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Are women now being erased from childbirth?

They are a secretive bunch of women who jokingly call themselves The Witches – a group of midwives and birthing professionals holding an increasingly controversial view. It’s one the majority doesn’t dare air in public for fear of losing their job and reputation, or becoming the victim of a social media pile-on. 

They believe that only women – that is, adult females – can give birth to babies. And, no, that isn’t a joke. The bitter debate about transgender rights that has raged across Britain’s university campuses has made its way onto the maternity ward.

Milli Hill, best-selling author of The Positive Birth Book and one of the Witches in question, revealed last week that she has been set upon and “cancelled” by an online mob. She was “bullied and silenced”, she says, after an online exchange with a stranger last November over whether unwanted obstetric interventions by doctors was violence against women. Hill, founder of the Positive Birth Movement, a free support service for pregnant women, questioned the use of the term “birthing person” in that context, prompting an online furore in which she was accused of being “vile”, “deliberately hateful” and transphobic. There was a call for her books to be boycotted, and she was dropped by the charity Birthrights, which she has worked with for some years.

“It was really horrible. I was extremely hurt and upset,” she says. “If anyone tried to defend me, they too were bullied and intimidated. The birth world is small, and I have been made an example of – a lesson to others. I don’t know where this witch hunt mentality comes from, but we are in trouble if we cannot have an honest debate.”

Back in February, Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals issued guidelines on “gender-inclusive language”, advising midwives and other professionals to talk of “chestfeeding” rather than breastfeeding, and the “birthing parent” rather than mother, when dealing with trans and non-binary parents.

'I don’t know where this witch hunt mentality comes from, but we are in trouble if we cannot have an honest debate'

“We are forbidden from mentioning the words ‘she’, ‘her’, ‘female’ and ‘woman/women/girl’ in our NHS Trust’s pregnancy testing policy. It has been erased that only the female sex is capable of pregnancy. Madness,” one professional posted last week.

“It was really horrible. I was extremely hurt and upset,” she says. “If anyone tried to defend me, they too were bullied and intimidated. The birth world is small, and I have been made an example of – a lesson to others. I don’t know where this witch hunt mentality comes from, but we are in trouble if we cannot have an honest debate.”

Back in February, Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals issued guidelines on “gender-inclusive language”, advising midwives and other professionals to talk of “chestfeeding” rather than breastfeeding, and the “birthing parent” rather than mother, when dealing with trans and non-binary parents.

“We are forbidden from mentioning the words ‘she’, ‘her’, ‘female’ and ‘woman/women/girl’ in our NHS Trust’s pregnancy testing policy. It has been erased that only the female sex is capable of pregnancy. Madness,” one professional posted last week.

A midwife working in a rural area of north England says the “inclusive” trans and non-binary ideology has “exploded”, particularly among young midwives. “We are going backwards in terms of recognising women’s needs and women’s space,” she says. “Some of my colleagues seem to be have been brainwashed, and now we are all forced to go along with this polite fiction. Last week, I got an invitation to a smear test that described me as a ‘person with a cervix’.”

Earlier this year, the High Court upheld a ruling that Freddy McConnell, a trans man who has given birth to a baby boy, could not be described on the birth certificate as his son’s father or parent, as English common law required him to be described as the child’s mother.

Milli Hill posing in a park: Milli Hill: ‘When I wrote on my blog that sex is binary, I was told I should respect other people’s beliefs’ - Jay Williams for The Telegraph

Despite that, for the midwives and doulas who support pregnant women, simply saying out loud that it is women and mothers who give birth is now tantamount to lighting a blue touch paper – and watching your career go up in smoke.

“A couple of years ago, I started to notice other writers adding disclaimers to their books, saying ‘I acknowledge not everyone who gives birth is a woman’, and at conferences, speakers talking about ‘women and birthing people’. Since then, it’s definitely gathered momentum,” says Hill.

