#51 

Alice from FiLiA in conversation with Sian Norris speaking about LGBT rights across Europe.

Alice: Today we’re speaking with Sian Norris who is a journalist who has written for The Guardian and openDemocracy, and the New Statesmen among other publications. She's also a published author and the founder of the Bristol Women's Literature Festival. Today we're going to be talking about a series of articles in which she's covered the struggle for women's and LGBT rights across Europe.

So thank you so much for talking to us today. Which came first, the feminism or the writing?

Sian: Oh gosh. Well, I think I always wanted to be a writer when I was younger. When I was about five, I wrote a book about a duck that I put together with sellotape. But I always, as long as I can remember, really being very committed to feminism.

 I grew up in a gay household. So I was very aware of issues around discrimination and prejudice and inequality just through being in a non-traditional family. And then as I became a teenager, I became much more interested in LGBT rights and then that really naturally led into an interest in feminism because if women don't have equality, if we don't look at gender equality, then everything else sort of comes out of that. 

I spent a lot of time as a teenager reading a lot of feminist novels, and very old seventies feminist books and learned a lot. I read loads of Marge Piercy novels and these kind of just random, any Women's Press novel, any Virago that I could find. I just read and read and read. So kind of the reading complimented the writing, which complimented the feminism. 

In 2007, I got involved with organising a Lady Fest in Bristol. It was the Second Lady Fest that we had in the city. And from there, one of the women involved in Lady Fest set up a feminist network, which I and my friend Anna took over the organizing of, and then we ran that for six years. 

I think at the one point we were the second biggest feminist network in the UK after London and we organised Reclaim the Night marches and various protests, pro-choice rallies, events that kind of profiled and celebrated women performers.

 And all the time I was writing and writing and writing and, you know, the more I was getting involved in feminist activism, the more issues I discovered needed writing about, needed talking about. 

So for the last three years, I've been a full-time freelance writer as opposed to doing writing on the side of other jobs. And yeah, pretty much everything I write has a feminist heart to it. I once wrote an article about buses, which might not seem like a feminist issue, but it is a feminist issue when you think about who has access to transport, who has access to getting around city centres, who uses buses. 

So everything kind of comes back to feminism with my writing. And I think, it's really important right now to be writing politically from a women's perspective and from a feminist perspective.

If you look at something like Brexit, which has not really been framed in a huge amount as a feminist or a women-centred issue, and yet women are going to be much more affected by the fallout of a no deal Brexit, or any kind of Brexit, than men are because we're more likely to use public services that will be affected. Industries that women work in are affected. Even issues around violence against women are going to be affected by Brexit, and yet these conversations aren't really being had. 

 So if you don't tackle political issues, if you don't tackle what's going on today without a feminist or a gendered lens, and you are really not getting the full story and that's what I try and do with my writing, is always thinking, well, what is the women angle here? What's happening to women in this news story and how can we express that? 

Alice: Sian has written an amazing, really fascinating series that focuses on struggles for, but also struggles against women's rights, mostly in Europe.

So you look at the far-right and Christian lobbying in Europe, so lobbying against LGBT rights and abortion rights, the Red Pill effect in America, Women of the World which is an anti-feminist network in Spain. And it's on the website of openDemocracy. And if you're listening, I really recommend you read it.

But I'm wondering, Sean, what made you choose to write about organisations that oppose women's rights?

Sian:  Well, first of all, the Tracking the Backlash series on openDemocracy 50.50 is a, a much bigger thing than just me. I mean, I'm contributing to that series, but it's not something that I invented or came up with, it's come very much from the editors. 

We've been really, really brilliant and passionate about looking at what's happening to women's rights, looking at the organizations that are funding anti-feminism, anti-LGBT movements and really exposing issues around money coming in from America, the kind of the dark underbelly of the far right and even the more mild looking Christian right.

So I mean, it's been really an amazing privilege to work with editors like Claire Provost at openDemocracy, who has this real sense of purpose and vision and is commissioning these brilliant articles. So I really feel very lucky to be part of that team and to have the opportunity to write these stories.

