Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed in this blog post are solely those of the author.

Season 10 is already off to an intense start with the amazing midwives of the East End charming us with their devotion and the love they have for the families they serve.

Episode 2 presents us with some very serious topics, namely the topic of abortion. Trixie confronts a respected doctor whom she suspects is not performing what he claimed to be “D&Cs”, and was furious to find out that he was actually performing abortions. If you’ll recall the previous season, when a group of ladies secretly performed unsafe abortions to desperate women and were criminally charged for it, you’ll understand Trixie’s reaction to this doctor’s actions.

In comparing Trixie’s reaction to what I see today, I found it very interesting how the views and attitudes towards abortion have changed. It is no secret the struggles women have faced for decades regarding their abortion rights and the prosecutions faced for doing so. These same struggles, while not as restrictive as they were in the 1960s, are still very much present today. Trixie’s reaction to what she felt was deception on the doctor’s part is only the natural response of a very good midwife who lives by a specific code of ethics - a code of ethics of a specific situation during a specific time period. As midwives, we carry the responsibility to both the pregnant client and their baby. We respect what our clients want and always educate them to make sure they are informed and can make an informed choice. It is often hard to balance the client’s right to choice with what we as midwives feel is the best and safest decision. This is where education comes in and why it is so important to educate our clients and the people we serve on what is safe and what is not, whilst building that respectful and trusting relationship that is the foundation of the midwife’s role.

I have been following the recent uproar on social media over the rather restrictive laws that the state of Texas has made which state that it is illegal for women to have abortions as early as six weeks. Their justification - cardiac activity heard on ultrasounds determines that the fetus is viable and any women seeking an abortion at this period would be terminating a viable fetus. However many scientists have ruled this claim to be false as the ‘heartbeat’ picked up by ultrasound is in fact cardiac activity of the cells that may or may not become a viable fetus.

It is just another example of males making laws regarding female bodies and if this law were to change by some miraculous chance, it will be males who will "decide" against it. And this not to say that there aren’t females who are a part of making these laws.

This whole situation made me think about the things that Trixie voiced to Sister Julienne about how it was unfair that women are still dying from unsafe abortions performed by women who will without a doubt be persecuted and charged, while women who have money can go to a male doctor and get a safe one. Why, just the other day I was speaking with my midwife who told me that one of her previous clients had to pay $20,000 dollars for an abortion she needed for a fetus that was twenty plus weeks gestation, a fetus who had a very low chance of survival. In the mother’s heart she knew that this baby would not make it yet the glimmer of hope that is only natural of a loving mother wanted to wait just a little longer. However, as the laws would have it, if she did not abort within a certain time period, she would miss the opportunity to do so, and would have to carry a very sick, brain-dead fetus to term. Imagine the additional trauma that would have caused her!

As a Black student midwife, this episode also made me think of the African-American slave women, many of whom were midwives, commonly performing abortions using potent herbs and such when other slave women were burdened by an unwanted pregnancy, many times as a result of rape by slave masters. Yet here we are hundreds of years later, and unsafe abortions are one of the top leading causes of maternal mortality (WHO, 2020).

In conclusion, we as women need to continue standing up for each other. We need more midwives! We need to protect each other, educate one another, and foster relationships with our communities so that women don’t feel the need to have an unsafe abortion and to create a world where if an abortion is needed a woman can freely do so without fear of legal repercussions.