I have read a lot of fiery op-eds over the years, but I haven’t read many as hot as this one by Camilla Long in the London Times. Her subject is the abandonment of women by supposedly feminist liberals in Great Britain, but you could make a similar case anywhere.
Over to you, Camilla:
I wasn’t going to write about the horrific findings of the Ockenden report, the many devastating errors at maternity units in Nottingham hospitals. The woman, for example, who went in to have a caesarean, only to discover she’d been given an “inadvertent cystectomy”: they’d cut her bladder out by mistake. Or the dead baby stuffed in a bin as “clinical waste”; or the woman who was told to terminate a healthy pregnancy.
Or the heavily pregnant mother in labour who telephoned the hospital nine times, crying and begging to come in, only to discover, when she was finally allowed in to give birth — having been sent home once — that her baby had died. “I’m sorry, your baby’s dead,” said a staff member. Only minutes earlier, they had been offering “aromatherapy”, fussing over the birthing pool, asking what kind of music she’d like.
The vanity of it.
What happens when a society gets so carried away with itself — with an ideology, an aromatherapeutic way of being — that it abandons all empathy, all reason?
***
What has in fact happened in the NHS is the same as in the police, in politics, the law, and in the BBC: an important resource becomes politicised, then made untouchable by forcibly silencing all dissenting voices.
Yes, that sums it up pretty well. Socialized medicine is a particular kind of horror, but it is of a piece with any institution that is taken over by the Left.
Just as the police adopted a horrific set of policies and attitudes that meant 1,300 child rape victims were ignored in the north of England, just as the BBC shielded terrorists and paedophiles, NHS midwives and nurses pushed a misguided plan to promote “natural birth”, turbocharged by the belief that “our” NHS was infallible.
If you were someone who dared to point out the flaws in this, you faced a wall of hostility and denial.
One woman, whose son was badly brain-damaged while he was born, waited 12 years for the hospital to admit it had could have prevented his injuries.
Another, whose baby needlessly died in utero, waited nearly ten years before anyone even made contact. When finally the hospital did, it was sorry it hadn’t been in touch “sooner”. Who are these people?
“Staff laughed over a miscarriage,” said another patient. They mocked one father when he called to raise concerns after the death of his own baby.
Of course, Britain is ruled by an avowedly feminist government.
As for what this means for feminism, well, good luck with that now. Turns out that at the same time as we were all slutwalking and parading for pussies and the right for minor celebrities not to have their bums slightly touched by other minor celebrities, mothers were being needlessly maimed or killed, and babies were dying.
Politicians: do they even care? In parliament last week, we had to watch the new poster boy for another doomed and narcissistic leftist organisation perpetuate this stupid “feminism” dance, posing for selfies with female politicians while his acolytes told us how many advisers of his were female, how he loved “female” issues.
Andy Burnham is being hailed as Britain’s first woman Prime Minister:
[Burnham] was so pro-women, in fact, he could be “Labour’s first woman prime minister. A female PM in all but sex.”
How can a man ever be a “female prime minister”? And why aren’t women interested in serious matters, like “bombs and budgets”? It’s true, of course, that Labour doesn’t know what a woman is. But it says everything about where we are as a society that in the end, Labour’s first female prime minister has long eyelashes and a penis.
To these people, women’s issues are mere cosplay. …
***
But what has Labour ever done for women? If anything, it has mocked and diminished us. It has promised to support and care for us, yet refused, repeatedly, to recognise us as a sex-based category in our own right.
***
What sort of “feminist” outfit does not put the eradication of the world’s leading woman-hating organisation, Hamas, right at the top of its agenda?
Good question! It has been obvious for a long time that feminism and “women’s issues” have little to do with the interests of actual women. It is good to see the point made so forcefully.