 In terms of being interested in what anti-feminist groups are doing, it's just so important and it kind of began when I went to Romania and I was looking at the LGBT movement in Romania. And what was going on at that time was this organization called Coalition for the Family was organizing a referendum in Romania to prevent any potential future plans to have equal marriage.

So the legal situation was that there's no equal marriage in Romania. Homosexuality was only legalised in 2001, but in the Constitution, the wording says that marriage is between two spouses. So if there ever was a move to have equal marriage in Romania, all it would require is a legal change. It wouldn't require rewording the Constitution, which requires a referendum. So quite similar to Ireland. 

So what Coalition for the Family wanted was to have a referendum to change the wording of the Constitution so that it would say marriage is between a man and a woman rather than two spouses or two people. And they succeeded in calling the referendum, and then when you looked at what was going on, they were bringing in speakers from America (USA).

There was this woman called Kim Davis, who is kind of a celebrity of the Christian right in America (USA) because she went to jail for refusing to officiate at a gay wedding. And so she came to Romania and did this tour, and then these organisations, Alliance Defending Freedom and the Liberty Council had provided really, really homophobic briefs to the Romanian government to try and say why gay marriage was the end of days.

And so you could just sort of see this international influence coming into Romania. And when I interviewed gay rights activists in the country, they were just so angry. I remember this woman saying, you know, who do these people think they are? They're coming into our country and deciding they can tell us what to do.

And there was this real sort of outrage that American organizations who in their minds, because America has equal marriage, they've failed America, and they're now trying to make sure this pattern isn’t repeated across the world. And you know, they were very active in various African countries like Uganda and Nigeria around anti-gay rights.

Coalition for the Family is also a very anti-choice organisation. So in the end they, they had the referendum and it didn't work for the Coalition for the Family. There wasn't a very high turnout, so it was deemed invalid. There's been no changes to the Constitution. 

It really kind of highlighted the fact that these very big, very, very big American organisations are trying to meddle in European politics around women's rights and LGBT rights. 

I think it's really important that we look at these organisations like Alliance Defending Freedom, Liberty Council, the Heritage Foundation, you know, these are very, very influential groups in the USA.

They're determined to overturn human rights. They don't want LGBT rights, they don't want abortion rights. They don't believe in climate change. They're very powerful, very vocal. 

So from Romania, I was kind of looking at what was going on in the rest of Eastern Europe. If you look at a country like Hungary, so last year, Hungary banned gender studies programs in some of its universities.

So you can kind of see again these very powerful movements to try and silence discussion, try and silence debates around feminist and LGBT issues. 

In Hungary, they've started incentivising women to have more babies, which links to the far right movement with these far right conspiracy theories about white genocide and the great replacement, which is this idea that if women don't have more ethnic Hungarian or white American, white British babies, then the countries are going to be ‘overrun’ with immigrants from the global south.

So you are kind of seeing these very ideologies like anti-choice ideology, anti LGBT ideology coming together with your more traditional, far right racist ideology. And if we don't look at what these people are saying and what they're doing, then we can't effectively fight back against it. If we don't recognise that these organisations share ideas, share ideologies with some very, very nasty, far right organisations and these are the kind of respectable faces of the far right Heritage Foundation and Liberty Council and ADF, then we can't effectively resist it. 

So I think it's really important to look at what the anti-feminist organisations are doing and to make those links between racist, Islamophobic, homophobic ideologies, because then we can work together, we can form alliances, we can collaborate to fight back.

Alice: You talk about the need to fight back against these organisations, which in many cases, I guess especially the Christian Right in America (USA) are extraordinarily well resourced in terms of the money that they have available to them, and like you said, the speakers and the kind of celebrities like Kim Davis that they can kind of deploy to wherever in the world they want to target.

Is there an equivalent on the feminist side or the pro-women's right side, whatever you want to call it. And do you think we have the kind of resources and the facilities to match? 

Sian: Financially, no, we don't. I mean, if you take just one example on the Christian Right, like the Heritage Foundation they have a lot of resources, financial resources. One of their funders is the Koch brothers. So David Koch is the billionaire industrialist who died at the end of August. The feminist movement just does not have that kind of money, unfortunately, if only we did. 

