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Issue Details: First known date: 2019... 2019 Towards an Autoethnography of Stillbirth
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'In 2009, the author gave birth at home to her third child, and second daughter, who was stillborn. This paper is about some of that experience of birth, police investigation, the coronial inquiry and the personal aftermath over the last seven years since the inquest. There was a three-year wait from birth to inquest which was a very long gestation and a time in which she could not speak out. Between her activism on behalf of birthing women through a long campaign by doctors and some midwives to remove consumer-driven homebirth from Australian women, and her refusal to be an obedient woman, public punishment had to be devised. The paper draws out the ways in which loss is described depending upon the perceived level of social compliance of the woman, or girl, who was pregnant, including experiences of pregnancy and birth that were made public such as those of Keli Lane, a young Australian woman convicted of murdering her baby.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Hecate vol. 45 no. 1/2 Carole Ferrier (editor), Jena Woodhouse (editor), 2019 21220789 2019 periodical issue

    'The house husbands or SNAGS, a new phenomenon, did not see this as a permanent role and most, sooner or later, tired of a lack of life in the public sphere; despite a brief fashion for the male population's public job being private Home Duties, many men longed to re-enter the usual world; one in which important or sometimes stimulating things went on. The Australian Institute of Family Studies (in the government Department of Social Services) has regularly researched attitudes to gender roles within households in relation to things such as divided domestic work and has found, in its surveys, considerable support for shared housework. Other factors are in play in many countries, especially the incidence of child marriage (650 million girls) and of Female Genital Mutilation (imposed upon 200 million girls), the latter increasingly administered by actual health services rather than the stereotypical old, female relative with a razor blade and a sewing basket. The witches and midwives of centuries ago were one thing (documented, for example, in Barbara Ehrenreich's 1973 Witches, Midwives and Nurses) but more recently, in COVID-19 times, women are much in demand in their jobs/professions as health workers, and have been given enthusiastic encouragement to lead their working life in close contact with often viralent infections, as "essential workers"-a category that seems to have benefits for the bourgeoisie who belong to it, but not many for nurses working long and demanding shifts, wearing often-uncomfortable Personal Protective Equipment, in hospitals and infection-testing clinics.' (Carole Ferrier, Editorial introduction) 

    2019
    pg. 175-186, 309
Last amended 5 Mar 2021 07:47:20
175-186, 309 Towards an Autoethnography of Stillbirthsmall AustLit logo Hecate
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