“When I wrote on my blog that sex is binary, I was told I should respect other people’s beliefs. Well, this is not religion. It’s not about beliefs, especially if you are a midwife.”

Last week, when Hill, a mother-of-three, revealed that she had been dropped by Birthrights (in an email from its chief executive, saying the charity “isn’t able to work with people who don’t share our inclusive values”), her inbox began to overflow with messages of support. Birthrights, by contrast, shut down its social media as it was inundated with complaints.

JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter novels who was attacked by trans activists last year after she took issue with women being referred to as “people who menstruate” (“I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpud? Woomud?”) she tweeted: “Solidarity to the brave and fabulous @millihill.”

“People from all over the world are saying ‘Thank you, thank you’ – people who feel they can’t talk about this,” says Hill. 

Lynsey McCarthy-Calvert watched the Hill drama unfold with a weary sense of déjà-vu. She was forced to stand down as a spokesperson for Doula UK three years ago, after transgender activists complained about a Facebook post in which she said only women can have babies.

A general view of Hillingdon hospital in west London on July 8, 2020. - The hospital in British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's west London constituency said on July 8 it had closed to emergency patients after an outbreak of coronavirus. (Photo by ISABEL INFANTES / AFP) (Photo by ISABEL INFANTES/AFP via Getty Images)

McCarthy-Calvert, a mother-of-four from Benfleet, Essex, says she believed the point of being a doula was to be an advocate for women: “The irony is that most of us are Left-leaning, sympathetic, inclusive women who have spent a lifetime speaking up for the underdog. To cast us as hate figures is bizarre.”

When her story became public, she had to sign a document saying she understood her views were not compatible with NHS values and would not air them in public in order to continue working for the East of England NHS Trust, where she serves as a non-executive member of the maternity board. That work means a lot to her, so she agreed. “I’m still feeling rather stifled by it all,” she says drily.

Why all this matters, over and above the academic and philosophic arguments about what is to be a woman or a man, is that sex difference is key to formulating health and social policy. A nursing and midwifery professor (who asked to remain anonymous) said: “Look at the hospital policies around Covid. If a baby needs care, some hospitals are only allowing one parent to visit each day. An infant needs contact with its mother and we should say explicitly which parent we mean.

“When it comes to breastfeeding, you don’t need parental leave protections; you need maternity leave protections. The bond between mother and infant is crucial. You can’t protect it if you can’t name it.”  

McCarthy-Calvert adds that there is also an issue of safety: “The atmosphere is so toxic and divisive it’s got to the point where we can’t state a simple fact – for example, in talking to parents about how to safely share a sleep surface with a baby in case you fall asleep when you are feeding. We should use plain language that says it’s the breastfeeding mother that’s safe [in that situation], not any other parent. Once you obfuscate the language, the meaning isn’t clear. People just don’t understand what you mean when you are talking about the chest-feeding parent.”

None of this means that trans or non-binary people need to declare themselves as women if they don’t want to, they all insist: simply that those people should get tailored care, without sidelining women (organisations tend to say inclusive language is an addition to the norm and that staff should talk about “women and birthing people” – the reality, especially online, where word count matters, is that this gets reduced to “birthing people”).

“That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be talking about it or training around it or learning what people who are trans or non-binary need in their maternity care. I think that would be great,” says Hill. “It’s important to understand the needs of anyone who needs personalised, individualised care, be someone with English as a second language or a disability or whatever. I’m not trying to erase anyone.

“The problem comes when you get this shift of birthing language – you are saying not all people who give birth are women and are therefore you are demoting women from a sex to an identity.”  

Irene Garzon, a midwife who worked at London’s Hillingdon Hospital and taught midwifery at the University of Birmingham, puts it more simply: “If you have ovaries and a uterus and you are pregnant, you are a woman,” she says.

That would have once been a statement of the obvious – but not any more. 

Reference:The Telegraph:  Margarette Driscol

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