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BIRTH PAINS: CHANGING UNDERSTANDINGS
OF MISCARRIAGE, STILLBIRTH AND NEONATAL DEATH
IN AUSTRALIA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
SUSANNAH RUTH THOMPSON B.A. (Hons)
A thesis presented in fulfilment of the degree Doctor of Philosophy
School of Humanities, University of Western Australia
2
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
4
ABSTRACT
6
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
7
INTRODUCTION
9
CHAPTER ONE
30
‘The babies scarcely mattered’:
Literature review and historical context
CHAPTER TWO
69
‘A delicate girl has no right … to bear children’:
The medicalisation of childbirth and discourses of responsibility and success
CHAPTER THREE
104
‘It was as if she had never existed’:
The invisibility of perinatal loss, 1940-1970
CHAPTER FOUR
136
Emerging change: The impact of theories of grief and loss
3
on constructions of perinatal death in the l970s and 1980s
CHAPTER FIVE
161
‘I consider as much has been done as can be done’:
Opposition and resistance to emerging understandings of perinatal
loss in the 1970s and 1980s
CHAPTER SIX
181
‘Awakened by angels’: re-inscribing the foetal body
in the late twentieth century
CHAPTER SEVEN
203
‘I’d just like to die with a bit of peace’:
Renegotiating and reinscribing perinatal loss
CHAPTER EIGHT
221
The ‘pointless pregnancy’: reinforcing the inscription
of ‘defectiveness’ at the end of the twentieth century
CONCLUSION
250
BIBLIOGRAPHY
256
4
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The research and completion of this thesis was made possible through the provision of
several grants and scholarships from the University of Western Australia [UWA], including
UWA’s University Postgraduate Award and Completion Scholarship; the Graduate
Research School travel funding; the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Dean’s Postgraduate Research Award; various School of Humanities travel and conference
grants; and a Postgraduate Students’ Association Conference Grant.
I owe a great debt to several staff members within the School of Humanities at UWA. First
and foremost, my heartfelt thanks to my supervisors, Dr Andrea Gaynor and Associate
Professor Charlie Fox, who were unfailingly supportive and encouraging throughout the
entire course of this research. Both Andrea and Charlie were also wholeheartedly
committed to developing my skills as a historian and university teacher, and provided
invaluable opportunities for teaching and publication for which I am grateful. Associate
Professor Rob Stuart has also been an unwavering source of support and his confidence in
my ability as a novice historian has often helped me get through some particularly trying
times throughout my time as a doctoral student.
Several individuals provided invaluable assistance throughout the course of this research. In
particular, I thank Belinda Jennings, Reverend Robert Anderson, and Libby Lloyd at King
Edward Memorial Hospital for Women in Perth for sharing their experiences of working
with women who have experienced perinatal loss. Belinda and Libby also gave me access
to unpublished documents and a vast collection of contemporary psychology and nursing
scholarship. Robyn Waymouth, head archivist at the Royal Women’s Hospital in
Melbourne, gave generously of her time and knowledge of the history of women’s health
care at the hospital, and provided me with a space to work in the archives during my study
trip to Melbourne.
I was particularly overwhelmed by the generosity and openness of the participants in the
oral history component of this project. I wish to thank those women who shared their
experience of losing a baby with me, either through the interview or through personal
5
correspondence and many long and open conversations. Their willingness to revisit painful
memories has made this thesis possible.
I would never have been able to complete this research, much less juggle teaching
responsibilities and family commitments, without the support of my extended family.
Thanks to my parents, Peter and Christine Brain, instilling in me a love of learning and a
(mostly) inquiring mind! Thankyou in particular to my wonderful mum who flew from
Armidale to spend two weeks caring for Olivia and the running of the house at the very end
of this project. My siblings, Matt and Rachael, Jonathan and Rosie, and David, have proved
themselves yet again to be friends of the highest calibre, and I thank them for providing
relief from the pressure of the thesis and for maintaining an interest in my work. A special
note of thanks to the Pitt crew, who were supportive in so many ways! Finally, I am deeply
indebted to my husband James, and daughter Olivia, my greatest champions and source of
strength. Thank you for your dedication to this thesis, which has so occupied my time and
energies and indeed has been the central focus of our family life for several years. It is
without a hint of exaggeration that I say that this thesis would never have come to fruition
had it not been for James, who willingly and cheerfully stayed at home to care for our baby,
listened to me for countless hours as I worked through a particularly frustrating problem in
my work, and who cheered me on to the end. This thesis is for you both, James and Olivia,
and is inspired by the memory of Jude Lachlan Thompson.