What we do have is numbers, you know, like when these attacks happen on women's rights, there's a huge upsurge of emotion. There's a huge upsurge of activism. There is a huge upsurge of resistance. 

So I think if you take, Spain is a really good example, so in March, I reported on this anti-feminist march as part of International Women's Day, which was organised by Women of the World, not to be confused with WOW Festival, which is also called Women of the World, which is a pro-feminist, wonderful, global festival celebrating women's rights.

This is the Spanish Women of the World, which is a kind of coalition with anti-feminist organisations around the world, including ones in America (USA) and Canada and Latin America as well. So they organised this anti-feminist march in collaboration with another organization called CitizenGo, who are very close to the Vox party, which is the far right party in Spain who want to overturn gender-based violence laws, violence against women laws in the country, and who also have an anti-choice agenda. 

So there's this kind of growing anti-feminist rhetoric happening coming from the Vox Party and its various allies and Women of the World and CitizenGo and this other organization, so they had this march, but then you looked at what else was happening in Spain that weekend, the Women's Strike, which was huge, absolutely dwarfed the anti-feminist organising like thousands and thousands and thousands of women year on year, coming out on International Women's Day in Spain, taking part in this mass strike, taking part in this mass up surging of protest, demanding secure abortion rights, demanding secure domestic violence laws, and fighting back against the creeping misogyny and creeping repression of parties like Vox.

When you look at something like that, it's really heartening because you can see the backlash. You can see how these far right anti-feminist, right-wing organisations are working. But then you compare that to what women are doing on the ground, what the feminist organisations are doing, the fact that they rally together, they come together, they take to the streets.

Another really good example is Poland, which I'm sure that most people listening will remember. So in Poland, abortion is illegal except in very, very, specific circumstances, and then every now and again the Polish government goes, oh, actually we're going to get rid of any circumstances. It'll be completely illegal. We're not going to have any abortion at all. 

The last time that happened, women in Poland went on strike and I interviewed one of the organisers of this strike, and it was just completely grassroots. It was women getting together on Facebook, setting up Facebook groups in their individual towns and cities, starting from there and building up this mass movement of feminist resistance and feminist protest so that while the laws in Poland haven't got better, they haven't got worse.

And so while we don't have the millions and millions of dollars that some of the big, far right American (USA) organisations have, and the reporters, my colleagues at openDemocracy have found out that an awful lot of American (USA) money has been coming into Europe. We do have mass movement: we have grassroots activism.

We have a refusal to be silenced. A refusal to back down and that is incredibly powerful and, and really heartening. 

Alice: So you mentioned the Women of the World in Spain, and one of the things that really struck me when I was reading your article and I saw the pictures was that obviously among these people, there were women and they were campaigning basically against their own rights.

What's your sense of what it is that draws women into these kinds of campaigns and what's the best way of discussing it I guess without being patronising and without trying to silence women? 

Sian: There's always been women who have campaigned against women's rights.

If you look back at the suffragette movement, there were women who were anti the vote. In fact, you know, one of my favourite writers, Colette, didn't think women needed the vote. She kind of gets labelled as a feminist, and I think we have this problem with women in history, if she does something, she must be a feminist.

A lot of the way anti-feminism is expressing itself has changed quite dramatically in recent years. If you look at anti-choice propaganda, there's an awful lot of things, they use this term ‘abortion vulnerable’ as if women are being taken off the streets and forced to have abortions that they don't want. It's this idea that women are being denied choice. That women feel forced to have abortions when they might have other choices and they're vulnerable and they need your help. 

If you look at language coming out of Women of the World, they talk a lot about how women need better support in the workplace in order to have families. So they say, we are campaigning for more flexible working so that women can have a family and have a job. Well, that's feminism. That's what we've been campaigning for, for ages. So it's this kind of idea that feminism has been denying women the ability to have children, to have families to live a traditional lifestyle. And I'm using traditional in an advised way. That's the kind of language they would use.

