Is “Women and Children first” in a rescue situation discrimination?
Firstly, “discrimination” has a negative connotation. In rescue situations though, people are prioritized not only the two categories of their health and accessibility, but also how quickly they can be helped and how quickly they will get worse. This is especially true in mass casualty incidents (MCIs) where there are multiple patients who are all in various states of health. The “woman and children first” rule, in my opinion, is a bad one. For instance, if you have perfectly fine women and children and a man with arterial bleeding that are all equally accessible, you are usually going to treat the man first. However, there is some trueness to the so-called “rule”. Women aren’t built as strongly as men (fact), which leads to a slightly higher risk of injury. The children first can be true because children, especially young ones, definitely tend to be more at risk than adults due to their mental ability and their bodies. While the “woman and children first” shouldn’t be a rule, it does