6
ABSTRACT
Feminist and social historians have long been interested in that particularly female ability to
become pregnant and bear children. A significant body of historiography has challenged the
notion that pregnancy and childbirth – considered to be the acceptable and ‘appropriate’
roles for women for most of the twentieth century in Australia - have always been
welcomed, rewarding and always fulfilling events in women's lives. Several historians have
also begun the process of enlarging our knowledge of the changing cultural attitudes
towards bereavement in Australia and the eschewing of the public expression of sorrow
following the two World Wars; a significant contribution to scholarship which underscores
the changing attitudes towards perinatal loss.
It is estimated that one in four women lose a pregnancy to miscarriage, and two in one
hundred late pregnancies result in stillbirth in contemporary Australia. Miscarriage,
stillbirth and neonatal death are today considered by psychologists and social workers,
amongst others, as potentially significant events in many women’s lives, yet have received
little or passing attention in historical scholarship concerned with pregnancy and
motherhood. As such, this study focuses on pregnancy loss: the meaning it has been given
by various groups at different times in Australia's past, and how some Australian women
have made sense of their own experience of miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal death within
particular social and historical contexts.
Pregnancy loss has been understood in a range of ways by different groups over the past
100 years. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when alarm was mounting over the
declining birth rate, pregnancy loss was termed 'foetal wastage' by eugenicists and medical
practitioners, and was seen in abstract terms as the loss of necessary future Australian
citizens. By the 1970s, however, with the advent of support groups such as SANDS
(Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Support) miscarriage and stillbirth were increasingly seen as
the devastating loss of an individual baby, while the mother was seen as someone in need
of emotional and other support. With the advent of new prenatal screening technologies in
the late twentieth century, there has been a return of the idea of maternal responsibility for
producing a ‘successful’ outcome. This project seeks to critically examines the wide range
of socially constructed meanings of pregnancy loss and interrogate the arguments of those
groups, such as the medical profession, religious and support groups, participating in these
constructions. It will build on existing histories of motherhood, childbirth and pregnancy in
Australia and, therefore, also the history of Australian women.
7
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
AAPC: Association for the Advancement of Painless Childbirth
AJAN: Australian Journal of Advanced Nursing
AMA: Australian Medical Association
AMG: Australasian Medical Gazette
ANJ: Australian Nursing Journal
ANZJOG: Australian and New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology
BOHP: New South Wales Bicentennial Oral History Project
CEA: Childbirth Education Association
CVS: Chorionic Villus Sampling
IMJA: Intercolonial Medical Journal of Australasia
JAN: Journal of Advanced Nursing
KCB: Karrakatta Cemetery Board
KEMH: King Edward Memorial Hospital for Women
MCB: Metropolitan Cemetery Board
MJA: Medical Journal of Australia
8
NICU: Neonatal Intensive Care Unit
NSW: New South Wales
PDMC: Perinatal Death Multidisciplinary Committee, Royal Women’s Hospital Melbourne
RWH: Royal Women’s Hospital, Melbourne
SAFDA: Support After Foetal Diagnosis of Abnormality
SANDS: Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Support group
SMH: Sydney Morning Herald
Vic.: Victoria
WA: Western Australia
9
INTRODUCTION
In May 1967, two women shared a room in a small private maternity hospital in Perth.
