#153 Birthing Expert Milli Hill Will Not be Silenced by Misogynist Bullies

Birthing expert Milli Hill who was “cancelled” for suggesting violence in childbirth was committed against women rather than against “birthing people” talks to FiLiA Spokeswoman Raquel Rosario Sanchez in this episode of the FiLiA podcast.

Milli Hill, a bestselling author and an expert in women’s rights in childbirth and throughout their reproductive lives, found herself at the epicentre of a bullying and ostracism campaign last year that has spanned over eight months of her life. Recently, she published an essay titled ‘I will not be silenced’ where she details her experiences of ostracism and abuse in the birthing community, after stating that obstetric violence constitutes sex-based violence and is, therefore, a form of violence against women.

Listen Here (transcript below):

Milli Hill | Photo: Alister Thorpe

Milli Hill | Photo: Alister Thorpe

As a writer, Milli is best known for raising awareness of women’s voices, rights, and experiences in the birth room. She is a tireless advocate for women’s choices, and for the notion that birth can be positive in any setting, from home to the operating theatre.

She is the author of Positive Birth (2017), Give Birth Like A Feminist (2019) and the soon-to-be-published My Period (2021). She has written for various publications about birth and motherhood, including the Telegraph, The Guardian, ipaper, Good to Know and Mother & Baby Magazine. For over two years she wrote a weekly column for Best Daily Magazine, which often went ‘viral’ and won her thousands of followers and acclaim.

She has appeared on many podcasts, BBC Radio 2 (Jeremy Vine Show with Amol Rajan), BBC Radio 5 Live (Emma Barnett), talkradio and many more. Milli set up the global organisation The Positive Birth Movement (PBM) from her living room in 2012, and it has since boasted hundreds of groups worldwide and become a leading voice for better births.

You can find her books in all great bookstores around the UK and online, follow her on Facebook, Twitter and on Instagram. There is more information about her work around birthing issues and women’s rights on her personal website.

Transcript:

Raquel Rosario Sanchez from FiLiA in conversation with Milli Hill

Raquel: Hello everyone. Welcome to the FiLiA podcast. My name is Raquel Rosario Sanchez and I'm the spokeswoman for FiLiA today. We are delighted to be speaking with Milli Hill, who is a bestselling author and the founder of the Positive Birth movement. Milli is a writer with a passion for women's rights in childbirth and throughout their reproductive lives.

She set up the global organisation, The Positive Birth Movement from her living room in 2012 and has since hundreds of groups worldwide and become a leading voice for better births. She has written for various publications about birth and motherhood, including the Telegraph, Guardian, ipaper, Good to Know and Mother and Baby magazine.

 She is a writer and is best known for raising awareness for women's rights, women's voices and experiences in the birth room. She's a tireless advocate for women's choices. And for the notion that birth can be positive in any setting from home to the operating theatre.

Milli is a writer who has published best-selling books like The Positive Birth Book, Give Birth Like a Feminist: Your Body, Your Baby, Your Choices, and My Period. Find  Your Flow and Feel Proud of Your Period.

Today we're speaking with Milli about some events that have been taking place starting in the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, November 25th, in which she spoke about birth and obstetric violence is a women's rights issue. It happens to women. Let's start with speaking about the incident that took place in November, in which you were tagged, or name-checked in an Instagram post, in which someone said ‘birthing people are seen as the ‘fragile sex’ who need to be kept on their patriarchal authority by doctors’.

Your response to that Milli was to say, ‘I would challenge the term birthing person’ in this context, though, it is women who are seen as the ‘fragile sex’ and obstetric violence: that is the medical interventions performed during childbirth without a woman's consent is violence against women.’

You've been in the media a lot this week.

How are you?

Milli: I'm okay. I'm bearing up. I mean, it's quite intense and there's a lot to keep up with, but in many ways I feel actually really relieved because I've been sitting on the story of what happened to me for, you know, eight months or so. And I have felt unable to talk about it. And now that I have spoken about it, which I was still in two minds, to be honest, whether it was safe to do, it just feels like a huge relief to have been honest. I felt like all this time since it happened, that I haven't really been being fully myself and fully honest, because I've just been kind of like going la la la, you know, everything's fine, and not really being authentic because it was such a huge thing that happened and it affected me so much, so I feel good. I feel good.

Raquel: And then it probably felt like you had something very heavy that you were carrying with you. You couldn't share it, you weren’t sharing it yet.

Milli:  It's quite shaming, isn't it when you get attacked like that. I've written about this in the blog I wrote, that somehow, sometimes it plugs into your own negative sense of yourself when you think. Well, if all these people are saying all these horrible, horrible things, then I must, it must be true.

It's, it's quite hard to carry that around, to have that nagging doubt in your mind. Like, am I a bad person? Am I really this awful, terrible bigoted hideous, hateful person that they think I am? it's hard to wrestle with that, but by talking about it, I've found that really helpful because I've had so much support and so many people backing me up.  

