Men with cancer and those having MRI scans and x-rays are being asked if they are pregnant beforehand. The UK Government removed the word “female” from the law governing the medical procedures and replaced it with “individuals.”
According to The Telegraph:
The Walton Centre NHS Foundation Trust, in Liverpool, now asks “ALL patients under the age of 60, regardless of how you may identify your gender”.
The Telegraph understands that it is among a handful of trusts to have implemented the policy for men and women undergoing procedures that involve radiotherapy and could harm an unborn baby.
It comes amid anger at the NHS for prioritising gender over sex in order to be inclusive of trans people, including on single-sex wards.
One woman whose husband has cancer says that the question before a scan had caused “unnecessary confusion and agitation” and was “unfair” as a combination of steroids and brain surgery had made him emotional.
She added: “This was very confusing for him in his post-surgical daze, his vulnerability and needs completely ignored.”
Medics are required to find out if a patient could be pregnant before carrying out procedures involving radiotherapy, diagnostic imaging and nuclear medicine because of the risk it poses to any unborn child.
The Department of Health updated the regulations regarding the procedures in 2017 and changed the wording surrounding those who should be questioned from “females of childbearing age” to “individuals of childbearing potential”.
Campaigners warned on Monday that the policy was part of a “clinically dangerous” practice to record gender and not sex on medical records. They pointed out that those born male cannot get pregnant.
File this one under you just couldn’t make it up.
If you’d told me when I started in radio, that one day in the future I’d be reporting on such lunacy as men being asked if they are pregnant before being x-rayed, I’d have told you to feck off.
It’s surreal to read a newspaper article in which a nurse is quoted as saying:
“We do not need to ask all patients if they are pregnant. We need to ask females.”
So said Kat Barber, of the campaign group Sex Not Gender Nurses and Midwives.
Kat better watch herself. In some schools, that could be construed as hate speech.