Their room was situated next door to the nursery, where both women could hear the
busyness of the nurses and the cries of newborn babies. These women were strangers to
each other, but they shared a sad bond as mothers: one, a young unmarried woman, was
waiting to give birth to a baby who would then be relinquished for adoption, despite her
own misgivings. The other woman, Audrey, was recuperating after giving birth to a
stillborn baby, her third child. When I asked Audrey what she remembered of her time
spent in the hospital, she recalled that her baby was ‘whisked away’ and that she spent the
next week recovering from a postnatal infection whilst the nurses ‘tiptoed around’ her. She
then left the hospital without any knowledge as to why her baby had died, or where his
remains had been buried. However, her dominant memory of this period is particularly
poignant: ‘We [both] could hear the crying [of babies]. That’s all I remember of the
hospital’. 1
At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the ending of a pregnancy through
miscarriage or perinatal death was an event of great regularity, and the risks to both mother
and child posed by childbirth were ever-present concerns. A lack of knowledge of infection
during childbirth proved fatal for many Australian women and their babies, whilst poor
living conditions in cities led to large outbreaks of infectious diseases such as gastroenteritis, pneumonia, diphtheria and tuberculosis as well as a high incidence of weanling
diarrhoea, making infancy a particularly dangerous period of life. 2 In the period between
1870 and 1914, 1495 stillbirths (often confused in the record with premature birth) and
5693 infant deaths were recorded in Perth alone. 3 During the first three decades of the
twentieth century, improved knowledge of the spread and treatment of infectious diseases
saw a drop in both maternal and infant mortality rates. Particularly, advances in neonatal
care, especially care for premature babies, saw the infant mortality rate begin to fall
1
Audrey, interview with Susannah Thompson [the researcher], 1 June 2005. Tapes and transcript in
researcher’s possession.
2
See Michael Durey, ‘Infant Mortality in Perth, Western Australia, 1870-1914: A preliminary analysis’,
Studies in Western Australian History, vol. 5, 1982, pp. 62–71.
3
Durey, ‘Infant Mortality in Perth, Western Australia’, p. 63.
10
markedly and remain stable after 1970. 4 However, despite these advancements in medical
knowledge of foetal development and the decline in infant mortality, miscarriage, stillbirth
and neonatal death remain all-too common events in many Australian women’s (and their
families’) lives. It has been recently estimated that as many as one in four pregnancies end
in miscarriage and over ten in one hundred end in stillbirth and neonatal death. 5
Despite the continuing incidence of miscarriage, stillbirth and neonatal death in the twentyfirst century and the growing recognition that the death of a baby is likely to be an event of
immense significance in a woman’s life, perinatal death remains a relatively silent subject
both within the community and in historical scholarship. Oral history suggests that the
traumatic nature of this event in women's lives has long been underestimated by many
women’s families and friends, and it appears that many women continue to find that they
are limited in the ways they are able to mourn and remember their loss. 6 In a culture that is
obsessed with the notion of a ‘good death’ – as I discuss further in the thesis - it is, as one
oral history participant observed, a loss that defies the prescriptions of a good death, and is
therefore a taboo subject. 7 Since the 1970s there has been a growing body of literature
concerned with the psychological impact of pregnancy loss on Australian women and their
families within this culture of silence. Nancy Kohner and Alix Henley, psychologists and
authors of When a Baby Dies, comment that ‘the death of a baby, whether at birth or in the
weeks or months immediately afterwards, is no less a death than any other. It is no less
important, no less heartbreaking than the death of an older child or an adult. It is certainly
different, but it is not a lesser event’.8 Recalling the experience of losing her first child in
1977, a daughter who lived for ten minutes after birth, Pam wrote that ‘still today, and right
4
Even before the introduction of antibiotics and modern vaccines, by the 1930s the total infant mortality rate
was half that of the figures for 1900. The infant mortality rate declined even further with advances in medical
knowledge of disease and infections in the post Second World War period. See Fiona Stanley, Before the
Bough Breaks: Doing more for our children in the twenty-first century, Canberra: Academy of the Social
Sciences in Australia, 2003.
5
In 2004 the adjusted perinatal death rate (stillbirth and neonatal deaths combined) in Australia was 10.5 per
1000 births. See Australia’s Mothers and Babies 2004, AIHW National Perinatal Statistics Unit, Australian
Institute of Health and Welfare, Sydney, 2006.
