Remember unassisted birth advocate Meg Heket? Heket, you may recall, is the sister of Janet Fraser (My dead baby was not as traumatic as my birth rape). She is also a co-administrator with Ruth Rodley of a number of homebirth and unassisted birth groups. No doubt you remember Ruth. She’s the one who, in the wake of 7 homebirth deaths in 1 week, referred to the death of a baby as “a little hickup.”
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.[/pullquote]
Heket has an extraordinary amount of blood that is on her hands. I cannot keep track of the many, many babies who are dead because she encouraged their mothers to have unassisted homebirths. I wrote yesterday about another member of her group who is boasting about her unassisted VBAC at home despite the fact that the baby is dead (The unspeakable callousness of a homebirth loss mother). Evidently someone shared the post with Heket is this is her response:
No, so I just make sure to make things really confusing so she’s GUARANTEED to misinterpret it on her blog.
I HATE ALL CAESAREANS! NO CAESAREAN WAS EVER NECESSARY AND IT’S BETTER TO DIE THAN HAVE MEDICAL INTERVENTION IN LABOR. Excuse me, I need to go and eat babies now.
PS. I haven’t seen the blog post because I go out of my way to avoid anything and everything she and her cult ever say. It works brilliantly
Ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha!
But the worst thing about Meg’s inanity is not that she’s dancing on yet another baby’s grave, although that is despicable. The worst thing is that she and her unassisted birth buddies never learn … anything. Despite the astronomical perinatal death toll in her group she has been completely unable to make the connection between the dead babies and their unassisted births. She and her compatriots repeatedly counsel women that they should “trust” birth even though birth lets them down time and time again.
As Albert Einstein explained, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Over and over again Heket encourages high risk women to give birth unassisted at home and over again babies die. She seems to have a serious problem with the concept of cause and effect.
Heket is hardly alone.
“Jackie” addressed herself to me in the comment section of the post about the mother’s callous response to the baby’s death:
…You are disgusting and pathetic to use this mothers tragedy for your douchebaggery blog post! Having lost my father a few weeks ago, I’ve seen first hand how everyone around me copes with death and EVERY SINGLE PERSON handles it differently …
Indeed, they do; there’s a very broad range of normal responses to grief. But boasting about your role in another person’s death is outside the realm of normal, particularly if the dead person is a close family member.
“Wow! Did you see how I was handling driving 90 mph before I hit a tree and killed my daughter?” is not a normal response.
“You’ve got to admit I’m a great arsonist!” is not a normal response to the accidental death of a your toddler in the house fire that you set.
“Look at me! I pushed a baby out of my vagina and killed him in the process!” is not a normal response to your baby’s death.
It’s the response of a cult member and Meg Heket’s unassisted birth group is a cult. The most important rule in a cult is to keep believing in the wisdom of the cult leader regardless of how often he or she is demonstrably wrong. Meg Heket is like the leader of a millennial cult who is constantly specifying the day that the world will end, and constantly being proven wrong. Mentally healthy people would learn from that experience and stop believing a person who is wrong over and over again, but not cult members. They keep believing the predictions and hoping that this time is going to be different.
I write about the deaths of these babies for a reason. I don’t want them to be buried twice, first in a tiny coffin in the ground and then in the minds of the people who were responsible for their deaths. I am not hoping to change the minds of those who made the irresponsible choice; it’s too late for that. I’m hoping to change the minds of the other cult members and, especially, of people thinking about joining the cult of unassisted birth. If I can prevent the death of even one baby, I’ve accomplished the job I set out to do.
Thinking about unassisted homebirth? Then think about how these women sacrificed their babies and think again.
