The ABM and Me.

Mixing causes distracts from serving women.

Just over a year ago Milli Hill withdrew from participating in birth and breastfeeding communities in the UK and she has described elsewhere what drove her to that decision. Six months ago she came back, with her new book, her blog and renewed vigour in feminist circles, recently at Filia and today at the Oxford Feminist Union. She has made such an impact, Twitter decided to blue tick her.

I cannot imagine the trepidation she felt when she decided to reclaim her space in feminist circles but that she had to do as a writer, an activist, a working mother, and a feminist. But she’s done reclaimed her space. Women won’t wheesht.

Just over a year ago I made an official complaint to the Association of Breastfeeding Mothers (ABM). I have been a Mother Supporter (MS) since 2007 fitting it around my full time work as a teacher and the caring duties for two children. I am also an immigrant from the Caribbean and I had no family to share caring duties in my children’s critical early years, a time when my husband worked away during the week. Still, my passion for breastfeeding led me to an organisation whose training structure fit around my work commitments and my caring role. I have attended ABM conferences, and continually updated my knowledge. I have supported both mothers and colleagues over the years. I’ve written articles for the magazine and in 2017 I served as the unpaid photographer at the annual conference. I considered it my duty of care as a professional teacher, and as a Mother Supporter to make an official complaint as three of the main aggressors were also Mother Supporters and trainee breastfeeding counsellors at the time of the incident.

In November 2020, I spotted the meme below which seemed to be about apartheid or racial segregation. Puzzled, I scanned the text below and my heart sank. It was the racist/transphobic tropes once more.

The meme is a racist trope as it uses an assertion that someone is an exclusionary and white to slur her reputation. Racist discourse is not a tool to be used by anyone, regardless of skin colour or heritage, to advance scurrilous charges to further any agenda. As it turns out, all three trainee counsellors and the moderator who participated in the thread that ran to 104 comments appear to be ethnic white British. White British women used the oppression of ethnic minorities to attack the personal and professional standing of another white British woman. This is a new way to ‘play the race card.’ In doing so, they brought themselves and the organisations with which they serve into disrepute.

The use of ‘white’ contributes substantially to the meaning the writer and sharer intended to convey. Had the writer said: Give birth like an exclusionary feminist, there is a question of who is being excluded, but the addition of ‘white’ raises the race spectre. In the minds of women reading the page ‘exclusionary’ activates ‘inclusion’ as white activates ‘black’ in their minds. They are therefore being led to believe that this is about excluding black people from birth. The use of ‘minority groups’ in this context also implies that the post is about ethnic rather than sexual orientation or disability minority groups. So without saying “Milli Hill is a racist', the readers can draw the implication for themselves that she is racist.

Across social media platforms and blog posts, no one seems to have been able to reference how and when Milli Hill has been racist or that she has ‘dangerous opinions, beliefs, and views.’ This looks like a case of the disappearing evidence.

The birth and breastfeeding collective waiting for the evidence that Milli Hill has ‘dangerous opinions, beliefs, and views’.

The quote by “Birth and Conquer” begins, “Let’s just air it. Milli Hill.” The full stops creates a pompous air of authority and the reader knows exactly who this is about. The faceless authoritarian continues with what “we shouldn’t” do, three times to make us good women grasp the gravity of the occasion. We are told to ostracise her. And there are penalties to pay in the birth world for those who do not obey. Either be quiet and comply to the edicts or deal with the consequences of holding an independent opinion. Those women who have been bullied into a medicalised pregnancy and birth care may be able to draw parallels with the behaviour of those staff who berated them in hospital for not being ‘good’, ie obedient, birthing women.

Shared and supported in a home birth group which gives otherwise reliable information by many trusted posters who are doulas, breastfeeding counsellors, and a page administrator who chairs an NHS Trust’s Maternity Partnership Voices and who are actively providing information to pregnant women and new mothers in their communities and online, many women will be torn between trusting their independent knowledge of Ms Hill and believing these assertions, previously unbelievable, from these otherwise trusted sources they have relied upon for weeks, months and possibly years.

The accusation continues that ‘ She has centred herself’ with ‘she’ being used to distance Ms Hill from the ‘we’ in the previous paragraph an ‘centred herself’ is just what women aren’t supposed to do… make themselves the focus. But also, a frequent allegation used to diminish anyone, especially women, and which has evolved out of one of the principles of critical race theory. Women are supposed to be accommodating of others and acquiescent to authority. But Ms Hill has transgressed and was being stubborn about it - this is the ‘centred herself’ accusation - and she needed to be whipped back into line by using a charge of self-centredness to shame her into behaving.

Birth and Conquer continues, “No one I know gives birth like an exclusionary, white feminist. And no one you know should either.”