6
During the course of my research I was contacted by a number of women whose babies had died only
recently. Overwhelmingly, these women believed that their families and friends were initially supportive after
the event, but grew increasingly intolerant of the duration and intensity of their grief. One woman wrote that a
few weeks after her daughter was stillborn her mother-in-law insisted that she ‘get over it’, and that no
mention was made of the child. She commented that ‘it was like I had lost a dog or something’. Katie,
personal correspondence with researcher, 5 May 2005. Email in researcher’s possession.
7
Christine, interview with researcher, 7 June 2005. Tapes and transcript in researcher’s possession.
8
Alix Henley and Nancy Kohner, When a Baby Dies: The Experience of Late Miscarriage, Stillbirth and
Neonatal Death, New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 1.
11
this minute, I shed a tear when thinking of my precious little girl’. 9 Coralie wrote in 2005
‘this year in September [my daughter] would be thirty two years old and I must tell you that
the pain, although less now than then is still there. Whenever we hear of a stillbirth
happening to someone else my husband and I are still capable of sitting together and crying.
It never goes away’. 10
Privileging women’s voices: a feminist history
In my thesis I have sought to end what psychologist Margaret Nicol has termed ‘the
conspiracy of silence’ surrounding perinatal death, 11 evident in both the dominant
constructions of this event as well as in historical scholarship. As such, my work stands
firmly as a feminist history: that is, I seek to uncover an aspect of many women's lives that
has previously been ignored in traditional historical scholarship, whilst also challenging the
dominant ways of understanding this subject in the past – constructions of pregnancy loss
which have categorically excluded women’s voices. Joan Wallach Scott argues that:
Historians searching the past for evidence about women have confronted again and
again the phenomenon of women’s invisibility. Recent research has shown not that
women were inactive or absent from events that made history, but that they have
been systematically left out of the official record … The story of the development of
human society has been told largely through male agency. 12
I have been inspired by existing feminist historiography that operates from the premise, as
Jill Julius Matthews argues, that the experiences of women should be the central concern of
the feminist historian. 13 The study aims to build onto the existing scholarship that has
provided insights into women’s lives which have traditionally been told from men’s
9
Pam, personal correspondence with researcher, 13 May 2005. Email in possession of researcher.
Coralie, personal correspondence with researcher, 19 May 2005. Letter in researcher’s possession.
11
Margaret Nicol, The Loss of a Baby: Understanding Maternal Grief, Sydney: Bantam, 1984, p. 3.
12
Joan Wallach Scott, ‘The Problem of Invisibility’, in S. Jay Kleinberg (ed.) Retrieving Women’s History:
Changing Perceptions of Women’s Role in Politics and Society, Oxford, New York: UNESCO Press, c1988,
p. 5.
13
Jill Julius Matthews, Good and Mad Women: The Historical Construction of Femininity in Twentieth
Century Australia, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1984, p. 18.
10
12
perspective and which have remained silent in traditional histories. 14 Being considered
mentally ill, remaining unmarried or childless, working in the sex industry, being a victim
of domestic or sexual abuse - these have all been ways in which Australian women have,
willingly or unwillingly, transgressed the traditionally acceptable roles of wife and mother
but are stories which, until relatively recently, have not been considered worthy of record.15
Whilst I acknowledge that women’s individual responses to perinatal death are diverse and
that there is no universal or essential response to the death of a baby, 16 my work is
motivated from a conviction that pregnancy loss has been, and still is, a significant event in
many women's lives in Australia, yet is an event which has principally been spoken about
by voices other than those of women themselves. The underlying conviction of this thesis is
that women’s lives - the daily, the mundane, the ordinary as well as the extraordinary - are
important historically, and that the story of women’s lives should be told through women’s
own understandings of their experiences.