Raquel: And I'm sorry. I know that this is very distressing, but if you could explain to our audience what happened that day of November 25th, 2020. And I want to clarify that it was not like you were on a vendetta to say only women give birth or it was not like you were campaigning on this issue, it was just a comment on social media, in which you clarified, or you just stated your position on the language issue and birth.

Milli: I hadn't definitely hadn't written articles or blog posts or done massive Instagram posts or anything about this issue because in the birth world, which I'm part of, birth, breastfeeding and maternity, it is a huge hot potato and everybody is very scared to make any comments about it, as was I. But I had occasionally asked a couple of questions and that alerted me to the fact that, wow, you know, this really isn't even okay to ask questions about this. That had got me thinking, because you know, it didn't feel right, that you weren't even allowed to, for example, with some of the terminology, you weren't even allowed to question that you had to just say it, and if you questioned it, you got really, really not the pile on I had in November, but certainly when I'd asked a question, for example, once before in a group of midwives, I'd asked about who chose the term ‘birthing people’ and I was genuinely curious, like when was it decided that that would be the alternative to women and who agreed that that was the right term? I was told very quickly that questions like that were not appropriate and I shouldn't post even post in the group anymore. I was just never to post in the group again. So I was like, ooh, it kind of made me more interested in the whole situation to be honest, because I thought something really isn't right here.

So I'd been thinking about it, reading about it, reading wonderful articles by people like you, that I hadn't really ever come out all guns blazing about it. So yeah, this is just another incident like that. I was tagged in this post; it was the International Day of Violence Against Women. So all day I've been sort of reading other posts and seeing other people's conversations about violence against women, about why birth is a feminist issue, and I write a lot in that book about obstetric violence. And I also write a lot in that book about how overlooked obstetric violence and women's experiences in birth are by feminism because it hardly ever gets talked about in this mainstream feminist conversations.

I was just thinking about obstetric violence and then somebody tagged me in this post. It was a variety of slides and some of them did say women, but the one that leapt out at me was it said:

 ‘birthing people are seen as the fragile sex’ who need to be kept under patriarchal authority by doctors.’

 So I thought that's really silly because you're using an older feminist idea here about women being the fragile sex and you're mixing in things about this gender neutral language. And it doesn't make sense if you do that. So it was only a small account with a few thousand followers. It wasn't anything massive, but, and it was a comment on the post that I replied to. So I didn't think anyone apart from the person who'd tagged me would even read it.

But I replied and saying that I challenged the term ‘birthing person.’ It is women who are seen as the fragile sex and obstetric violence is violence against women. I said, let's not forget who the oppressed are here and why. And they replied saying obstetric violence is violence against anyone on the receiving end of obstetric violence, women, trans men, non-binary people, anyone.

And so I said, personally, I think it's part of violence against women, but if you disagree, then at least don't leave them out and say women and birthing people not particularly sort of hateful -

Raquel: And actually, you know, it's like, you're an expert on this topic and you should be allowed to state your views.

Okay. So now in July, 2021, you're getting a different response, you've been featuring in the Sunday Times, your blog post has been shared far and wide.

What I want to know is: what was the response to you initially when you stated your opinion in the birthing community?

Milli: Well, all hell broke loose, basically, it was absolutely astonishing.

It was like suddenly being caught up in some traumatic incident, it just happened so fast and it was so aggressive and it was so unbelievably disproportionate. I still feel it.

Another thing about telling my story that's really helped me. I've had to revisit all of the comments that were made about me, which to be honest, out of a whole folder of them and still do. And I couldn't look at it cause it's just so horrible, but to actually go back and look at them again and see what people were saying as a response to the comments that I've just read to you, it's helped me think, hang on a minute, you know, that really was unbelievably disproportionate.

Somebody screenshot the comment that I made and they did an Instagram story about me.

 They said, this is violence, unadulterated, deliberate and completely inexcusable. And then it just snowballed from there. So they were literally hundreds of posts. A lot of them were on Instagram. I'll just read some of them out: ‘a piece of shit’ ‘a TERF’ ‘I'm not a feminist’ ‘I'm not for all birthing people’ ‘I'm harmful’ ‘do you not buy her books’ ‘If other people stay silence You know, the prominent names in the birthing world continue to follow her’ So there's kind of like an implication already straight away that day that anyone who followed me even was on the list, you know, that I was derailing the conversation, ‘stop following her, throw her book in the f…ing bin’  ‘I'm toxic dangerous, transphobic doing it deliberately to cause harm’  ‘deliberately hateful, poison, bile, Shouldn't be allowed within a kilometre of a pregnant or birthing person’.

 

That is just a sort of little selection.

Raquel: That is all abuse. You're none of those things. And no one deserves to be piled on like that.

Reading those comments, the thought came to my mind that:

Do you think that the sheer volume of vitriol that is aimed at individual women like you, is it meant to frighten other women or is it meant to just break down your spirit as an individual? Because it just feels so disproportionate.

