Born Still Launch speech by Petra Bueskens
Launch speech for Janet Fraser’s Born Still: A Memoir of Grief
Petra Bueskens
In 1944 Arthur Koestler wrote an extraordinary essay called “The Nightmare That Is a Reality” declaring the atrocity of the holocaust when it was still not widely accepted as fact, and indeed when many were still denying it. The essay starts with a dream, or rather a nightmare, in which he is being murdered. He calls out to the many bystanders, but none of them hear him. Oblivious to his suffering, they walk on chatting and laughing. Musing on the archetypal significance of the dream, Koestler identifies a category of person he calls “the screamers” – an inelegant, if apt, term for those who are the prophets, whistle blowers and pariahs in any age, lost and unheard in the thicket.
While this is a well-known archetype, where Koestler gets interesting is in his identification of what we might call “practised unseeing” – we have to know and navigate the implicit rules and norms of a society in order to be on the right side of them. It is the rebels, outsiders and deviants who reveal the law, not those snuggly inside its lines. But – and this is his point – the insiders are not simply ignorant, nor in proverbial bliss, rather they are ever-vigilant, always on the look-out for slippage in both self and other. Many, especially those in institutions that wield power – like hospitals, universities and law courts -- are keenly aware of where the ideological lines lie. It is the practiced unknowing which afflicts the screamers -- and in turn society, the most.
I see Janet as a “screamer” in Koestler’s archetypal sense of a seer, a whistle blower, a teacher and a pariah. As we come together tonight to celebrate her beautiful book Born Still, let us take a moment to acknowledge Janet’s extraordinary bravery to call out the abuses in routine medicalised childbirth practices in her writing, political action, creation of the support group Joyous Birth, and in the mobilisation of her own story. Let us celebrate Janet’s insistence on women’s rights in childbirth in the face of overwhelming opposition and let us celebrate her integrity in helping so many women come to an understanding of normal birth, breastfeeding and attachment. Finally, let us celebrate Janet being able to tell this story – the story of giving birth at home to a still born baby and then being blamed for it -- plastered all over the mainstream media in the most vulgar, sensationalist and character-assassinating terms. Let us celebrate Janet finally being able to tell this story in her own words.
It is no surprise that Janet’s book has been published by the wonderful Spinifex Press which remains one of the few, if not only spaces for radical feminists to publish their work. Let us celebrate Spinifex press -- run by the inimitable team of Susan Hawthorne and Renate Klein -- for their commitment to fearless feminist and ecological writing.
Born Still is a very special kind of memoir. It is, as Janet informs us in the opening pages, a political memoir – in which “the personal” – specifically, Janet’s life -- has been rendered so political, by virtue of its disruptive place in institutional systems of power and governance, as to have implications for the law and social practice -- in particular, in relation to home birth and independent midwifery. What is at stake, as Janet consistently reminds us, is the very female autonomy (both legal and cultural) on which they both rely. That is, on which homebirth and independent midwifery rely.
The book, it seems to me, speaks at three levels: first, at the level of the personal – the embodied, experiential, emotional story of a life lived and of a baby -- little precious Róisín -- birthed and lost in the same moment; second, the book speaks at the level of the political – or the points at which Janet’s exercise of autonomy conflicted with implicit and explicit norms regarding where, how and with whom to birth, which were also brought to bear in an analysis of the meaning of Róisín’s death. Finally, the book speaks at the level of the poetic – here Janet’s unique capacity to fold her pain into art frames the text through-out. These three – the personal, the political and the poetic -- fold together to create a text that is at once lyrical, fierce, enlightening and in the very best tradition of women’s liberation writing.
Maria Turmarkin recently said she loves non-fiction books by poets, and I have to agree. As she says,
“Poets think faster, make connections faster … I feel like there are so many swollen, bloated bits of nonfiction out there —books that should have been essays, essays that should have been two paragraphs. But …for poets, each word counts in a way that perhaps it doesn’t for [other] writers.”
Janet’s literary aesthetic in Born Still captures this sharp, economical style – experience is at once exquisitely rendered with not a word too many! As someone inclined to verbosity, I am in awe of Janet’s felicity. I’ve seen it on social media for years where her quick wit and poetic sensibility combine to create sharp, insightful missives within seconds. Where I’m still musing, and in a stare, Janet has summed up the problem and defined the debate. But, her poetry is more than her capacity for verbal dexterity—it is also, as all good poetry is, a visceral quickening; an alchemy that stirs together the living and the dead. Poetry is liminal and takes us to the spaces in between.
I see the poems in this book as the moments when Janet moves into the sublime -- when she sits in the little crevice where for a cosmic moment she met Róisín – out there in the field, as Rumi might say, “beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing”. Her poetry emerges from this liminal space and punctuates the book ... It breathes her and us into and through the birth chapter, staccato sentences ushered in and taken out with a poem; it opens the doors to chapters three and five closes the doors of chapter four and six. It concludes the book. I think of these poems as little breadcrumbs of her soul that guide us through the forest of this story … perhaps to the maligned and misunderstood witch’s house and back again. They are souvenirs from this painful journey. Poetry lets Janet tells us in the language of the sublime what cannot be said in the language of the real.
It helps us to understand the unfathomable accusations of lying, the deep pain of betrayal by people who should have behaved better, the grief of losing her baby, the extraordinary institutional abuse and ushers us along Janet’s journey through this hell. I’d like to pause on these words because they are central to the story:
Lying
Betrayal
Institutional Abuse
Grief
In her powerful memoir, Janet holds together – both biographically and politically -- the fragile nexus of birth rights, feminism, and our culture’s fear and denial around both women’s procreative capacity and death. Part of this fight, as Janet has understood from the beginning, is the invisible tripwire that says: sure you can birth anywhere (by law) but really hospital is the only “safe space”, and therefore any birth that doesn’t happen in a hospital is suspect and should anything go wrong, this is always already the fault of the mother and/or her midwife.