However, to claim one’s work as ‘feminist’ in methodology is neither straightforward nor
unproblematic. Despite popular misconceptions of feminism as merely concerned with
‘women’s issues’, feminist theory and critical approaches to history are as varied and
diverse as women themselves. In my work I privilege women’s own accounts of the death
of a baby through stillbirth and neonatal death, and their understandings of these
experiences. But who exactly is this category of ‘woman’, and what is ‘experience’? Earlier
feminist writers assumed that the category of ‘woman’ was unproblematic, self evident and
a signifier of a collective and shared identity, but contemporary feminist writers argue that
14
Judith Allen vigorously rejects the empirical historian Geoffrey Elton’s assertion that ‘if men have said,
thought, done or suffered anything of which nothing no longer exists, those things are as if they had never
been. The crucial element is the present evidence, not the fact of past existence, and questions for those whose
answer no material exists are strictly non-questions’. As Allen argues, this can ‘potentially hold the discipline
prisoner of effective discourses’. Rather, she continues, the feminist historian should not be ‘satisfied with the
smug exclusion “it is as if they had never been.”’ See J. Allen, ‘Evidence and Silence: Feminism and the
Limits of History’, in Carole Pateman and Elisabeth Gross (eds.) Feminist Challenges: Social and Political
Theory, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1986, p. 176.
15
Since the 1970s there has been a substantial (and growing) body of historiography concerned with the
construction of ‘appropriate’ femininity in Australia and the ramifications of transgressing this cultural
expectation. See for example Matthews, Good and Mad Women; Suellen Murray, A History of Menstruation
in Australia, 1900-1960, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Western Australia, 1996; Suellen Murray,
More than Refuge: Changing Responses to Domestic Violence, Perth, WA: University of Western Australia
Press, 2002; Joy Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial
Australia, Cambridge, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997; Anne Summers, Damned Whores and
God’s Police, Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1994, Rev. ed.
16
As Joan Scott notes, for the feminist historian ‘perhaps the most difficult question of all is whether we can
speak historically of a single category of woman’. See Scott, ‘The Problem of Invisibility’, p. 16.
13
we must resist essentialising ‘women’ as a single category of analysis. Scott, for example,
suggests that:
[R]eal men and women do not always or literally fulfill the terms either of their
society’s prescriptions or of our analytic categories. Historians need instead to
examine the ways in which gendered identities are substantively constructed and
relate their findings to a range of activities, social organizations and historically
specific cultural representations. 17
Experience is a complex mode of analysis, and as such – forming as it does an important
analytical tool in my own work – it is important that I articulate what I mean when I refer to
‘women’s experiences’. Feminist writers in the 1970s were understandably keen to address
the absence of women in the historical record and so hailed ‘experience’ as a true and
authentic mode of understanding how women have understood themselves within particular
sociohistorical contexts. 18 Similarly, philosophy and contemporary popular understandings
hail ‘experience’, to quote Iris Marion Young, as being ‘knowledge that is more immediate
and trustworthy than second hand knowledge’. 19 Poststructuralist critiques however have
dislodged the appeal to authenticity in these understandings of experience; poststructuralist
feminists such as Young, amongst others, argue that feminist historians should not seek in
vain the unmediated and ‘authentic’ experience of women in history but rather ‘the tactile,
motile, weighted, painful, and pleasurable experience of an embodied subject; how this
subject reaches out with and through this body; and how this subject feels about
embodiment’. 20
To reject women’s experience as factual, literal, and unmediated does not mean a rejection
of the usefulness or value of seeking to understand women’s experience; it does, however,
recognise that women’s experiences are discursive, framed within social rules, conventions,
and other modes of discourse. In my work I have privileged women’s voices not because
17
Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Gender: A useful category of historical analysis’, in J. Scott (ed.), Feminism and
History, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 169
18
For primary source evidence of this, see for example Lynn Z. Bloom, ‘Listen! Women Speaking’,
Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, 1977, pp. 1-2. Contemporary feminist proponents of
oral history have also written extensively on the debate surrounding the notion of ‘experience’ and its
usefulness in oral history in the recent past. See for example Joanna Bornat, ‘Women’s History and Oral
History: Developments and Debates’, Women’s History Review, vol. 16, no. 1, March 2007, pp. 19-39; Sherna
Berger Gluck, Donald A. Ritchie and Bret Eynon, ‘Reflections on Oral History in the New Millennium:
Roundtable Comments’, The Oral History Review, vol. 26, no. 2, 1999, pp. 1-27
19
Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory,
Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, c1990, p. 12
20
Young, Throwing Like a Girl, p. 14
14
they are more authoritative or authentic than other discourses of perinatal death, but
because an underlying aim of this thesis is to challenge the very notion that women’s
bodies, and by extension perinatal death, can be understood using essentialist or absolutist
terms. Elizabeth Grosz points out that what constitutes ‘knowledge’ in a particular culture
is not simply a mode of survival, ‘of pure use value’, ahistorical and natural; rather,
‘knowledge is what is socially recognized as knowledge’. 21 Working from a feminist
perspective, I have sought to illuminate women’s voices in order to both challenge the
dominance of medical knowledge of perinatal death as a form of absolute knowledge, and
to accord the diversity of women’s experiences of perinatal death the historical recognition
that they deserve.