Milli: It's really hard to understand. I don't understand the motivation behind it. I think it's a mixture. I think some people genuinely think that they're doing the right thing and they're fighting a just cause and that anything is okay in the name of that cause that they're fighting. Some people are doing it simply for the lift it gives them because if you attack someone, I mean, no one listening to your podcast necessarily knows who I am, but in the birth world, people know who I am because I've written two best-selling books about birth.

If you attack me on social media, you're going to get a lot of traction. And there was a lot of that going on where it would be one post about what a terrible person I was followed by another post about I've only got three places left on my hypnobirthing course and need to think, oh God, it's just completely, it seems a bit obvious almost that it was a way to get more followers and to get more people looking at them.

And definitely 100% of what you said is true, that it is, it served as a warning to other people because everybody in the birth world knew who I was. And they saw what was happening. And I know so many people who have told me themselves, personally, that having seen what happened to me, that they feel forever silenced. They literally cannot afford to even ask one question about this topic anymore. That's the end of the conversation as far as they're concerned, because they've got businesses to run, they've got families to feed and they can't risk it. So it was a quite a powerful move in that sense, it made it very clear that it was just unacceptable to say those sorts of things or ask questions on this subject.  

Raquel: It’s such a sinister thing to do to a person. I'm wondering if the people, not that it would be justified in any way, but I wonder if the people who are projecting this abuse on you. I bet most of them were not even experts on this topic. Meanwhile, they are harassing and bullying an expert who is speaking about her subject. And you just happen to have an opinion that some people disagree with, an element of taking down a woman who has managed to get recognition for her expertise.

Milli: 100%. It's got to be that because it's happening to other women in the same way isn't it.

There's got to be so much internalised misogyny going on here, and professional jealousy. I've worked hard, really hard for nearly a decade and I've done a lot of helpful stuff.  I'm not massively financially successful. I know some people think that once you've written a book, you get 10 pounds for every copy that gets sold.

I think there's a projection on me that I'm not living in this palace and I have all this privilege and money. So there was that sort of thing of like wanting to pull people off pedestals, pull women down. That is definitely under the surface. And I don't understand why that happens. It's really, really quite horrible.

I’m going to tell the next bit of the story really, which is important, which is then that evening after when all of that was going on, when there were literally these hundreds of comments made on social media about me, an organisation, charity called Birthrights joined in. they say they didn't join in, but they made a social media post on Instagram talking about how they were an inclusive organisation, they would always use women and birthing people and that they wouldn't work with anyone who didn't share their values.

 And it was absolutely obvious, again, only within the birth world. It was absolutely obvious who they were talking about. And in fact, within an hour or so, I was tagged in the comments and people were calling me a terf again and abusing me in the comments.

So I felt that they stepped in, in a way and kind of rubber stamp what was happening. I mean, I don't feel that they should have supported me because that's up to them. It would have been nice. I have supported them since 2012. We started our organisations up at the same time, I've been a huge fan of what they're doing.

It is painful to me to be even having this conversation with you now and talking about them in a negative way, because I have so much respect for what they've done in the sense that they came into a space where nobody was thinking about human rights in childbirth, in the UK, it was totally off people's radar that that was even an issue.

When you said this, you said somebody's human rights in childbirth. They didn't understand that those two concepts could even be put in the same sentence. And in that environment, birth rights came in like a gift. These people, one is one of the founders, is a really brilliant lawyer and they, they worked it out and they set up something which has been so important and helpful.

And so, yeah, it's painful to me, but they didn't have to defend me. they could have just stayed out of it.

 But I felt that what they did, they're so highly regarded in the birth world, to then come in and to make that post, legitimized, at some level, I feel it legitimised what was happening and it made it feel like everybody was on the right side. Everyone who was saying all of those things I've just said to you about the abuse, was actually in the right.

 So that was almost more painful to me and the actual doulas and hypnobirthing people or whatever who were writing all those horrible things about me. The fact that that organisation had, I'd even run a course during the pandemic and donated hundreds of pounds of the profits from the course to Birthrights.

It's not just about money. I mean, I've literally written about them in practically every article, supported them in every way I can, I've never been paid by them or worked for them in an official capacity, but I know them personally and I've supported them in everything I've done. So that was pretty horrific.

And then I got the letter at 11:00 PM, an email from the CEO of Birthrights, reiterating what they said on Instagram, which was basically that they wouldn't work with people who didn't share their inclusive values. One sentence that leaped out to me and still does from the email was that they've seen other social media comments where I state that people can only be male or female.

They said this is harmful and distressing and not compatible with the rights based approach to pregnancy and childbirth. And then we had some other stuff that, but that was what happened.

