When Grief is Political by Janet Fraser

AN INTRODUCTION TO BORN STILL: A MEMOIR OF GRIEF

How many children do you have? An innocuous question, used thousands of times a day, as an entry into polite conversation. What you may not know is that sometimes when you ask that question of a stranger, they do a quick mental calculation before they answer. Are you likely to see them again? Are you in a position of authority over them? Do they feel like announcing a dead child in this interaction, or not? It’s not always so simple. So this is the story of my answer and why I sometimes hesitate before I answer you.

This is a memoir but it is a very particular kind of memoir: it is a political memoir of grief. It is a deeply personal, viscerally revealing story that could only have occurred in a specific context. When feminists said the personal was political, they probably did not anticipate in how many ways we could use the concept. It is an idea which has helped save my life or at least my sanity since I know only too well how easy it is to become the next woman in the spotlight, the target, the witch’s double. By placing my life in a political context it becomes easier to bear the weight of the hatred, betrayals and pain. The grief is another story but here too the political is personal. Or more precisely, the personal is political.

The Witch’s Double:  The Mother the System Tried to Crush

Around six thousand years ago, a young woman in what we now call Denmark, died along with her baby. Their community buried them in a joint grave. A flint knife indicating the baby’s sex to be male was placed in the grave, and red beads were used to decorate the mother’s hips. The baby was laid to rest on the outstretched wing of a swan. The poignancy of this scene speaks to us still because we recognise ourselves in this burial. Those of us who have experienced loss relate to the ritual of making a precious baby safe. Those of us touched by loss are moved by the deaths of both mother and baby. Despite our distance in time and our technology, the reality is that loss still occurs and can occur at any time throughout pregnancy and birth. I wonder though, would the Danish mourners recognise the current climate for loss?

The events I will describe took place between 2009 and 2012, and in a situation in Australian maternity politics that no longer exists because homebirth has been largely stamped out. Giving birth is now under obstetric control. I want to shed light on one argument used at that time to justify removing decision-making from Australian women: the trope of homebirthing women as a danger to our babies, to social cohesion, to ourselves and to other women.

It is a defining opportunity for me to have my own experience published in my own words after being ignored and sidelined for so long. During the events that unfolded, the media found it far easier to construct me as a witch than engage with my ideas.  I always shy away from using ‘witch craze’ as a descriptor for this phenomenon of tearing women down in Australia. I discussed this with my friend, Petra Bueskens, recently, and she made the brilliant point that it is perhaps death in an online world which we experience rather than death at the stake. I have taken that to heart. 

The current political context in which birth is becoming overtaken by gender neutral language – it is ‘people’ that give birth – as if the embodied act of birthing could ever be separated from our biology – also brings a certain urgency to describing these experiences. We cannot spell out having a female body in a world in which hatred of women is a scourge, if we cannot say that women give birth. What happened to me was because of my female status and because of how I am therefore categorised as female in patriarchy. I will not separate my sexed body from those events that unfolded. As midwife Marylou Singleton puts it, “So essentially, we’ve taken this quintessential female process of gestating and giving birth, which is something biologically that female members of the species do, and we’ve erased all reference to people of the female sex.” I also want to draw out the ways in which loss is described depending on the perceived level of social compliance of the woman, or girl, who is pregnant.

Briefly, I am the National Convenor of Joyous Birth, the Australian homebirth network. In 2009, I gave birth at home to my third child, Roisin. She was born still. From that moment, there was a deliberate calculation to smear me and undermine my capacity to resist both the medical establishment and the accepted understanding of what giving birth is all about. Everything from the ugly photos used by the media to the appointment of two women as Crown Solicitor and Counsel Assisting at the eventual inquest, was intended to warn other women: step out of line and beware the consequences. Strangely, no other woman in Australia has been through quite what I went through. Midwives are weeded out of their workplace via the coronial system, but mothers are usually used as witnesses in court to bring their midwives undone rather than be subject to scrutiny themselves.  I am a mother the system tried to crush.

Two main pathologies were brought to bear on me when my stillbirth occurred. I was a mad, bad freebirther and, as I wrote after the inquest, “Freebirthers are the new whore: they are vicious, unregulated, uncaring, murderous, dangerous and probably hairy.” I was further deemed by so-called medico-legal authorities, to have ‘concealed’ my pregnancy, a label with more than a hint of the ‘madwoman in the attic’ to it. One of the questions asked at the inquest was: “Does Janet Fraser pose a danger to public health?” So between my activism on behalf of birthing women and my refusal to be an obedient mother, public punishment had to be devised for me.

This book is about some of the experiences of my daughter’s birth, the police investigation, the coronial inquiry and the personal aftermath over the last eight years since the inquest. There was a three-year wait from birth to inquest, which was a very long gestation. During that time I could not speak out. I’ve lost a decade of my life. I birthed Roisin at 40, then went into the underworld and emerged, blinking, in 2019 at 50. I am still chewing through the limb I’ve lost to the trap but perhaps bringing light to those years will speed the process. It certainly can’t hurt.

This is not intended as an academic work, replete with footnotes and quotes. Any poetry is my own, unless otherwise stated. It is a reflection on my memory of these events and experiences. The pain of being called a liar over and over makes me very sensitive to cries that I am inventing what I’m writing. I am sure that were a person financially equipped, they could purchase the inquest transcription and produce a very different work. If I were approaching this as a historian, that’s exactly what I’d hope to do. But this is a memoir and speaks from the heart. It is my story of these events. Anyone sufficiently invested in another narrative is free to provide their own and many people have already done just that.

Now it is my turn.