Themes of the thesis
This research, then, is underpinned by several themes. The notion of authority is central to
this thesis. I have been interested in those voices which have been dominant in speaking
about perinatal death in the past in Australia (and largely by extension, other western
cultures), and how the constructions of pregnancy loss as articulated by these voices have
changed over time. Secondly, I consider the intersection of different groups’ constructions
of perinatal death, with particular emphasis on the theme of silence and avoidance. For
example, in the mid twentieth century, the medical discourse of perinatal death and the
cultural prescriptions of ‘appropriate’ responses to death were powerful factors in shaping
the twin expectations that most women would feel little long-lasting grief after the death of
a baby, and that those who did find the experience traumatic should repress their grief and
‘move on’ by having another (live) baby.
Furthermore, I consider the ways in which these expectations have impinged on some
Australian women’s ability to articulate their experiences of the death of a baby. I have
sought to gain insight into how a group of Australian women have understood their own
memories of the ending of a pregnancy or the loss of a baby, problematising the notion of
experience by examining how individual women have interpreted their loss within the
framework of cultural constructions of perinatal death. I view women’s experience within
21
Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin,
1994, p. 147.
15
the lens of conforming to or transgressing cultural notions of ‘appropriate’ femininity, and
consider how some women have continued to renegotiate their experiences over time and
within the shifts in cultural expectations of ‘appropriate’ responses to grief and
bereavement.
Finally, a persistent theme throughout this thesis is that of responsibility. Underlying
constructions of perinatal loss throughout the twentieth century has been enduring notions
of failure and blame, and I consider the ways in which women were held responsible for the
death of their infants, particularly at the end of the twentieth century as prenatal diagnostic
testing became considered a routine and ‘responsible’ part of pregnancy. Within this
context, I also consider how the foetus has been inscribed within the framework of
‘viability’ throughout the twentieth century, and examine the ways in which those women
whose babies were considered ‘unviable’ were expected to respond.
Sources
The sources I have used can be grouped into three broad categories. Firstly, I researched
medical text books, clinical reports, case notes, lecture notes and published lectures, and
articles in medical journals which give insight into medical constructions of perinatal death
throughout the twentieth century in Australia. A crucial aim of this thesis has been to
challenge the dominant discourses of perinatal death to include women’s own
understandings of the death of a baby or ending of a pregnancy; because medical
knowledge has been a powerful framework through which pregnancy and childbirth have
been constructed throughout the twentieth century in many Western societies, I pay
particular attention to the dominant construction of pregnancy loss as found in medical
sources. Post-structuralist historians have generally understood notions of ‘discourse’
within a Foucaldian perspective, 22 being primarily concerned with the relationships
22
Post-structuralist scholars note that Foucault did not use ‘discourse’ as a linguistic concept but rather as the
production of knowledge through language. According to Stuart Hall, Foucault argued that discourse
‘constructs the topic. It defines and produces the objects of our knowledge. It governs the way that a topic can
be meaningfully talked about and reasoned about. It also influences how ideas are put into practice and used
to regulate the conduct of others’. In his later writings, Foucault ‘became even more concerned with how
knowledge was put to work through discursive practices in specific institutional settings to regulate the
conduct of others’. See S. Hall, ‘Foucault: Power, Knowledge and Discourse’, in Margaret Wetherell,
Stephanie Taylor, Simeon Yates (eds.) Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader, London, Thousand Oaks,
CA.: Sage, 2001, pp. 72-75.
