Society's Gatekeepers: Who Decides Women's Health and Safety?
From criminalised midwives in Georgia to a repurposed cancer drug, this week exposes who controls women's access to care — and who escapes accountability.
Editorial digest April 12, 2026
Last updated : 08:18
The thread connecting this week's most striking stories is deceptively simple: women's bodies remain subject to rules written by people who will never inhabit them. In Georgia, qualified midwives face criminal prosecution for doing their jobs. In oncology labs, a drug designed for something else entirely may save lives that current treatments cannot. And at a prestigious liberal arts college, a president insists he simply could not have known what a convicted sex offender was really like. The common denominator? Systems that fail women, then shrug.
Why is Georgia criminalising its own midwives?
Here is a fact that should stop you cold. In the US state of Georgia, a nationally accredited midwife who runs one of the state's only freestanding birth centres cannot legally provide clinical care to her own patients. According to the Guardian, Tamara Taitt, executive director of the Atlanta Birth Center, could face criminal charges simply for doing what she is trained and certified to do.
A new lawsuit seeks to overturn Georgia's ban on certified professional midwives — a ban that persists amid what the Guardian describes as a "worsening maternal health crisis." Black women are disproportionately affected. They are turning to midwives precisely because the hospital system is failing them: the United States already has the highest maternal mortality rate among wealthy nations, and Black women die in childbirth at roughly three times the rate of white women.
For a British audience, this may sound alien. The NHS employs thousands of midwives; midwife-led care is not merely legal but actively encouraged. Yet the underlying question resonates here too. When institutional medicine fails specific communities, criminalising the alternatives is not regulation — it is abandonment dressed up as public safety.
Could a repurposed drug change outcomes for aggressive ovarian cancer?
Platinum-resistant ovarian cancer is one of oncology's cruellest diagnoses. When the disease returns within six months of chemotherapy, options narrow sharply. Now, according to the Guardian, a clinical trial suggests that relacorilant — a drug originally developed for Cushing's syndrome, a rare hormonal disorder — could extend survival in these patients.
The science matters, but so does the principle. Drug repurposing is faster and cheaper than developing new compounds from scratch. For patients with platinum-resistant ovarian cancer, who have historically been offered limited therapeutic avenues, even a modest survival extension represents something the system has rarely given them: time.
This is not a miracle cure. The trial results need scrutiny, replication, regulatory review. But at a moment when cancer research funding faces political headwinds on both sides of the Atlantic, the finding is a reminder that innovation does not always require billions — sometimes it requires looking at what already exists with fresh eyes.
What did Bard College's president really know about Epstein?
Leon Botstein has led Bard College for decades. He is one of the longest-serving university presidents in America. This week, according to the Guardian, he told staff that there was "no way he could have known" that Jeffrey Epstein — a convicted sex offender during their years of interaction — was "actually reprehensible."
The board has hired WilmerHale, a major law firm, to investigate Botstein's communications with Epstein. Botstein reportedly predicted he would "soon be cleared." Perhaps he will be. But the defence itself — I simply could not have known — has become a refrain so familiar from institutional leaders that it has lost all force. Epstein's first conviction was in 2008. It was public. It was not obscure.
The pattern repeats across universities, charities, cultural institutions: proximity to wealth buys extraordinary benefit of the doubt. The question is not whether Botstein will be cleared by his own board's chosen law firm. The question is why institutions consistently treat ignorance as exoneration when the information was hiding in plain sight.
A quieter story worth noticing
Amid the weightier headlines, the BBC reports that a women's network for mid-life wellbeing has launched, founded by a woman who challenged herself to try fifty new things before turning fifty. It is a small story. But it speaks to a gap the health system rarely acknowledges: the years between fertility-focused care and elderly care, when women's health concerns are routinely dismissed as inevitable decline. That someone had to build a support network from scratch tells you everything about what the system does not provide.
What ties this together
These stories share a skeleton. Qualified midwives criminalised while maternal mortality climbs. A cancer drug ignored for years because it was filed under the wrong condition. A university president confident he will be absolved by the institution he leads. A woman building a wellbeing network because nobody else did.
The systems that govern women's health, safety, and justice are not broken by accident. They are functioning exactly as designed — for someone else's priorities. The question Britain should ask itself: where are our own blind spots just as conveniently arranged?