 So it's very much this idea that feminism's been denying women something, and that these more traditional right wing organisations can give women back what they've lost through feminism. So it's this idea that women don't get to choose not to have an abortion. They're being kind of talked into it when actually if they had better support, they could have a baby and you know, go to work. But actually it's just nonsense. It's complete nonsense because if a woman wants to have an abortion, she wants to have an abortion and they're not actually campaigning for better child benefit. They're not campaigning to improve the school systems. They're not campaigning to make sure that women who are single mothers have all the state support that they need. They basically just want women to have more babies, but they couch it in this very much women's liberation language, and they are sort of taking the language of feminism to promote an ideology that what women really should be doing is just having lots and lots of babies staying at home, raising them, and having the man of the house as the leader of the house, and particularly Women of the World. There's a lot of stuff about complementarianism, which is this idea that men are men and women are women, and the father is the patriarch and the women is submissive to him.

But you can see how, if you’re unsure, and you are reading the website and you go, well, I really love my husband and I want to be able to do flexible working and you know, I want to have kids, but I want to have this, and you can see how attractive that would become.

And I think what we really need to do, and the way we overcome this idea is by talking much more about what feminism is, you know, like feminism is about making sure that women who want to have children have the support they need to have the families they want, that women who don't want to have children have the support they need to have control over their reproductive rights and their reproductive capability. To recognize that these old-fashioned ideas that men and men and women are women are harmful to men and to women and to kind of combat these with the truths about what feminism is.

 The changing rhetoric that the right is using to talk about what they do for women, this Society for the Protection of Unborn Children SPUC which is an anti-choice organisation than has recently become much more vocal on anti LGBT education. Their conference a couple of years ago was themed around protecting women. So it's very much this idea that we're not here to take away your rights, we're not here to say you can't, we're here to protect you, to support you. It's all very much this fluffy, loving language towards women. 

And you know, it's not new. It's new for them. But when you think about the beauty industry, how that co-opted loads of language around feminism, you know that your skin will be liberated if you use this product, that your hair will make you so strong and powerful. We've seen this co-option of feminist language to attack feminism before. 

Alice: How do you in your experience, women's rights activists or feminists deal with this stuff? Because I'm interested because I was talking to a pro-abortion campaigner in Northern Ireland, and she said, the best way to deal with the pro-life movement is to ignore them because there is such a difference on the foundational fundamental basis of what we do and don't agree on. But there is no point in trying to have a conversation. What's your take on that?

Sian: I think if you are fundamentally anti-choice, if you fundamentally don't believe that a woman has the right to choose, then no amount of reasonable rational argument is going to change that. It's the same with Brexit, right? Or being a Trump supporter, like you're going to just waste a lot of time and emotional energy having an argument with someone who's never going to move. 

But obviously there's lots of people in the middle. And I think the Irish referendum really proved that because there were lots of people who either weren't engaged with the issue or didn't really know where they stood or thought, you know, I can see it in this perspective and abortion might be the right solution, but I don't want a free for all. There was this kind of confused, uncertain, like, swing voters in the middle and it’s always worth talking to them because they're the ones who can be persuaded and who you can listen to and who want to listen.

And I think, the way that you talk to people who might be antagonistic or uncertain or ambivalent is by just telling the truth. 

When I was involved a little bit with the rape campaign and we talked a lot about women who were pregnant and then realised there was a fatal foetal abnormal and they had to carry that baby to term knowing that their baby wasn't going to survive, and one of the things that really stood out for me when I was looking through the stories was that women became completely trapped in their own homes. Because going outside when you are eight or nine months pregnant and having so many people ask you about the pregnancy, about the baby. Have you chosen a name? Have you decorated the nursery? When that woman knows, the only thing she can do is like have a smile and nod. Okay, well no, this baby's going to die. So they just stopped going out because it was too painful. And when you tell people that story, suddenly it changed their minds. They didn't agree with refusing women in that situation an abortion.

And once they agree with that, then they can see, well, maybe forcing any woman to carry a pregnancy to term when she doesn't want to be pregnant is a violation of her human rights. So it's very much about telling the truth and telling stories. 