16
between power and knowledge and I consider the ways in which medical discourse has
exerted influence in constructing understandings of the female body and normality and
abnormality. Medical inscriptions of perinatal death and miscarriage are not necessarily the
meanings given by individual women who have experienced a miscarriage or perinatal
death, and in my work I have sought to consistently challenge the authority of medical
discourse in creating absolute forms of knowledge by giving insight into how women have
understood their own bodies and their experiences of giving birth to a deceased or seriously
ill baby.
Secondly, I researched those sources I considered would give me some insight into other
popular constructions of perinatal death, such as the so-called ‘wives’ manuals’ or
‘women’s handbooks’, often written by medical professionals to disseminate ‘appropriate’
knowledge of sexuality and pregnancy to women; newspaper articles in major Australian
newspapers; burial registers and gravestone inscriptions; and oral history interviews with
allied health professionals including a social worker, midwife and chaplain. I have also
analysed unpublished documents from the Social Work departments of two major maternity
hospitals in Australia, King Edward Memorial Hospital for Women [KEMH] in Perth,
Western Australia, and Royal Women’s Hospital [RWH] in Melbourne, Victoria. These
sources gave great insight into how allied health professionals in the late 1970s to the turn
of the twenty-first century critiqued the medicalisation of childbirth; re-inscribed the
deceased baby; and spearheaded changing attitudes towards the care of women in hospital
after a perinatal loss.
My primary source of evidence, however, is Australian women’s own accounts of perinatal
death. 23 I have utilised a diverse range of sources to give insight into some women’s
experiences of perinatal death. These include women’s private letters and diaries; although,
Katie Holmes observes, from the turn of the century women tended to write less about the
death of a baby than their mothers and grandmothers as the language of sexuality became
23
When referring to ‘Australian women’ I am referring to women who, at the time of losing a baby through
miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal death, were residing in Australia. However whilst I may refer to them as
‘Australian women’, some involved in the project may not actually identify with this. Throughout the thesis I
use ‘Australian women’ for the sake of brevity rather than to signify a homogenous group.
17
medicalised 24 and I was largely dependent on women supplying me with letters and diaries
held in their own private possession. I have also utilised existing oral history projects, such
as the NSW Bicentennial Oral History Project [NSW BOHP]; letters to newspaper editors
in the more recent past from self-described bereaved mothers; self-published and
unpublished memoirs; and an oral history project of my own undertaking. The oral history
component of this work in particular has provided me with a rich site of analysis of
women’s own experiences of losing a baby through miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal death.
Problematisation of sources
Having discussed my sources I will now consider some of the problems I encountered
during the course of my research. Firstly, my evidence is drawn from a wide range of
sources from a large time frame. Chapters Two and Three in particular draw upon sources
from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries until the late 1960s. The remaining
chapters generally draw on sources from discrete time periods; in Chapters Four and Five I
analyse a body of sources from the 1970s and 1980s; and Chapter Six to Eight are
concerned with evidence from the end of the twentieth century. In each chapter I have
grouped sources according to theme with a broadly chronological structure in order to trace
the changes in constructions of perinatal death and the ways these constructions have
intersected and, at times, been in contradiction to each other at various points in the past.
Secondly, a persistent problem with researching an area of history which is characterised by
cultural silence is the difficulty one faces in actually finding suitable and useful sources. 25
Throughout my research, this thesis has been governed by the availability and accessibility
of sources, particularly with regard to texts which give insight into medical constructions of
perinatal death, such as medical records and case notes. Gaining access to medical records
held by individual hospitals is a notoriously difficult task for a researcher in the humanities;
even if access is granted, the use of such sensitive records can be fraught with ethical
issues. Although I was consistently denied access to historical medical records – even if
24
Katie Holmes, Spaces in her Day: Australian Women’s Diaries of the 1920s and 1930s, St Leonards, NSW:
Allen and Unwin, 1995, p. 71.
