Media

Call the Midwife takes women’s side over abortion. But the BBC is failing us | Suzanne Moore | Opinion


Call the Midwife is a wonderfully successful programme, a slice of dramatised social history that centres on women’s experience. It tackles many “difficult” issues: recently we saw a young woman find out that she was intersex, and the introduction of the cervical smear. It manages to be warm and moving, while reflecting the quiet bravery of so many women. A triumph. It is, if you like, always on “our side”.

I never thought of it this way before, even though I know the BBC as an institution is not always great for women. It does not promote women into its senior management roles, it does not pay women equally and it is happy to crank out routine misogyny on many of its flagship shows, such as Today, in the guise of “banter”.

After an episode of Call the Midwife in which a young woman died of complications from a backstreet abortion, and given its duty to educate and inform, the BBC made the decision not to link to any information about abortion services. A link it provided, following the programme, to the BBC Action Line website gave no advice on the issue. Women who went to the website seeking support complained to the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (Bpas) about the lack of information. Perhaps this was an omission that the BBC would correct and apologise for.

Quite the opposite : the BBC dug in, with a spokesperson saying that information had not been given about abortion services because it is a “contentious” issue: “It isn’t possible for the BBC Action line to offer support for abortion and similarly contentious issues without referring people either to campaigning organisations which take a particular stand on an issue or to organisations which provide it.”

Well, that was certainly a contentious position to take.

Vaccines are contentious to some people. What is the BBC’s stand on this? Some people disagree with blood transfusions – will the BBC refuse to offer advice on them, or to link people to where they can donate blood or organs? Why is the BBC politicising a medical issue? Half of its licence fees payer are women, and one in three women will have an abortion in their lifetime. The majority of people support a woman’s right to choose (around 70% in polling). In the UK nearly all abortions (98%) are funded by the NHS. It is an everyday procedure. No one who is anti-choice for any moral or religious reasons is ever forced to have one.

Those of us who see women’s reproductive choices as fundamental to our autonomy are well aware of the ever-present pushback on our rights – coming from certain elements in the Conservative party and influenced by the far right in the US – but we didn’t expect the BBC to be part of this, all in the name of “balance”. Nor did the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare, the Family Planning Association, the Royal College of Midwives, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and Marie Stopes UK, all of which have signed a letter of complaint. The stigmatising of a medical procedure is way beyond the pay grade of BBC spokespeople.

Call the Midwife provided a valuable public service by drawing attention to the time when abortion was so contentious as to be illegal. As a young woman, my mum came to London for a backstreet abortion. She ended up haemorrhaging in Liverpool Street station toilets. She survived. Others didn’t. The late, great Claire Rayner used to talk about how the first body she laid out as a young nurse was that of a 16-year-old girl who had died of septicaemia after a backstreet abortion. What exactly is contentious, then, about the fact that women now have access to safe and legal terminations?

This is yet another example where BBC “impartiality” is not fit for purpose. The idea of balance is completely skewed. Ukip and Nigel Farage were gifted a platform because of it, given credibility by the BBC. It is only recently that climate-change deniers have not been given equal weight to climate-change scientists. On issues of sexual harassment, I and many others were invited to discuss the wave of allegations coming from the #MeToo movement with some mercenaries for the patriarchy who would be arguing that a hand on the knee was no big deal. This is not balance, it is pursuing an agenda that merely props up the status quo.

This latest decision by unnamed BBC types about what medical information can or cannot be offered is simply wrong. If one of its most popular dramas can deal with such issues with sensitivity and humanity, the least the organisation can do is provide links to advise women in need – it is, after all, advice readily available from our own NHS. Each individual makes up her own mind. It is not for the BBC to decide. The fact that it has chosen not to provide such information is not impartiality: it is a choice, a political statement that tells female viewers that it does not support our perfectly legal medical choices. The BBC has taken a side. But it is not ours.

Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist



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