And yet, as research by Professor Marjorie Tew shows (and on which Janet draws), the transition from home to hospital birth saw a decline in women’s safety. The key transition in women’s health in childbirth as elsewhere is hygiene and nutrition. Indeed, in Safer Childbirth?: A Critical History of Maternity Care, Tew shows that when the men went to war, including especially the doctors, women’s birth outcomes improved!
Since the medicalisation of birth, labouring women have been forced into the supine position, strapped to beds and forced to endure unnecessary and unwanted medical interventions including: intravenous syntocinon, premature rupture of membranes, caesarean sections, internal vaginal examinations (as Janet suffered expressly against her will during her first labour), forceps deliveries, episiotomies and more. In the 1960s and 70s these procedures were sometimes performed in the presence of large groups of student doctors without the mother’s consent. I am not suggesting that these interventions are never necessary; clearly, in rare instances, they are, but they are not necessary at the rates we currently have them and are doing much more harm than good. Moreover, and one would think in the year 2020 this would go without saying (but unfortunately it doesn’t), a woman’s permission is always the legal and ethical basis of any intervention on her body, including those deemed medically necessary.
It turns out a lot is hinging on this. Interrupting normal vaginal birth, breastfeeding and attachment has serious consequences for our collective physical and psychological health. What we are learning in the paradigm-shifting work on the human microbiome is that this complex system is handed from mother to child through birth and breastfeeding in a process so important to our long-term health and immunity that it literally has implications for how resilient we are as biological organisms in the face of, say, a world-wide pandemic. It seems we have forgotten we are animals, intimately woven into local ecosystems and the earth at large. Research on the human microbiome is only around a decade old, but what we know is that the infant gets his or her first “seeding” through vaginal birth and breastfeeding, and that this sets up the immune system for life. In the same way that development research shows us that giving aid to women is the best way to ensure nourished and educated children, families and communities, giving birth back to women, has massive implications for our collective physical and mental health. It is no exaggeration to say that natural birth is at the bedrock of human health at scale …
Unfortunately, we have in the contemporary west an allopathic medical system that exceeds its place for reasons of money, power, fear and control. As a consequence, we have a system of normalised obstetric violence that is increasingly being documented by women with research and writing skills who have themselves suffered. Women like psychology Professor Kalina Christoff who has painstakingly documented her experience, Evelyn Yang wife of former US Presidential candidate Andrew Yang who was the subject of a recent long-form article on obstetric violence in the Washington Post and our own Janet Fraser in this important book Born Still we are celebrating tonight. One wonders, if women of this calibre, education and expertise are experiencing obstetric violence, how many more are suffering alone and in silence?
Lest we think Janet is alone in being persecuted for exercising her choice in childbirth, she is not. She is one of several historical figures – and a key Australian feminist – in the fight for women’s right to choose where, how and with whom they will birth. This fight is global and well-documented by historians and sociologists, including our own Professor Kerreen Reiger who refers to the birth rights movement as the “forgotten women’s movement”, and show-cased in the award-winning film Freedom for Birth, while also being fought in courts internationally by both midwives and mothers. It is worth mentioning at this point that independent Melbourne midwives Gaye Demanuele and Melody Bourne are facing charges of manslaughter as we speak.
This is why women’s autonomy that sits at the bedrock of the homebirth movement. While natural birth and the myriad positive outcomes that flow from it are hugely important, these are secondary to women’s autonomy, because from this first principle, all else flows…
Janet asks us – through the poignant story of her own baby’s death and her loss as a mother followed by the nightmare of being blamed and, quite literally, the subject of an inquest – to reconsider and come to terms with the full meaning of women’s autonomy in birth. It isn’t simply the choice model of neoliberalism, the consumer model which obliterates or renders impossible any choice that exceeds the limited ones that prioritise medical control. She asks us to move outside and beyond the Overton window stipulating birth in a public or private hospital, with this or that bona fide medical attendant and shift to a model where women’s choices and needs are at the centre. Janet’s unflinching message is that birth is a woman’s choice, and her attendants need to rally around this choice and support the mother, rather than impose, cajole, insist, undermine, or worse, abuse her.
Janet is unfailing in her commitment to women’s rights in childbirth and held to this line with deep integrity even in the face of extreme vilification in the mainstream media and an inquest in which she was painted, in her words, as “the worst mother since Lindy Chamberlain” (which, for our international listeners, was the last very public, very “bad mother” in Australia falsely accused of killing her baby). In Born Still Janet tells her story – for the first time in her own words, and here we come into the fullness and complexity of her experience, the terrible grief of losing a wanted and cherished baby, and the unfathomable hell of then being blamed and vilified for it. In writing that is both exquisite and economical, poetic and political, feminist and fearless, she tells her own story, as it happened.
Always she reminds us that childbirth is a key site of the feminist struggle for women’s human rights. As the Hungarian midwife Ágnes Garéb has argued – herself recently pardoned from a two-year prison sentence, “the freedom in a country can be measured by the freedom of birth”. This is the message that Janet’s writing and life attest – as laid out in this beautifully written political memoir. I raise a toast to Janet in celebration of her book, and I ask you all to do the same.
Dr Petra Bueskens is an Honorary Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, a psychotherapist in private practice and a freelance opinion writer. Her books include Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities (Routledge 2018) and the edited volumes Mothering and Psychoanalysis (Demeter, 2014) and Australian Mothering: Historical and Sociological Perspectives (co-edited, Palgrave, 2020).
Watch the video of the launch below.