You're never going to persuade the people who just fundamentally hate gay people or fundamentally believe that women's bodies are objects for them to control and own, but you can persuade people who haven't really engaged or haven't really had a chance to think about these things before. 

As a writer, the only way I can ever think to do that is by telling the stories and telling the truth. 

Alice: That's really nice to hear a kind of hopeful stance on what sometimes looks like a bit of a kind of bleak area.  

We've mentioned the word backlash a few times. What's your sense of whether things are generally getting worse and if they are going to kind of continue in that direction for a while?

Sian: It's always difficult to know, isn't it? Because to me it feels like they are getting worse, but maybe that's because I wasn't aware of some of the issues before, you know, I've grown up in a position of privilege, so I'm seeing things now that perhaps I didn't know about before. But I do genuinely believe that things are very bad right now, and we're seeing a rise in more and more extreme right wing politics across the world.

So Trump, who, despite the fact Trump has not led a Christian, using the word advisedly, life, he's pushing this kind of far right Christian agenda around abortion and LGBT rights and unravelling the laws that we thought were there and were, going to stay there. We've just seen his proposal to make it legal for business owners to discriminate against LGBT staff.

This is something that I wouldn't have thought was possible three years ago. I remember within a week of him becoming president, he got rid of the Obama law that George Bush had implemented, a law that meant that federal funds could not go to any organisations in international development that provided abortion services. And then Obama overturned that. And in the first week, Trump put it back in and, and obviously what's happening with abortion rights in America (USA) although that hasn't reached a top, top level, we're seeing more and more States overturn the sort of norms around abortion rights. So having these six week bills, having these kind of groups of men around the table and decide that they're going to cut off women's access to abortion and Trump supports that and he's filling up his Supreme court with men who support that too.

So that's definitely something that's getting worse. 

And when you look at the stuff I've been doing in Europe, I interviewed a Hungarian writer and she was like, I never, I never thought we'd be seeing them closing down university courses. And now here we are, she's like, I don't know what's going to happen next. She said, I would never have thought that they would get rid of abortion. But I don't know anymore because I never thought we would be here. 

So you are definitely seeing these kind of more and more extreme actions being taken by political leaders to repress women's rights and LGBT rights.

Turkey, again, another example of democracy just sliding away and then suddenly it's not there.

 In the UK I think it, with Brexit, we've seen an upsurge in LGBT hate crime. We've obviously seen an upsurge in Islamophobic and racist hate crime and obviously with Islamophobic hate crime, that's generally targeted against women because if a woman's wearing a veil, she's very visible and that is seen as an excuse to attack women.

And so things that I thought weren't possible have become possible, and that's what really frightens me. I mean, I don't think in the UK that we would have restrictions on abortion rights beyond the ones that we already have because the abortion law in the UK is, you know, illegal in Northern Ireland and quite complicated in the rest of Britain. I don't think that we're in a position where that would start to drip away and be chipped at. 

But more and more of the far right organisations are becoming embolden, you can't ever say, never say never. Because if you look at the rest of Europe, things that were impossible are now possible and why would the UK be immune to that?

Alice: And especially with the promotion of people like Jacob Reese Mogg, who is vocally anti-abortion to senior ministerial positions. It does become more conceivable than it has been in the past.

Sian: And I think Jacob Reese Mogg is a really interesting case because I've written about him in the past and about his views on abortion and LGBT rights, and you always get this backlash when you write about him, of people going, oh, he's entitled to his views, and I'm like, yeah, sure. He's entitled to his views. He's not like a pub bore, he's a very powerful politician now. He has influence. 

We have to keep speaking up for abortion rights and LGBT rights and women's rights when people like Mogg, Dominic Raab, who has called feminists obnoxious bigots, these are people in power now.

And unless we continue to say we care about our abortion rights, we care about LGBT rights, we care about domestic violence, we care about sexual violence, we are fighting for these issues, we don't know, they could react back. But if we stay strong and keep speaking up and keep demanding our rights, then it becomes harder for them to do that.

