Call the Midwife goes full PC

Now, a series like Call the Midwife, which is about a group of midwives living in East London in the 1960s, is always going to be PC.

But it's not as overt as when it features an episode that features Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).

Now, given that it's a BBC drama, it's got more than its fair share of anti-male, anti-white bias including:

• Except for the Doctor, all the main male characters a dopes (Chummy's husband the police officer, Fred the groundskeeper).  Only in the last few series has a second regular male character who isn't stupid or hopeless: the priest.;
• If there's violence in an episode, it's the husband more than 95% of the time;
• If a woman's in a bad situation (poor, forced into prostitution), it's because of the husband or man;
• None of the nurses there are in the slightest bit racist, not even the old ones.  It's mostly white males (and only occasionally white women) on the show who are racist, never any other race.  I think the series feels that they'd 'dealt' with racist women in an earlier series, forgetting that the stories focus on lots of new expectant mothers, so each year would bring a fresh batch of potentially 'racist' people who hadn't got 'the message'.  That being said, it'd get pretty boring if every week it was featured.

But this recent episode featuring FGM takes the cake.  The story centers around a Somali woman who is expecting, who is further along than she thought (she was going to give birth in her native Somalia).  The midwives realise that her nether regions have been mutilated and she won't be able to birth naturally.

Where the show goes full PC (you NEVER go full PC!) is that, once the otherwise all knowing doctor finds out from head office what it's all about, he declares that "it's a practice that predates Islam".

Think about that for a minute.  You've got a patient who has been mutilated.  You then find out that every girl from that country has been mutilated.  But your immediate reaction it to confirm that it's not Islam that's to blame, it "pre-dates Islam".

We can't have Islam being shown in a negative light, can we?

But, in a show that loves to portrait white men as abusive idiots, how is this any different from most of the other episodes?

I personally feel that the quality of the show has gone downhill since it finished up the original source material.  They've introduced topics on lesbianism, homosexuality, vaccinations and more.  What started out as touching real life stories has morphed into a show that tries to pack in as much historical content as possible.

That being said, given that it's supposedly set in London following on from WW2, there's surprisingly few characters, even in the background, with any war injuries (missing legs, arms, etc).  I guess in Call the Midwife world, those people just kindly disappeared into the background.  But that's probably just because they're men.