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Comment by MrOwnPut | Hacker News Reader

Biological parents already described that.

“birth parents” and “biological parents” are synonyms, and have been as long as I’ve been alive (well, at least using language.) This is not some novel usage.

Adopted, so kind of forced to be aware of things like that.

Interesting. From your perspective, what's the % of how often you have heard "biological" vs "birth" parents and has the rate changed any?

I'm curious as to why the change of what I've heard (biological parents) and in the recent year (birth parents).

> what’s the % of how often you have heard “biological” vs “birth” parents and has the rate changed any?

Biological has always had a notable edge, but it seems subjectively to have eroded slowly over time over the last 40+ years that I’ve been exposed to it (thinking mostly of print, its been near parity in what I’ve heard, but “birth” is what I favor and what my [adoptive] parents favored so…)

Thinking about it more wouldn't biological more relate to those who are linked biologically (the egg & sperm).

The birth parents would be the mother who actually gave birth (and if existing, the spouse who is in the relationship with the birth mother).

This is would be much more prevalent of a distinction due to surrogacy.

I mean, the whole process of carrying a child is biological, so, I probably wouldn’t distinguish them that way. The general case in surrogacy (and exceptions to this usually involve someone who is identified as a “donor” of some material, rather than a parent) involve the suppliers of genetic material being the caretaking parties after birth, so typically the terms “parents” and “surrogate” suffice.

So if a family provided eggs & sperm and had a surrogate to give birth on their behalf, then later gave the child up for adoption, how would you identify everyone?

Also, I'd assume the child would later look for those people with their genetic material, their biological parents, those who provided the sperm & eggs. Not the birth parent, who birthed them. There's much less of a connection there as it's the person who simply carried them for a money transaction and is not part of the child genetically.

Most likely there has been no such change. You've just started paying attention to it for some reason. Looking at a couple of data sources for popularity of terms over time, "birth parent" has been consistently more used:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Biological+par...

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Biologic...

So if a family provided eggs & sperm and had a surrogate to give birth on their behalf, then later gave the child up for adoption, how would you identify everyone?

Why are you asking me? I don't give a crap about that.

You made a statement on this being a new term, I gave references showing it was factually incorrect. The proper response is "thank you, I was wrong", not whatever this thing you responded with is.

Yes, they are generally synonyms. It’s not a new term.

As another user pointed out, why does the definition you posted qualify it with:

"who has been adopted"

> It's not a new term

I see, it's somewhat new to me, when did the term come to popular usage? When was it "invented"?

> when did the term come to popular usage? When was it “invented”?

Its always been somewhat less popular than “biological parents”, but its been in wide use since somewhere about the late 1970s, and it (or at least, the narrower form “birth mother”) was in use by the early 1950s at the latest.

The reason why it’s qualified by people who are adopted is because people who aren’t would just refer to them as “parents” not “birth parents” since there is no need to make a distinction.

People who are adopted have two sets of parents so it’s used to distinguish who they are referring to.

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