Alice: Who are the ones to watch? Who are the people who you've met and thought, wow, you know, your work is incredible?

Sian: Oh gosh. I mean, there's so many. One that really stands out recently are the feminists in Romania, this organization called FRONT and they're also on Facebook as Feminism in Romania, and those women are just amazing. 

It's a very small feminist movement in Romania. But recently there was this absolutely horrific case of a young teenage girl was kidnapped and raped and murdered in Romania, and she managed to get hold of her phone when she was kidnapped and called the police. And the police ignored it and they just didn't turn up and it took them 19 hours before they bothered to respond to the call, by which time she'd been raped and murdered. I mean, it was just horrific. 

And then the women in Romania, they just came out. They went onto the streets. They had huge protests, like they stood outside the ministries, high profile people being forced to resign and there was this real kind of upsurge of feminist energy and a refusal to say that this is normal, that we're going to accept this. 

I think we could really do with some of that energy in feminism in the UK you know? That when terrible things happen, we have mass civil disobedience, we get out onto the streets. I mean, we do to an extent, but it's not like these cases aren't happening in the UK as well. 

I was lucky enough to go to Bangladesh earlier this year to report on the other Women of the World, the Wow Festival. The Nice Feminist Global festival. I was really privileged to meet some amazing feminist women.

I met theatre makers, so this woman called Samina Luthfa, who's been working with garment factory workers in Dhaka to create street plays about their experiences of working in these factories and the inequalities that they face, both sex inequality and class inequality. A woman called Hussein, who has been sort of running a Vagina Monologues programme that's blossomed into women telling their own monologues and writing their own pieces. 

Then yeah, there's just some amazing women in Spain, and I'm just trying to remember the name of the organisation. There's a woman called Viviana Weismann, and then in Croatia you've got this organization called Roda who are working on reproductive rights, but also on issues around obstetric violence and helping women who've experienced obstetric violence, so, physical or emotional abuse during labour or during gynaecological procedures. They've been collecting women's stories and taking them to the UN to try and get more recognition. 

I could go on and on and on, and obviously in Ireland, Ailbhe Smyth, who was one of the great architects of the Together for Yes Movement who was fighting for women's abortion rights since the eighties and finally won. I remember on the day watching on YouTube her and her two colleagues just come out of this building, like arms in the air, huge smiles and thinking, yeah, we did it. They did it. Not we. They. So that was incredible footage. 

Alice: I had a little bit of a weep when I was watching that. 

Sian: I think I cried for like 24 hours that day, every time, any clip, I would just start sobbing with joy. 

Alice: And so on the obstetric violence thing, that's something that's really interesting. Is that something that you’ve written on?

Sian: Yes. I did a long read for News Mavens about it, and I mean, it is incredibly interesting, incredibly horrifying. It was a long read, it was about 3000 words that I could have written, like 30,000 words about it.

There's so many different issues. There's a lot of organisations in Europe. So I spoke to these two brilliant activists in Italy called Alessandra Battisti and Elena Skoko who have been collecting data from Italian women about their experiences of violence during labour and pregnancy.

There's an organization in Hungary. Also, organisations in Slovakia, Zuzana Limova, who made a documentary film about her own and other women's experiences of obstetric violence. And it's a really, it's a really terrifying situation because it's very, very unspoken and it happens in the UK it happens in the States, and particularly for black women where there are higher levels of obstetric violence than for white women and this kind of really intersects with issues around racism and the treatment of black women's bodies. But what you tend to see is very, very linked to all issues around women's reproductive health, including abortion, which is just denial that women know what is best for their own bodies. And this idea that women should surrender control of their bodies to a patriarchal force. 

So with abortion rights, women don't know that they don't want to be pregnant, that they should sacrifice their bodies in order to continue this unwanted pregnancy, that they should give up their own health and their own wellbeing in order to have a baby.

And with obstetric violence, it's a very similar situation. You either have situations where women are denied pain relief because they just need to shut up and get on with it. You have situations where women have pain relief that they don't want to have so, or interventions that they don't want to have.

