I've been sitting with the idea that women whose babies have died are 'bullies' for speaking out about the use of the term 'birthing parent.' I had to sit with it because it's something I could only read through my fingers, too painful to actually stare straight at and consume.

There are lots of us who've had punitive experiences around loss. There are hundreds (thousands?) of us in prison around the world. There but for the grace of something, go I.

What do we all have in common? We're women and we are mothers to those babies.

I can take all the dirt people dish, I'm centred, I know why they cry witch at women like us.

I cannot fathom such an impoverished sense of empathy which fails to see how losing a baby is compounded by denying we are mothers to our babies?

Women whose first baby or child have died often ask, "Am I still a mother?" The heart they grew in their bellies has ceased to beat. Does a mother cease to be a mother? Women's mothering can feel made invisible when the baby is gone.

It's ok that strangers don't know the true shape of my family, that the two children they see include another, missing forever. We manage that when we lose a child at any age. I don't need everyone to know, I'd sometimes be glad if they didn't in my particular circumstances.

But however women define themselves in relation to living or dead children, it is for the women themselves to define. Some of us say 'he died,' some of us want to call the loss our 'angel baby.' There's no one right label, there is the label which speaks to you.

I think however that recognition of the very particular visceral loss which belongs to mothers and has a taste all its own, which you never want to sample, could be something we support as a society. Not because mothers are above reproach or more special than others but

because it is reasonable, desirable, permissible that the space which marks loss for women should be held by all, and defined only by those who need to define it.

I mother, I am a mother, I am a woman who mothers. I have a connection to my children which matters.

How I define my relationship to loss is mine to manage. How others manage their knowledge or understanding of our losses, is theirs to decide.

Separating women who mother from loss though is how we end up in prison, denied our grief and punished for life.

I hope the women who've been shaken by this attempt to smash the bonds they have left with the babies they've lost, can move through it with support and love.

I'm certainly sending my love and solidarity to us all.

I'm struck as I often am, how women are expected to lay our flesh & bones bare to justify why we might want single sex spaces, or the word mother, and I resent that we cannot simply say no.

The complete sentence: no. Hear me say no. You will not take my words.