Raquel: Sometimes I wonder, is it worse when it comes from strangers or is it worse when it comes from people that, you know, and I think it must be so hurtful to go through this when these people that you have a working relationship with. All the bullying and harassment that happened against me at the University of Bristol. I don't know any of those people. They're not my friends. It's not, my circle was never like had a working relationship, just strangers.

And it felt so dehumanising, but what you're mentioning is you had a working relationship with this organisation and then you've been abused. And instead of even like, I don't think staying neutral was an option. I think they should have supported you, they couldn't even do that.

Milli: No, they very much, I feel got involved and it's difficult to say which is worse. We sort of discussed what the possible motivations were for the people who are making those horrible comments. You can sort of move on from that in a sense that you think, oh, well. They’re trying to sell their courses, or they just believe they're in the right and we differ, you can move on from it.

But in a way I think that kind of behaviour of Instagram stories and posts, everything is pretty childish, but you then expect a large charitable organisation to be the grownup in a situation. To join in and to be firing off emails at 11 o'clock at night as well, to me, when, you know, just literally on the way to bed and I'm already like really upset by the events of the day, you just think that's not really the grownup thing to do.

And surely they needed to have a meeting and discuss things before making a decision of what side they wanted to come down on, if any, et cetera. So, Yeah, the whole thing was just really upsetting, really disappointing. And to be honest, as it sort of escalated over the next few days, I was terrified because everyone's saying don't associate with her, don't let her speak at your conferences. Don't buy her books, stop following her on social media and all of that stuff.

And you think, well, this is my livelihood. And also it's my work, it's what I do. And it's felt like the whole thing was being threatened. It's easy with hindsight to think, okay, you can come through these things, but when it's actually happening, it does feel like everything might fall apart, literally.

Your whole life, as you know, it might be destroyed because when you're right in the eye of that storm, it does feel that intense. I had to contact my literary agent who represents me as a writer and tell her what was happening. And I was just so terrified to even tell her, I was like, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. You know, I'm so stupid. Why did I make that comment? I'm really sorry. I thought she might then drop me and say, well, I can't carry on representing you because you were a horrible, hateful bigot. I'm not going to represent you anymore. I didn't know what was going to happen next. I didn't know who was going to turn on me next. Especially since Birthrights had, I thought well that there could be a queue of people in the next couple of weeks who are going to tell me that they're going to drop me. Are they going to pulp my books? You just don't know. It's just terrifying.

Raquel: You are threatened with ostracism.

Milli: Yeah. People who were friends of mine were being attacked as well. People who were professional, I'm not looking to say who they were, but people who were running other high profile birth businesses and organisations were being told ‘you have to stop associating with her’.

So I was being ostracised literally by people because they felt they didn't have any other option.

Raquel: I want to go back to a comment that you said that it comes across sometimes as if it could be seen as childish or silly. And I think, you know, it's not acceptable just in general, you know, you shouldn't talk like that to a colleague, to a friend, to a stranger in any context.

If it was one person, but then we're talking about a large number of people who are doing that to one individual. There's an element of it that is very much, it's a mob mentality.

Milli: It's a witch hunt. Yes, it's so medieval. I mean, it literally, you could just almost visualise it in that way of one woman being pushed to the edge of the village or being dragged from her little hut on the edge of the village and everybody cheering as she gets put on the fire.

I mean, that's literally what it feels like. And all those people who were cheering, are they all bad people? No. There are people who don't want to go on the fire next. Some of them, some of them are bad people and some of them are people who you just want to keep the family safe and themselves safe.

Raquel: But then that brings you into, into a very existential question, you know, do you throw another woman under the bus just to keep yourself safe or do you stand by that woman?

A lot of this happened in November and subsequently, but for the past eight months, what happened to you personally Were you silent for the whole eight months? were you're just hoping that it would go away? were  you just hoping to create a sense of normality?

Have you been silent for the past 8 months?

Milli: Yeah, I mean, I've been carrying on trying to just carry on still being sometimes on social media, still talking about my books, telling people when they're on special offer for 99p on Kindle and all that kind of thing. But I haven't been really writing very much.

I've been finishing off this book that I've been working on, which is for pre-teen girls about periods. So I've been occupying myself with that. I won't go into the details of that now, but there were quite a lot of conversations around inclusivity around that book, which was quite an interesting process to go through.

But anyway, yeah. So I mainly just been focusing on that book and just thinking, well, I had Christmas, obviously after it will happen, it was Christmas. And I got three kids and got on with things in that sense. And then after Christmas, I thought I'm going to close the network, the Positive Birth movement networks.

This is a network of groups that I set up in 2012. It was a grassroots thing. It wasn't financially motivated. I never managed to make it into a charity. It was a little bit disorganised, but rather beautiful in a sense that it was just groups for pregnant women and their partners to go to, to talk about birth, to change the narrative around birth. I did a lot of work on social media.

We're going back quite a few years. now it's not such a big deal seeing amazing birth movies on Instagram and stuff, but this was back pre-Instagram that it all started. So sharing, you know, inspiring birth images and to try and change the narrative around birth, helping women to feel more empowered and get more information.

