Closing Children's Centres - is this a feminist issue?

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Regular poster (promise) but name change as my real name is linked to the campaign.

Our local authority is proposing to manage their budget cuts by closing 8 children's centres across the borough, tendering them out to private nurseries to offer the 2 year central government funded nursery places and focusing on outreach work and 1:1 support. Myself and other parents are not impressed with this, and have raised a lot of issues regarding them getting rid of the universal offer and how this will impact the community etc.

But, I'm beginning to think it might be a feminist issue. They have done the obligatory equality assessment, but despite the users being overwhelmingly female, there is nothing in the assessment about sex or gender. Shutting the centres will mean that midwives and health visitors will not be able to run clinics from them, so women will have to travel further to access maternity and postnatal health care (they haven't consulted the midwives, but that's another issue). They wont have access to breastfeeding peer support groups except at the hub centre (which is difficult to get to). I'm wondering if anyone can help me compose an email to the local councillors outlining why this proposal could be considered discriminatory as it unfairly targets women (and children)?

Any thoughts or help very gratefully received!

Yes it is a feminist issue. It disproportionately affects women. There is no way they can say it doesn't. Maybe it shouldn't disproportionately affect women if men were providing the same level of childcare but they aren't! Also from what you describe this is likely to affect women with young babies if health clinics won't be able to run in the near vicinity. Regardless of whether men are doing childcare in any extraordinary proportions in this borough, that will always affect women more because of maternity leave especially the early part of maternity leave which the vast vast majority of women will take to recover from giving birth if nothing else.

And then not to mention the proportion of HCPs and midwives who are women.

It's definitely a feminist issue.

I will say, as well, that we don't have the same sorts of spaces in Scotland and it does impact on how easy it is to run breastfeeding support groups.

Whether there's an ideological basis for wishing fathers did more childcare or not, the fact is that currently that isn't the case. There will be statistics on that. And fathers certainly don't need to go to the breastfeeding support group hoping to get their latch checked.

And these places can be a lifeline for mothers suffering pnd.

When I lived in Newcastle, the children's centre trips allowed me space away from an abusive man, where I could spend happy time with my daughter. I wouldn't have been able to afford to go any other way.

Hmm. Our local children's centre is likely to close soon but mainly because it is so badly run that hardly anyone attends it. Children centres have very specific targets that are almost impossible to meet and in chasing those targets they alienate people, thus shooting themselves in the foot.
The loss of safe spaces for mothers is a feminist issue, but actually I think the failures and closures of CCs is more down to ridiculous policies, bureaucracy and terrible management.