A few changes to some words in a proposed budget bill in Wisconsin have led to Republican outrage, and the state’s Democratic governor is lashing out at Republicans for “lying” about his proposed changes.

Gov. Tony Evers (D) proposed a budget bill for the 2025 to 2027 fiscal period, and his 1917-page bill included some changes to language to make it more inclusive. Among the changes was one to change the word “mother” to “inseminated person” in sections about IVF, recognizing that two women who have a child together with the help of reproductive technology are both mothers, but only one of them is the inseminated person.

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“What we want is legal certainty that moms will be able to get the care they need,” Evers said, explaining the change, which only applies to IVF procedures performed in the state. “That’s it, end of story.”

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Republicans, though, said that there is something more insidious behind the language change: an attempt to “erase parents from state statute.”

“If you believed moms are moms, and dads are dads, then there would be no need for this change,” state Rep. Amanda Nedweski (R) said. “Apparently, Evers believes dads can be moms too.”

It’s not clear how she made the logical leap from the language change to “dads can be moms too.” If anything, Evers’ proposed change reduces the number of times “mothers” is used in the law.

“If I called my mother an inseminated person, she’d probably slap me for good reason,” state Sen. Andre Jacque (R) said, even though he was not conceived through IVF and does not have two mothers (the situation where the legal language distinguishing between the two is necessary). He then called the language changes “woke virtue signalling.”

Last year, Jacque and his campaign refused to tell journalists whether he supports IVF or not.

Evers responded that he was annoyed that Republicans are focusing on this at all.

“What the Republicans say is a lie, so of course I’m pretty pissed off about that,” he said. “It gives people using IVF legal certainty. That’s it… Moms are moms. Dads are dads. What we want is legal certainty.”

Republicans have a long history of taking inclusive language out of its original context, accusing Democrats of trying to impose the changes on everyone, and then staying angry at it for years.

For example, a Democrat used the term “birthing people” at a hearing in 2021 to be inclusive of people who give birth who don’t identify as mothers and to make it clear that there are mothers who don’t give birth. This led to right-wing outrage. Three years later, Republicans were still mad about it even though the term “mother” remained by far the most common way to refer to a woman who is a parent, with the Republican National Committee issuing a statement denouncing “birthing people” on Mother’s Day in 2024.

Another term that Republicans have directed anger toward is “chestfeeding,” which some nonbinary and transmasculine people use to describe feeding their children. The term, without the word “breast,” can be empowering for some people who don’t want to refer to their chests with that term.

Not understanding that it is a term for people assigned female at birth, conservatives spent years accusing Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg of “chestfeeding” because he’s gay. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) even issued an executive order banning the term, even though it’s only used in LGBTQ+ contexts, saying that it “erase[s] women and girls.”

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