And so that was another positive development was working. But the main of structure of it has been this network of groups. And I found that really difficult because after all this happened, there were quite a lot of people within who were running groups who were angry with me about what I'd said or who were still taking the side of the people that piled on to me and it just got too exhausting.

The Positive Birthing had been really hard to run any way through the pandemic, because obviously it's all about meeting other people in real life, but no one had been able to do that. And I'd been struggling with it anyway for quite a long time, in all fairness, because it was such a huge organisation to try and run and carry with hardly any money and hardly anyone to help me.

So it was just a final straw the bullying.  I just thought, do you know what? I cannot be bothered to bust my balls anymore over doing this, if that's how I'm going to be treated, I guess there was an element of sticking two fingers up. Do you know what? I'm not doing this anymore.

If that’s the little respect people have for me after I’ve done so much with this work, then I'm out. So I decided to just shut down that work. And that was very sad for me because obviously it's something that I'm very proud of, but it also did feel like an immense relief just to take myself away. When you’re fronting an organisation like that you can't sort of hide away. You have to be there. You have to respond to people's criticism or feedback, and which is fine, but I just felt like I needed a break from being at the front like that. And especially as being at the front seem to more and more mean being attacked and also that there was quite a lot of pressure, I suppose, to become ‘inclusive.’

And I'm putting that in inverted comers because I'm not sure inclusivity is as straightforward as just changing your language. But anyway these are all big topics.

I have not spoken about what happened in November publicly, even though I was aware that it was quite a story in terms of how the press would receive it.

Obviously, I think the environment has been changing in the last six months in terms of Maya Forstater ruling, Kiera Bell, Chimamanda’s essay was very inspiring to me. Then finally Jess de Wahls. And then she got her apology and once she got her apology, I couldn't believe it. I was like, I want an apology. I was so amazed that she got an apology.

I had so much respect for the way she conducted herself through that. And I just thought maybe this is the right time. And to be honest, keeping quiet about something of that magnitude is actually really difficult because like I said, you know, you still like, you're slightly living a lie. You're not really being authentic, you're not really being honest about what you think and who you are.

So I decided that I was going to talk about it, but I did still, after I'd written that blog, that it's now on my website, I did spend quite a long time considering and talking to people like my agent and my publishers and just making sure that I wasn't going to get pulped.

Raquel: So on the 10th of July, that was this past weekend. On Saturday, you wrote a blog post called ‘I will not be silent.’ And you can find the link to that blog post, right. At the top of your website, your website is www.millihill.co.uk.

And in that blog post you wrote at length about everything that you have been describing and your feelings and thoughts about this issue. And I will quote a paragraph from that blog post, in which you say:

‘By sharing this story, I am aware that I am laying it in front of you for your judgment. You may decide that my views about obstetric violence or the distinction between sex and gender are wrong and that's okay. It should be okay for us to hold different views and to respectfully discuss them. When we do so. it is sometimes even possible to change people's minds. Alternatively, we don't change their minds, but they're all clarity of thought benefits from the dialogue. And we develop and grow from the experience of sharing our views and disagreeing. We discover branches of thought we had not yet explored. We enter into grey areas. We see new perspectives. This is the kind of nuance discussion that elevates humanity and promotes ideals, social peace, progress, growth, and tolerance’.

So it sounds like for the past eight months, something horrible has happened and you've kept this big story within you, the backlash and abuse and bullying and harassment. But after you came out with this blog posts, what has been the response?

Milli: Well, it's been overwhelmingly positive. I've had hundreds and hundreds, thousands of messages from people saying that they agree with me or that they're glad I've started the discussion saying that they work in maternity but can’t air these views. Just so much support, it's been absolutely amazing and really, really sort of healing for me to have that wave of positivity coming towards me, because I didn't know how it would be received. And it's only been a couple of days, obviously, and it's nice that I've had this wave of positivity, but I still do have in the back of my mind, some anxiety that in the long-term, it could still affect me as a self-employed person.

 It would be very easy for a publisher, for example, to say, oh, well, we seen your proposal, but we're not really sure about the book. They don't have to say, we don't want to work with you because of what happened. When you're self-employed it's about, will I get the next contract?

So I do worry a lot and I am still a bit worried, but overall I feel really relieved to have talked about it. It's still a developing situation really. Birthrights made a statement yesterday, which disappointed me. And I got a really harsh email from them as well. So they definitely are doubling down.

Raquel: You got a harsh email from them for speaking up?

Milli:  Yeah. They basically said that they will never work with me again. So they're kind of like double cancelled me. I already was not working for them, but just supporting them. So in November they said, we are not going to work with you anymore. As in, we're not going to let you support us out of the goodness of your heart anymore.

And now they've said, now definitely, definitely, definitely not going to let you help us anymore for free.

