It has been recently reported that the Wisconsin bill WI AB50 filed on 18 February 2025 is doing the usual “gender-neutral/inclusive language” thing. The bill is one of those 1,900-page documents on state finances and appropriations.
Neither the length nor the gender-neutral language is, of course, anything new. But the thing that has caught attention is the use of “inseminated person” in place of “mother”.
This is in the context of the child’s status in which said child’s conception involved artificial insemination.
Setting aside the moral arguments for and against such procedures and even setting aside the humanist inclusive language, the whole thing is still rather silly.
According to most dictionaries, to inseminate means something like “to introduce semen into the female’s genital tract”. It just means that someone has somehow shot a load without implying whether conception takes place afterwards. In other words, an “inseminated person” need not be a mother, just a woman who has taken a load.
More generally and more importantly, this is another typical example of reductionism. By trying—and in this case, failing—to be more precise in a narrower sense, it has thrown away precision in a broader sense.
The word “mother” may come across as vague but, perhaps paradoxically, it encompasses much more than the insemination process; motherhood, the “essence” and all the “qualities” of being a mother, the morning sickness and sitting on an icepack during the trip home from the hospital after giving birth are included.
Such a modern mindset applies to just about everything else: a car is just a metal box with four wheels; thought is merely a biochemical process in the brain; morality is just your opinion…
The (nearly) meaningless combination of words is on the surface, the danger is the actual reduction of meaning.
To use another example: calling someone a “cognitively malfunctioning feminine hygiene product” just doesn’t have the same ring as using “stupid douche”.
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