Mick Hartley

Talking of misogynist abuse, there's an interview in today's Times with Milli Hill, the author who was abused and "cancelled" for suggesting violence in childbirth was committed against women rather than against “birthing people”.

In late November last year Milli Hill, a bestselling author of books about childbirth and the founder of the Positive Birth Movement, a network of support groups for pregnant women, saw herself tagged, or name-checked, by a stranger in an Instagram post about obstetric violence against “birthing people”.

As the author of Give Birth Like a Feminist, Hill took issue with this phrase. “I would challenge the term ‘birthing person’. . .” she wrote. “It is women who are seen as the ‘fragile sex’ etc, and obstetric violence is violence against women. Let’s not forget who the oppressed are here, and why.”

The account had only a few followers and Hill, 46, thought little more of the exchange. Yet the next time she glanced at social media she saw a doula (a professional pregnancy and labour supporter) had posted screenshots of her comment in her Instagram stories, causing a furore.

“I’d made the comment mid-morning and it was like wildfire; by the evening it was blazing,” Hill says, on Zoom from her Somerset kitchen.

“She is trash,” was one comment. “She’s toxic, she’s poison, she’s deliberately hateful. All of this makes her extremely dangerous. Absolutely vile creature,” read another.

Hill, the mother of three children aged 13, 11 and 7, was told she was “anti LGBTQ” and “transphobic”. People were urged to bin her books. A hashtag circulated #DontBeAMilli.

Hugely shaken, Hill says the next day she received what she describes as the sucker punch of Birthrights, a charity she had worked with for ten years, posting that it was “proud to be an inclusive organisation” and would “not work with individuals and organisations who do not share these values”.

“They didn’t name me directly, but it didn’t take long for people to work out who and what they were referring to and it made it a lot worse,” Hill says. “It really hurt me. It was one thing to be attacked by a bunch of people I didn’t know, but it’s another thing to be attacked by an organisation I’d supported with every fibre of my being.

“I spoke at their inaugural conference, I’ve stayed at the founder’s house. I ran an online course to help women have a positive birth in the pandemic and donated hundreds of pounds from its profits to them. But now I felt they’d legitimised and rubber-stamped that really unpleasant attacking.” In Birthrights’ mission statement it says it “protects the rights of women and birthing people in childbirth”.

Birthrights says it spoke to her privately and didn’t name or identify her in its public posts. The storm raged for a fortnight, then rumbled on. Many of Hill’s professional contacts broke all association with her. One person said “being linked to me ‘had caused her a lot of harm’ ”. Prominent figures in her professional community uploaded long videos calling for her cancellation. “Most of the people making these horrible posts weren’t random trolls, they were doulas, hypnobirthing teachers, antenatal teachers, midwives, birth trauma specialists, all very much in the world that I am working in.

“Everybody in the birth world knows who I am, so if you post about what an awful person I am, then you’re going to get a lot of traction. There were a few accounts doing a shitty post about Milli Hill and the next thing on the grid was, ‘Oh by the way, I’ve only got three spaces left on my hypnobirthing course.’ ”

Hill’s emotions ranged from fear that her publishers would pulp her books to paranoia. “I was absolutely terrified and devastated. I cried a lot. It felt so dystopian. I thought, ‘Is this going to be the ruination of me?’ I didn’t speak to many people because I was so upset, I was really ashamed. When all these people are saying these horrible, horrible things, a part of you buckles under it and I felt crushed. It was almost like I didn’t even know what a bad person I am and I’d exposed myself.”

For the next few months Hill lay low, not wanting “to poke the wasps’ nest”. She decided to close the Positive Birth Movement, which had 400 branches internationally. “It had already been difficult to run it in the pandemic and this was the final straw, because even people running the groups [those she had put in touch with each other] were taking the side of the people who attacked me.”

What's most dispiriting is the way people seem to have just jumped on the bandwagon in their desperate attempts to stay on the right side of this "progressive" movement, and happily stabbed Hill in the back as they clambered over her. But times were changing. Women like JK Rowling were standing firm. Maya Forstater won her appeal. The Royal Academy apologised to Jess de Wahls for removing her works because of her supposedly transphobic views. 

Observing all this inspired Hill, who trained as a psychotherapist, to publish her own blog post describing the “extreme bullying” she had experienced.

“I saw there has been a gathering momentum of change and pushback from other feminists and they made me feel braver. But I still wrestled with my decision. I was very frightened that if I told my story I would be attacked again, that it would be like career suicide. But I also felt I wasn’t being true to my nature if I just stayed under my rock for ever. I’m an opinionated, activist type and I felt I had this responsibility to add my story to the zeitgeist.”

Nonetheless, she was “terrified” when her blog went live. Yet a few days later she’s had “thousands of messages of support. I’ve had some people disagree with me, but I don’t mind that — what I haven’t had is any sort of abuse.”

Most tellingly, Rowling broke her silence with a tweet. “Judging by the tsunami of supportive emails and letters I’ve received, if women learned anything from the response to my post it wasn’t that they should sit down and shut up. Solidarity to the brave and fabulous @millihill.”

Yet the battle — as long as Hill continues in her field — looks set to continue. “If I write anything else about birth, breastfeeding, menstruation, menopause, women’s bodies, this is going to come with me. What happened to me had quite a powerful effect on the whole birth world because I was made an example of. And if you drag one witch out to the pyre, in front of everybody else, no one is necessarily going to step forward to say, ‘I don’t think you’re right to put Milli Hill on that bonfire.’

“But even if I take another hit for speaking out, I’m OK with that now. This is too important to keep quiet about.”