Raquel: Why would you? It sounds like something very reactive. Like, oh, we have to email her just to tell her and re-iterate what we already said in November. I think at this point, your response would be like, I'm speaking out because I know that I don't have your support and I'm moving forward even without your support. If there's an element of this that is about ownership feeling like people own women, like those people who were bullying you, they felt that they have a right to own your thoughts and your voice and what you say and what you don't say, and maybe Birthrights or any organisation in a similar position, feels like they can provide a stamp ‘we approved of this woman’ and what you're saying, and women in similar positions are saying is ‘no, no, I don't require your approval to speak up’.

Milli: Yeah and that's got a long history, I guess hasn't it, women saying ‘I don't require your approval to speak up’. Has never really ever gone down that well, so history just keeps repeating itself.

Raquel:  And you wrote about this very point in your essay. You wrote: ‘I think as women, we are often encouraged to keep our heads down and to keep walking rather than fight back. Not to be angry, not to be aggressive, not to draw attention to ourselves instead to hold our stress in our quietly clenched fist in the tightness of our job, in the knots of our shoulders and be silent but too many women have been silenced and I don't want to join them’.

You're an excellent writer by the way.

I mean, exactly. It's almost as if the expectation was she went through all of this, but she will keep quiet about it forever. And you're sending very strong and saying, no, that is not how this is going to be.

Milli: Yeah. I mean, I guess it's probably been quite a shock for Birthrights and for everyone that I've suddenly sort of piped up about it, maybe they just thought that I had gone away and I can see that that would have been upsetting and distressing for them. And I am actually genuinely, sorry that this is all happening, but I just feel…

Raquel: No, don't be sorry about it.

Milli: Yeah, I know, and it was wrong, but I do still feel at some level, I still feel, you know, maybe it's what I'm talking about. Maybe I am in that habit of as a woman of saying, oh, I'm really sorry. And I didn't want to upset you. And I'm like, maybe I'm actually doing what I've just described, but it is hard because I do, like I say, I do have great respect for their organisation. But I don't have great respect for the way they treated me. And I also think seeing what happened with Jess de Wahls and how that then impacted on me and how I was then emboldened and empowered to speak by her actions. I just felt like I had a responsibility as a feminist and as a woman to tell my truth, even if it was damaging to me.

And like I said, I still don't know whether it’s going to damage me in terms of my career or my livelihood that I've spoken up, but I feel like I don't really actually care. I mean, obviously I do care about completely career suicide, but I do care. I mean, at some level I really don't care because I'd rather be true to myself and in doing so open up this conversation, and blow the lid off it because I really think that's what needs to happen in the world of breastfeeding and all the organisations around birth, breastfeeding and maternity are going through this problem. There's massive division and massive problems within all of them.

There's people being ejected from these organisations for wrong think, or made unwelcome, or even just send out of Facebook conversations or whatever or groups. They are not able to speak because they're frightened just as I was frightened. And just as other women have been frightened. I think it's just really important because I hope that I'm sort of playing it forward, just like Jess.

I've spoken to her now, but I mean, I didn't know her. I was listening to her words and it was going to have the impact on me that made me feel brave. And I just hope that the more women talk about these issues, the more other women will feel able to and feel some level of protection because at the moment, I mean, people are being silenced. I know they are because I speak to them and it's appalling.

Raquel: I wonder if five years ago, there was a tangible possibility that sort of your career would be over your social circle would close down because as a result of something like this, but I think the, as you mentioned, because of so many brave women, like Alison Bailey, Kiera Bell, like Maya Forstater, like Jess de Wahls. Because of so many brave women, like all of these women who are coming forward, the climate has changed to a point in which, you know what you might actually get a lot of support.

 I speak with so many women who were so frightened. I was like, oh, I don't want to say this thing that is happening. You know, I don't want to talk about this thing that I'm experienced. They contact me to tell me these horrible experiences that they're going through. They're afraid of speaking out and what I always say to them, it's like, yes, all of those fears could materialise, but you know, what else might happen? You might get a lot of support. There is a groundswell of women, grassroots women, and people in general, men too, who are so fed up with this legitimize abuse of women, who might actually have your back. You don't have to go through all of that alone. And there's an element of this topic that benefits, from women thinking ‘if I speak out, I will be alone’ the perspective that I think we need to get out there. ‘you know what? If you speak out, you might get thousands and thousands of women being angry on your behalf’.

Milli: I 100% think that's true. And it has been amazing, the support that I've had even had people sort of saying they're buying my book, even though they really wouldn't normally buy my book. Just as an act of solidarity and so many lovely messages. I think that the problem though, that still continues is on the sort of smaller world levels. So if you just think about the birth world as an example, but I know there are like other communities and professional organisations or groups of people under certain professional umbrellas that affects in the same way.

So in the Birth world it's still not okay to ask questions or to challenge any of the language or to have a different viewpoint. So for somebody who says a hypnobirthing teacher in Kent or wherever, who runs classes and has a little Instagram account with a small number of followers, for them, if they spoke up and they were attacked in the same way, it could really be catastrophic.

