I’ve been debating whether to write once again about unassisted childbirth advocate and supreme narcissist Janet Fraser. Since everything is always and only about Janet, she no doubt will enjoy the attention.
Nonetheless, I think it is important to point out that when it counts, Janet Fraser seeks professional assistance. No, silly reader, not for something as trivial as whether her baby girl Roisin lives or dies. Only when it’s really, really important: when it concerns Janet herself. Even though there is no requirement to bring a barrister to a Coroner’s inquest, Janet Fraser decided she needed assistance. How ironic.
Fraser was interviewed in late March 2009, supposedly after labor with her third child had begun:
Janet Fraser is in labour… Has she called the hospital to let them know what’s happening? “When you go on a skiing trip, do you call the hospital to say, ‘I’m coming down the mountain, can you set aside a spot for me in the emergency room?’ I don’t think so,” says Fraser, whose breathing sounds strained.
This is pretty much where we end the conversation that started with me calling Fraser and asking if it was true that her organisation, Joyous Birth, was advocating that women go it alone giving birth at home, with no midwife or GP or bags of resuscitation gadgets…
Fraser is 40. She hasn’t seen a doctor or any health professional since becoming pregnant this time. No ultrasound, no genetic testing, no internal examinations, no stethoscope. Does she have any feeling for how long the labour will go? “I could do this for days. My daughter’s birth was 50-something hours. You just do it — it’s just birth, a normal physiological process.”
… [T]he natural water birth of her third child, a girl, at her home went horribly wrong in the early hours of March 27.
Ambulances were sent to the address following a triple-0 call made at 1.13am.
An ambulance service spokesman said paramedics were called to a Croydon Park address for a newborn baby who had suffered cardiac arrest and was not breathing.
Paramedics failed to revive the baby throughout the journey to the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital at Camperdown.
Does Janet blame herself for Roisin’s senseless, preventable death? Of course not. Narcissists never blame themselves and when anyone suggests that they take responsibility for their own actions, narcissists declare that they are being persecuted. Indeed, according to Janet, Roisin’s death wasn’t even traumatic.
My birthrape with my first child is traumatic. My stillbirth was not.
But evidently her Coroner’s inquest is traumatic and she wants not only the assistance of a barrister, but your assistance, too.
I hope that you, dear readers, will consider a donation to help my family out in this instance. It is because of the work I do in birth that I have been targetted in this way and while I will never stop doing this work, I have paid high prices professionally and personally and now in a very real and literal sense, for speaking the truth about birth in Australia.
You can paypal to janetlegalfees … if you feel moved to donate. I will be eternally grateful and each one of you will know that you did something concrete towards helping me and the families with whom I’ve worked. Thank you.
Why doesn’t she go to the Coroner’s inquest unassisted. All she has to do is answer questions truthfully. Talking is completely natural. Does she really need assistance just to talk?
Of course, Janet isn’t just talking, she’s lying:
But Ms Rees said that Ms Fraser told doctors at RPA that she had detected a pulse in the umbilical cord just after the birth.
The inquest heard Ms Fraser now believes there was no pulse, and that she had taken it at a time of “high agitation.”
But lying to save yourself is utterly natural, too. Why shouldn’t Fraser lie “unassisted” instead of having her barrister “deliver” her lie for her?
Janet Fraser let her daughter die unassisted because she was more interested in meeting her narcissistic needs than in preserving her daughter’s life. And now Janet Fraser is telling bold faced lies with legal assistance because meeting her narcissistic needs is far more important to her than the truth.
