Call The Midwife viewers have hailed the show for the “brave” and “sensitive” way it shone a spotlight on female genital mutilation (FGM).

Sunday night’s instalment of the BBC series about midwives in 1960s London featured a pregnant Somali woman named Nadifa who had gone through the barbaric procedure as a child.

Call The Midwife
Call The Midwife (BBC/Neal Street Productions/Sohie Mutevelian)

In harrowing scenes, she has to endure a traumatic birth to deliver her baby.

Viewers were impressed with the way the issue was handled.

An estimated 200 million girls around the world have been put through the procedure, which involves the partial or total removal of parts of the female genitals for non-medical reasons.

Meanwhile, an anti-FGM campaigner who worked with Call The Midwife on the storyline has launched a fundraising drive to help cut maternal mortality rates in Somaliland.

Nimco Ali, the co-founder of non-profit organisation Daughters Of Eve, was the victim of FGM as a child and worked closely with show bosses on the drama series.

In December, Nimco travelled to Somaliland, where Nadifa is from, and met doctors who said women and babies are dying during childbirth due to a loss of blood.

She has pledged to raise £10,000 to help fund a blood bank to improve Somaliland’s maternal mortality rate, which is currently one of the worst in the world, according to Unicef.

Call The Midwife creator Heidi Thomas has previously said she wanted to write about FGM for a long time but had to wait until the timeline of the show reached the 1960s.