And I'm not saying it hasn't been catastrophic for me, but I mean, it could be the in a sense that they could be closed down. They could, their professional body could say they were delisting them or whatever. And so within birth and maternity, there is still a massive problem and a massive climate of silencing, even though there is this huge support from all these amazing feminists and radical feminists and people like you, who are amazing and supportive a sort of micro level of within, say for example, the birth world, there are still going to be a lot of people who are going to be thinking, ‘I really like Milli Hill’s last

 

 book, but I'm not going to put it on my Instagram because you know, I'll out myself as supporting her.’ I mean, it really is literally that bad.

So what do you do about that? I don't know, but I, I hope that we can open the conversation up because as it a said in the blog, it's not about one person being right, and the other person being wrong, you know, there are issues around the care of a trans people in maternity, for example, which are really important to talk about.

And it's absolutely important that everybody, I mean, I've always advocated, that's been my whole ethos and everything that I've done has been underpinned by the idea of treating people as individuals caring for them as individuals listening to them, centring them in the birth experience and treating them with respect.

If somebody wants to be called by certain pronouns or refer to as a birthing person at an individual level, then of course, it's really important that they are treated with utmost respect. And it's really important that anyone working in maternity has the right training for them properly.

A lot of times it was a bit sort of, it made it sound like I was saying, I will never say birthing people or that I didn't approve of that. I mean, I think there are conversations to be had about the implications of that are but certainly at an individual level, if that's what somebody wants to be referred to as, everybody who's having a baby should be treated with utmost dignity and respect.

So it's not about taking sides. It's about finding a nuanced way through this issue and actually being out, you can't do that unless you're allowed to discuss it.

Raquel: Yes, of course. We spend a significant amount of time discussing something that happened to you. You didn't set out to become part of this storm, as you mentioned. But it happened. I'm a big believer that we shouldn't be defined by what other people do to us, you shouldn't be defined by this trolling that's taking place. You shouldn't be defined by this ostracism that you've experienced. You define yourself as a woman who works fo reproductive rights issues and birding rights.

You've written three books, The Positive Birth Book, Give Birth like a Feminist and My Period which is about finding your flow and to be proud of your period. So this is where you do your writing. And would you mind telling our audience what your books are about? What is this positive birth movement?

Milli: Sure. Well, so I sort of ended up in the whole birth world kind of literally by accident and just through my own birth experiences really. And through being first and foremost, I guess someone who, who writes. A long time ago, when my babies were very small I started writing a blog called The Mule, which became very popular. I used to write about birth and breastfeeding and motherhood and that kind of thing. And then it just kind of like went on from there. So that's how I ended up writing my first book, The Positive Birth Book.

I wrote a column for about two and a half years for an online magazine called Breast. And every week I wrote about a different aspect of birth and it was always pinned to some celebrity story, and it was pretty popular because it was at the time, quite a fresh narrative around.

 For example, one of my most viral things that I wrote was about how a healthy baby is not all that matters. So that's a phrase that gets used around birth quite a lot, especially to women who've had a traumatic birth, they get told, just look at your healthy baby, that's what really matters. And that can be meant well, but it can be very silencing for a woman who's had a traumatic experience who feels like she's being told, you know, it comes back to the sort of women as vessels got really deep roots that phrase, I think, like you don't matter, you know, you've got a healthy baby. You've done the reproductive work now shut up about your negative experience. We don't want to talk about it kind of thing.

So I wrote an article about that and it went massively viral. So those sorts of ideas were quite fresh. It’s talked about a lot more now, which is great, but this idea that women's experience of birth is important and that it's okay for a woman to want to come out of birth not traumatised, not broken, not distressed, not upset. That should be a reasonable expectation.

So that was kind of what positive birth was about and my first book, The Positive Birth Book is just basically a straightforward guide to how to have a positive birth in any situation.

It's not about having an actual birth necessarily. It's about how can we improve caesarean or hospital birth or home birth, all of the types of birth. How can we have a positive experience and it’s kind of giving women the information and the tools that they need to do that and how to make a birth plan and all of that stuff.

And then my second book Give Birth like a Feminist was such a fantastic opportunity to be able to write the book because basically it's exploring birth as a feminist issue. So looks at the power imbalance in the birth room. And that we see in phrases as well. You know, women will often talk about what they're allowed or not allowed to do. It addresses why, or tries to ask questions about why feminism hasn't ever really focused on this, even though we've got one in three women coming out the other side of that traumatised with full-blown birth trauma and many, many more women coming to the other side of birth feeling, not necessarily with a diagnosis of birth trauma, but feeling broken, sad, disappointed, violated that the experience is something that they would rather forget.

