Call The Midwife Confronts A Brutal Reality In An Unflinching New Storyline This Week

Call the Midwife is back in full swing with its 14th season, ready to tug at our heartstrings again.

In its third episode of the season, the show continued its trend of tackling deep-rooted societal issues with sensitivity and an unflinching spotlight. This time, it took on internalised ableism by exploring the abandonment of children due to disability.

For many disabled people watching, all too familiar with negative reactions to the ‘burden of disability’, it would have felt heart-wrenchingly close to home.

A baby girl is born to an excited first-time mum desperate to meet her daughter. Upon her birth, however, the midwife notices something on her lower back, later identified as spina bifida, a congenital disability that causes a gap in the spine.

Without even a moment in her mother’s arms, the sweet baby girl is rushed to the hospital to be looked over and taken to surgery. A couple of scenes later, the midwife walks in on the mother packing to leave the maternity home.

When questioned, she says, with heartbreak in her voice, that she cannot take care of the baby and she’s going home. She and the father believe that “the state” can take better care of her than they can because it’s not possible for them to parent a disabled child.

The parents’ immediate detachment from their daughter and suppressed disgust at her disability was horrifying and well done. We feel sympathy for their struggle, but the audience also experiences intense revulsion for how easily and quickly the parents walk away from their newborn baby. Neither of them held or looked at her, not once. The parents don’t even give her a name. The nuns later call her June.

Unable to comprehend what has happened, the parents seem to be numbed by the child’s disability. What’s most apparent is that their internalised ableism – and a profound misunderstanding of disability – have led to this choice. Internalised ableism is a form of oppression brought about by the absorption of commonplace negative messages about disability. These attitudes were particularly prevalent, noxious and unchecked in the mid-20th century.

This attitude, when left unchallenged, can result in precisely what we see play out on screen: the abandonment or rejection of disabled people, even our own blood. Call the Midwife has accurately depicted such attitudes in the ’50s and ’60s throughout its run.

Though we still have a long way to go in the modern day, both on screen and in daily life, our understanding of disability then was even less sophisticated than it is now, and many parents rejected their children if they were born with a disability.

A considerable number of children were consigned to institutions instead of living at home with their families, something we saw in a series-three episode when a young girl with Down’s syndrome became pregnant while living in one such state home.

We’ve seen the theme of ableism pop up repeatedly throughout the series’ run, particularly during the excellently produced, long-lasting Thalidomide storyline, and when Fred and Violet first met their adopted son Reggie and were unsure of how his Down’s syndrome would impact their lives.

The show also spotlights the struggles of social services. After the parents decide to give up their rights to June, a social worker visits the maternity home to say that the state cannot take her due to the additional “financial burden” her care would demand.

The social worker asserts that the parents must “take her on” because they have the financial means to do so.

Despite offers of far more robust in-home support than parents in the UK can expect today, the parents refuse to reconsider, claiming that caring for her would prevent them from having other children.

Both the social services’ and the parents’ response to this adorable baby expose the internalised ableism that lives in us all. Negative, implicit associations ensure that everyone involved assumes the baby will be a “burden” and that her disability will be an automatic barrier to fulfilment.

No one knows this for sure: through the ableist lens such things are just assumed.

The Nonnatus House residents take over June’s care temporarily. Watching the baby jump between carers, all while thriving after life-saving surgery, is a gut-wrenching watch. We see glimpses of a tiny child, too small to voice her own needs, being carefully tended to by people who have rejected their own internalised ableism and know the child as she is: an innocent baby.

Eventually little June is taken to the orphanage run by the nuns, given an opportunity at a new life, and she leaves with only a letter from her mother explaining why she abandoned her.

Call the Midwife masterfully explores this baby’s brutal start to life, exposing the varying impacts of internalised ableism while highlighting the importance of caring for all children, no matter their circumstances.

While many in the audience undoubtedly would have preferred to see the parents judged a little more for their rejection of an innocent baby, the show approaches the subject fairly. All involved are allowed their feelings and no one is judged too harshly for their decisions.

But the overarching theme is sadness for the child, who will live her life knowing her parents abandoned her for being disabled.

The show also avoids focusing on one person’s response or interaction with the child – instead, the episode pans out, allowing everyone’s perspective airtime, and highlighting the broad spectrum of people involved in an abandoned child’s journey.

Once again, Call the Midwife confronts a brutal reality: internalised ableism too often prevents people from seeing the person before the disability.