She gives herself the moral high ground with ‘No one I know’ and tells ‘you’ to join her there with ‘no one you know should’ .

“No one I know gives birth like Milli Hill” is the implication of that sentence. And no one you know should [be on Milli’s side] either. The ostracising is complete. And those who didn’t agree, were bullied into silence with threats and insults under the opening post as it evolved over the few hours that the thread was active.

Some responses to the replies focused on racism so the ABM trainee counsellor decided to ‘add some background’. It became explicit with the edit that the post wasn’t about racism but about gender ideology and transactivism when she states, “Yes, basically the post is discussing obstetric violence - and uses the term ‘birthing people’.

Neither was the thread about obstetric violence as she continued:

“Milli decided to … criticise the use of the term ‘birthing people’ and be completely patronising and exclusionary towards trans and non binary people.”

Though in the mindset of transactivists, failing to use the term ‘birthing people’ may be construed as obstetric violence.

If it wasn’t yet clear what the intended message was, for good measure she added: “[Milli] has shared these harmful opinions. It’s a deliberate act and is really troubling.”

Harmful, deliberate, and troubling are useful words when presenting unknown and as yet unformed hazards. They are words the headteachers tell naughty students who won’t listen. And you better know your place and behave.

In the interest of transparency, here is the offending post by Milli Hill, and her own words about this experience is published on her website.

Racism has been activated in the reader’s minds in order to attach the niche gender ideology and transactivism to a far more well-known framework. This tactic is used because everyone knows racists are downright horrible people with no redeeming features, ever, right? A transphobe, therefore, must be equally vile is the follow-on deduction. This is ‘forced teaming’, closely associating two disparate ideas to create the illusion that they are similar somehow. The tactic is useful since in helps the audience to draw the favoured conclusions about an unfamiliar topic without revealing details about it. Everyone knows what racism is, and no one wants to be a labelled a racist. Ergo no one wants to be labelled a transphobe. This tactic misleads women - the page admins and the trainee counsellors have had training in providing evidence based and unbiased information and how to gain consent. Lessons that they deliberately ignored in their attack on Ms Hill.

I’d previously seen accusations of racism without substantive evidence paired with transphobia as a pre-text to attack other women in the birth world. Force teaming racism with transphobia is a frequent tactic to isolate the victim and make it easier for others to join in vilifying the target. It has been used against Ina May Gaskin previously. Indeed this was what was unfolding once more with Milli, which puts her in good company.

The venality exhibited in this attack is not only confined to social media platforms but there are parallel attacks elsewhere as many academic women such as Jo Phoenix, Kathleen Stock, and Raquel Rosario Sanchez can attest. It seems that there is an academic genre being built around force teaming racism with transphobia as is happening here in this very woque blog by an academic at the LSE where she states:

“I explore the function of so-called ‘gender critical’ feminism as a reactionary response to anti-racist and decolonial campaigns which aims to both reclaim the centrality of white women as the ultimate victim in public debates, and to divert attention from calls to recognise and address the role of feminist movements in upholding systems of white supremacy and imperialism worldwide.”

She continues:

“In July 2020, JK Rowling infamously decided to take a very public stance on the issue of trans rights and women’s safety through a series of tweets and an essay. As Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests spread around the world in response to George Floyd’s murder, and as Edward Colston’s statue was toppled to highlight Britain’s lack of accountability towards its colonial past, the novelist’s choice to use her substantial platform to reignite the debate on trans rights appeared highly insensitive and a product of her current class and race privilege..”

As an academic, she will know that correlation does not mean causation but does not allow academic rigour to get in the way of woque evangelism. Perhaps Ms Michelis is unaware that BLM gained traction years before her claim, and she possibly believes that JK Rowling should know better than to speak up as long as black men and women are extra-judicially killed in the United States.

Like Ina May Gaskin and J K Rowling and many other women in the birthing communities, it was Milli Hill’s turn to performatively apologise, promise to educate herself and do better, and most of all to centre black and brown women, but most of all, centre ‘birthing people’ in her work though as have been shown above, that is merely a tool to force someone to conform to gender ideology. What it doesn’t show is that no amount of apologising, grovelling, and doing better will be enough. Once a woman is in the stocks, that is where she will remain.

Keeping this thread active on the pregnancy and birth support page is a breach of safeguarding. This is a matter of concern since the home birth group is run by a doula registered with DoulaUK and who is also the chair of an NHS Maternity Voice Partnership in England. Creating the post is also a breach of safeguarding since the original poster is a volunteer with the Association of Breastfeeding Mothers which has a safeguarding policy, a social media policy, and an equality and discrimination policy. The post above and those who commented after were in breach of the ABM’s code of conduct. They still are in contact with pregnant women, and with new and breastfeeding mothers, but their duty of care was placed a distant second to the defamatory statements and agenda against Ms Hill.