In Romania, in the cities there's a very, very, very high level of caesarean sections that is absolutely nothing wrong with having a caesarean section. a medical procedure that women are entitled to have. But when you get these problems is when doctors refuse to do vaginal births and will only do caesarean sections, which is taking the choice out of the women's hands because the doctor knows what is better for this woman than she does. 

So yeah, I'm always really careful I would never say that there's anything wrong with having a C-section that's completely valid. It's completely right, but I will say there's something wrong when men tell women that they're not allowed to have the process that is right for them.

We had some terrible horror stories of women, the anaesthetic not working during a C-section so a woman felt everything and when she told a doctor, she could feel it they were like, no, you can't feel it. You're lying. So it is repeated issues of women being denied the right to say what they want for their own bodies and being expected to feel pain or to sacrifice themselves for their child or to this higher patriarchal authority. And I just feel the links between obstetric violence and abortion rights is inextricable. It's so strong. 

Alice: But obstetric violence is not something that is spoken about as much. It's not something that I have come across very often, even from a feminist lens.

Sian: Yeah, it's really unspoken. And when I spoke to the activist in Italy, so Elena Skoko and Alessandra Battisti they talked about this because they feel that, well, number one, we do have this kind of normalisation, that labour is supposed to be awful and painful and horrendous. If you had a really traumatic labour, well, so does everyone, why are you complaining about it? So there's that kind of silencing there. 

The second thing is that if a woman goes through labour and it's really traumatic and she has a healthy baby, people are like, you’ve got your healthy baby, what are you complaining about? And the way Elena put it is, that's the base level, you know, you should be able to expect more than one positive outcome. You should be able to be treated with respect, to be listened to you, to be heard and still have your healthy baby. That those two things shouldn't be incompatible. 

And the third thing is shame. It's exactly the same as with any other form of violence. Like women are embarrassed and they're ashamed and they blame themselves or they think they've done something wrong or they feel they should have spoken out and they didn't, and so therefore it's their fault.

So the kind of the same patterns of victim blaming and shaming of women comes into it just as with issues around domestic or sexual violence. In Zuzana Limova’s documentary, you've got a doctor who talks about slapping women during labour and he says, he uses this ridiculous term, like discipline or something because she was uncooperative.

Women don't want to talk about that. They don't want to say, oh, this happened to me, because they're worried they'll be blamed, they're worried, they’re ashamed. It's exactly the same dynamics as with any other kind of male violence or patriarchal control. But I do think women are speaking out about it much more now, which is really good.

Alice: One more question for you, Sian, which is like, basically like you've done all this amazing stuff and you've met all these wonderful people and produced all of this really important work on it. 

What are your plans next? What are the next things that you are interested in? The next things that you're going to do? 

Sian: Well, I'm continuing to work with openDemocracy on looking at the backlash. The reason I'm in London at the moment is to put together or to finish my book proposal. To write something much bigger about abortion rights and the far right backlash against women's rights.

It's taking its time writing this book proposal, but I have a lot of jobs, so I'm really excited. I mean, I've been doing a lot of research to put the proposal together and I'm really excited to be working on a much bigger project about this issue because I think it's fundamental.

It's fundamental to where we are right now. And if we don't look at misogyny and patriarchal control of women's bodies as an inextricable element of far right activism and far right planning, then we're missing a huge chunk of what's going on. 

And I do feel that there are some left wing writers who get it and who will talk about misogyny and we'll talk about the behaviour and control of abortion rights as being fundamentally part of the far right project, but a lot of, particularly left wing men, they just miss it. They don't notice it. So the more we talk about it, the better. 

And I'm also putting together the plans for next year's Bristol Women's Literature Festival, which should hopefully be landing in the last weekend of March 2020. So it'd be good to bring the festival back and I've got an amazing team of women working with me this year.

So hopefully we'll have some really brilliant writers. and I'm sure these issues will be discussed at the festival as well. 

Alice: Well, it sounds like a really exciting year for you and thank you so much for taking time to speak with us.

Sian: Thank you for having me.