So then the book looks at the kind of history of birth and the patriarchal takeover of the birth room. It looks at how interestingly there's a chapter called Loose Women, which doesn't cover, obviously anything that's happened to me in recent times, but it is about what happens to women who try and do things differently, or speak up against the system.

Persecuted midwives, persecuted, doulas, persecuted free birthers anyone who kind of steps outside of the maze reveals to all of us, how there are parameters that women are kept within in birth. And it looks at women's bodies and whether they're fit for purpose, if you like, because that's another thing that's really important around both as a feminist issue is the fact that women are quite often get to the age of having babies and already feel that their bodies are somehow faulty. They're not actually built very well they don't work. They're probably going to need medical assistance to have babies. And so I explore is that true? And then I explore culture around birth, programs like One Born every Minute and the messages that were given, and then how that influences our choices.

I write about human rights and childbirth, because that's a topic that not everybody really knows very much about.

That's my second book. And then my book, which is coming out in a few weeks’ time, and by the way, someone has accused me of: ‘that's why you've chosen now to speak’. Cause you've got a book coming out. Actually. It's got nothing to do with that. So I've been waiting and keeping quiet and it was Jess de Wahls’ story which is what motivated me. It's got nothing to do with having the book coming out anyway, it's coming out. It's a, it's actually a book for preteen girls about periods, because I think it's really interesting going back to what I was saying about my book, Give Birth like a Feminist and women's messages that women absorb about their bodies and how they feel about their bodies.

And I think a lot of that starts in the way the messages we give girls about their bodies, you know, whether it's keeping periods sort of slightly secretive, you know, tampon rappers that don't make a noise and all of that kind of shame around menstruation, which we have. I think that builds a picture for us of womanhood, a negative picture in many cases.

And then we actually carry that with us when we come to the birth of our baby. So I think it's all part of the same continuum and I'm really interested in all of that. So it was a great, lovely to be able to write this book. It's all sort of illustrated and beautifully done by the publisher, but, you know, it's got some really good messages in there about periods being something to be proud of and how your body works. And has a diagram of a clitoris, it's really good. I think it's a feminist book. It's not coming at you as a feminist book. It's just feminist because it's positive about women's bodies. And isn't it difficult in this current climate to be positive about women and their bodies which is actually really quite complicated suddenly

Raquel: I’m so glad that you are writing these books, you know, in particularly I'm so excited to see the book that you just wrote about periods. Because as a culture, we treat the arrival of menstruation as some sort of shameful taboo. it made me smile. It brought a smile to my face because in my family, we did it the other way around. And when I talked to my friends, it's like, no, you know, it's like, you don't really talk about it. Everything's set up like quiet.

For my family. I got my period when I was 13 literally on my birthday. We had a slumber party and I had all my friends coming over. And then I woke up the next day, the day after my birthday, and I noticed that I had gotten my period and I thought someone had pulled a prank on me or something. I didn't understand, but then, okay. So then I told my sister and I told my mom, and then. My parents are divorced. They got divorced when I was very little, but then my mom told my dad and my dad came over and he's not very expressive, but he just gave me like a big pat on the back and he was like, ‘congratulations.’

And then my mom called everyone. She called my grandma's. She called my aunt. I have an uncle who lives in Honduras and she told him too, and everyone was calling me because in Spanish, the word Senorita means miss that's when you become like a young woman, you know, you're in your teenage years.

So everyone was calling me, saying ‘Raquel, we just heard the news. We just want to say, congratulations, you have become a senorita.

I was a 13-year-old girl. I was just red in the face the whole time. Personally, I felt embarrassed. And now everyone knew this thing about me, but in my family, they saw it as like, we're so proud of you Raquel because now you're a senorita and everyone was just calling to congratulate me. But then when I talk to other women, it's like, that's not their experience.

There's a lot of shame. There's a lot of keeping keep it quiet and hidden. And I'm so glad that there's books like this out, that you say in it doesn't have to be a dirty secret, because it's not

Milli: There’s a little bit in the book about what some other cultures’ celebrate, that's her best period and suggestions for what to do and it's just like simple things like painting your toenails or go for a swim, doing something to celebrate the occasion to remember it.

Raquel: Yes, well Milli Hill thank you so, so much for speaking with us at FiLiA. And I want to thank you particularly for speaking out about this, because it sounds like you've just gone through a tough, a very tough time and I'm so glad that you spoke out because if you hadn't, you wouldn't see this groundswell of support and solidarity from so many people who are horrified that a woman talking about birth issues and obstetric violence would go through something like this in the birthing community.

So, I'm so glad that you spoke out, but thank you for doing that because the same way that Jess de Wahls inspired you to finally say, I am speaking out. I will not be silenced. This is what happened to me. That exact same way. There's going to be so many women who look at you and who say Milli Hill did it. Let me talk about this experience that I've gone through as well. So thank you so, so much for speaking out in general, and also for speaking with us at FiLiA.

PodcastJ SteinSex-Based Rights, Reproductive Rights, Violence Against Women