Women’s Health and Cancel Culture
Pregnancy, motherhood, menstruation, maternity have one thing in common - female biology. Should women just ‘be kind’ and let go of these words?
Join us for our next online event on Monday 14th February at 7pm to discuss women's health and cancel culture with the fabulous Milli Hill, journalist and author of the bestselling The Positive Birth Book : Give Birth Like A Feminist (2019) and a book for preteens which celebrates the wonders of female biology My Period (2021). Well known for raising awareness of women’s voices and experiences during pregnancy and birth, she found herself "cancelled" from Birthrights for objecting to the word 'women' being replaced with 'birthing people' and her livelihood was threatened.
Please register here.
The government has recently published a paper Vision for Women's Health which makes it clear that women's health issues are under researched, widely misunderstood and regularly dismissed by health professionals. At the same time, The Lancet medical journal's recent reference to women as 'bodies with vaginas' is part of a wider trend within the healthcare system to remove words such as women, mothers and breast feeding, from talk about female reproduction. Can this circle be squared?
Milli Hill - Biography
Milli Hill is a writer and freelance journalist with a passion for women’s rights in childbirth and throughout their reproductive lives. Her book The Positive Birth Book is one of the UK’s bestselling pregnancy guides, and has sold nearly 100k copies since publication in 2017. Her more recent books, Give Birth like a Feminist, and My Period (for preteens), have also topped the Amazon charts.
A freelance journalist since 2013, she has written for many publications, including the Telegraph, Guardian, ipaper, GoodtoKnow, MailPlus and Mother&Baby Magazine. For over two years she wrote a weekly column for BestDaily Magazine, which often went ‘viral’ and won her thousands of followers and acclaim from the likes of Ricki Lake.
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 has appeared on many podcasts, BBC Radio 2 (Jeremy Vine, Amol Rajan), BBC Radio 5 Live (Emma Barnett), talkRADIO and many more.
In recent times she has become interested in ‘cancelled women’, and spoken out about her own experiences of bullying and threats to her livelihood. Her blog ‘I will not be silenced’ was read by 60 thousand people and she has since spoken out about the implications for law and policy of changing the definition of the word ‘woman’.