59, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

If I haven't mentioned this already, my daughter stopped by the other day and I told her about this discussion fully thinking that she would agree with me about never hearing womb used in our circle of people (well educated, etc.) and she said oh no she would feel perfectly comfortable with hearing or using the term. She did say that she thought that in conversation womb would not be at all uncommon but uterus would be used in a science discussion. Sectionworker (talk) 16:34, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

I asked my family what you would call the place where a baby develops when you are pregnant. The teenager said "uterus" and thought "womb" was "old fashioned". My wife initially said "tummy" but laughed about that. I said, "if you were explaining pregnancy to a normal person". Then they said "womb". I asked about "uterus". They thought certainly not as it was "technical" and more suitable for a medical text. I don't know if reflects an age thing or the influence of American culture on UK teenagers. Or the fact that one had only read about it in biology textbooks and might never have said either word out aloud, whereas the other one has been there done that.

While I do care our lead sentence is accessible, I'm more concerned than that we use the correct means to determine what word Wikipedia should use, than which word wins. Our word choice can become more technical as you go from lead sentence to lead section to body text. And the word choice should be mostly influenced by publications with a similar audience to us with a similar educational role as us. And we need to consider global variation and perhaps age. Looking at medical publications aimed at professionals is I think a terrible way to work out which word is understandable to the general reader. Especially if you are actually just counting the number of uterine pathology slides in the CDC database. -- Colin°^Talk 17:37, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

counting the number of uterine pathology slides in the CDC database Oh come on, you're using the fact that the CDC uses "womb" at all as if my whole argument rests on the claim that "womb" is never used in America, while apparently ignoring that at least 3:1 usage preference by the many, many purely public-facing orgs I linked that also overwhelmingly use "uterus" over "womb". "Uterus" is no more technical a word than any other organ; just because it also happens to have a literary/religious/colloquial synonym (that, at least in the US, has rather negative or at least non-professional connotations) doesn't mean it's "too advanced" a term for the average English-speaking reader, or that "womb" is necessarily more accessible. And have you considered that even if "womb" was the more popular term overall, this would surely be due to its use in religious contexts or as a metaphor for warm, nurturing environments or, indeed, as synonymous with "the place where the baby grows"? Because you're right, "womb" does evoke imagery of a cozy full-term fetus much more than "uterus" does. But maybe those semantic associations with the word are actively distressing to the millions of women suffering with unwanted pregnancies; and maybe someone who is considering an abortion, or who has had miscarriages, would feel alienated or patronized or worse by the implication that pregnancy has a single expected and desired outcome and that their uterus is "supposed to be" nurturing a baby. This page should not start out with what to many Americans/Canadians is a value judgment on the proper course of pregnancy when a perfectly valid, more common, and neutral alternative could be used. JoelleJay (talk) 22:45, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

I'm getting the the impression here that some editors think there's something wrong with religion, or something? If so, isn't that best kept to oneself, I mean here? Anyway, not to be "that guy", but if we're going to start worry about being actively distressing to readers, there's hella more important places to start (with hardcore porn for instance). We make lots of people unhappy here, oh well.

People who are that sensitive about pregnancy might want to consider not reading about it at all, here or anywhere. As I've said, this male-ally stuff is annoying to a lot of people. It's not like pregnancy doesn't have far-reaching literary and cultural associations. It's not like we want to be saying "All that nurturing and creative cultural stuff that's in many sources? Screw that, it's medical condition, period." Pregnancy is not a disease. It's not a medical disorder. There's no need for this article to be excessively medical, in fact it's sort of sketchy to do that, and not necessarily as woke as y'all might think. Herostratus (talk) 04:42, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

Joelle, there isn't a 3:1 ratio if you are just counting path slides at phinvads.cdc.gov. Even if you restrict it to www.cdc.gov, many of the results are nothing to do with pregnancy, but are listing and using that word in a list of organs that can get cancer or keywords or whatever. Search results like these don't tell me which word is more understandable to the general reader.

I clicked on CDC articles that the "uterus" search found, and nearly all of them had to explain this was a womb. I don't really think one needs to say more than that. It tells me that if I use "womb" in the lead sentence, as the place where a baby grows, absolutely everyone will understand it. Whereas if I use "uterus" in the lead, there are a significant number of readers who don't. And I have the CDC's actual public-facing health information pages to back me up on that, not some personal feelings or political advocacy ranting, which is what this seems to be turning into. -- Colin°^Talk 13:57, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

It is 3:1 (at least) if you look at all the public-facing pregnancy-related orgs I linked before. And given this, clearly "womb" isn't needed as clarification in the majority of cases where "uterus" is used. For example, the Mayo Clinic has 1,490 results for "uterus" "pregnancy*" -womb and only 178 for "uterus" "pregnancy*" "womb". For "uterus" -womb or "uterus" "pregnancy*" -womb, American Pregnancy Association has 1,340 results, Eunice Kennedy Shriver/NIH (NICHD) has 689, and Planned Parenthood has 580; while for "uterus" "womb", APA has 53, NICHD has 78, and Planned Parenthood has 40; and for "womb" "pregnancy" -uterus, Mayo Clinic has 80, APA has 59, NICHD has 282 and Planned Parenthood has 21 hits. The fact is that "womb" is not necessary for people to understand we are talking about "where the baby grows", especially since we are literally saying that in the lead. If anyone was unfamiliar with "uterus" but knew what a "womb" was, surely the context of the lead sentence would introduce them to "uterus" without any confusion. And all of that stands alone independent of the arguments I and @Cullen328 and others have made about what the word "womb" evokes to us and how often we encounter it. JoelleJay (talk) 21:15, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

Nurse-family Partner addition was removed

I am working on two articles that will re improved with information on teaching young vulnerable girls and women how to improve their chances of having a better and more healthful experience during their pregnancy and in the first months of their infant's life. That the short summary with a link to the main article will be pretty much similar does not mean that I am copy/pasting them or making a copy vio.

This is the same information that the article is already full of, a good diet, exercise, sexual information, etc. When it comes to our special needs girls and women, giving birth to babies before they are old enough to no longer need mothering themselves, should they not get even a mention of an agency that is set up to teach them and be available for answering their questions? It was suggested that the addition was SPAM. It is both government and privately funded. Feedback please. Sectionworker (talk) 20:23, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Two refs: [19][20] Sectionworker (talk) 20:28, 6 December 2022 (UTC) I am having computer problems. At first this did not show up and now it has but it still needed a copy edit... Sectionworker (talk) 16:06, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

You weren't having computer problems, you just originally included the ref links inside of ref templates, which don't work when there isn't a reflist and for some reason that caused most of the talk page not to render. When I fixed the refs I just kept the text you had last submitted (which was still present in the wiki code). JoelleJay (talk) 21:31, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing it. However, I am also having problems with my service and have lost stuff without warning...hard to explain...but will soon be fixed, hopefully. Since the editor that removed my edits has not bothered to comment at this or the other talk page I will soon be adding the information on help for vulnerable young women back. Sectionworker (talk) 22:59, 10 December 2022 (UTC)