25
Anna Davin notes that ‘all historical research is of course laborious and slow. When the quarry is women it
takes even longer. The evidence is scattered and often problematic: the historian pans much mud and sand for
the occasional nugget’. See A. Davin, ‘Redressing the Balance or Transforming the Art? The British
experience’, in Kleinberg (ed.), Retrieving Women’s History, p. 67.
18
they were to be de-identified – by the ethics boards of several large hospitals on the basis
that my work was deemed to have ‘little value’ for the wider community, 26 I was, however,
fortunate in that I was given open access to unpublished archival documents from other
departments in KEMH in Perth and RWH in Melbourne. As such, the later chapters are
focused heavily towards an analysis of the situation in these two hospitals.
The sources that I have used in my research are very different in nature and care has been
taken to analyse each source in terms of its historicity. That is, I have attempted to consider
sources against the historical context in which they were produced and to consider the
cultural and social forces which have shaped a particular construction of perinatal loss. I
have been particularly interested in understanding how the medical inscription of a foetus
as ‘viable’ has shaped constructions of pregnancy loss, and throughout the thesis I explore
how the inscriptions of ‘viable’ and ‘non-viable’ have shifted in the past and in turn how
this has impacted on the way women have experienced loss. Over the past one hundred
years, the classifications of ‘viability’ have been altered and the terms ‘miscarriage’ and
‘stillbirth’ have at times signified different stages of gestation; the values inscribed upon
the developing embryo/foetus have also shifted at times dependent upon changes in medical
knowledge.
Oral history: providing a space for the reinterpretation of memory
The underlying motivation driving this research has been an attempt to rectify the lacuna in
our understanding of the experience of perinatal death in the past; accordingly, an oral
history project was undertaken which privileged the narratives of a group of women who
had lost a pregnancy or baby at some point in Australia’s history. 27 The methodological
tool of personal narratives was an obvious choice for this particular project: oral history has
26
The Medical Ethics Board of KEMH in Perth, W.A. was particularly opposed to granting me access to
medical records, even if my work was supervised by a staff member of their choosing who would ensure that
any data collected was deidentified. In correspondence over several months in 2004, the Chairman of the
Board advised me that the aims of my project were not sufficiently useful for the ‘community’ and alluded to
the fact that a historian had no right to access medical information, even in a de-identified state. According to
one committee member, who has asked to remain anonymous, this view was not shared by the entire Ethics
Committee.
27
The interviews quoted were undertaken by me between November 2004 and October 2005. Copies of the
transcripts and tapes are my possession. Each interviewee was asked for their preferred method of
identification in publications and the thesis. Most chose their first names or surnames only while others
preferred a pseudonym, which is noted in the relevant citation.
19
long been regarded as useful in illuminating concealed sources or hitherto historicallydisregarded lives, particularly with regard to the experiences of ‘non-elite’ people whose
narratives were absent from the traditionally valuable sources of records and archived
documents. 28 Although oral history is neither unproblematic nor uncontested amongst
historians, 29 many contemporary studies illustrate both the intrinsic complexity of oral
history as well as its vitality in ‘reflect[ing] peoples’ memory of the past’. 30
Kate Darian-Smith suggests that the oral history interview reflects an ongoing process in
which ‘our memories are constantly negotiated in an interactive cycle of recovery and
burial, in a process of exchange between the individual and society’. 31 Thus the personal
narrative is not static or fixed in the past, but rather is a complex interaction between the
present and the many pasts that have intervened since the event actually occurred.
Accordingly, proponents of the oral history method now recognise that its usefulness lies
not in revealing so-called ‘universal truths’ but rather for its ability to shed light on the
‘psychological cost’ of an event in an individual’s life. 32 Once criticised by empirical
historians as subjective ‘myth-making’, subject to the ‘distortions of memory’, oral history
has been defended precisely because it gives insight into the way in which individuals
make sense of their experiences in the past. Treated as an object of historical analysis, it is
precisely these ‘distortions of memory’ which are useful, argues Michael Frisch; he notes
that ‘memory’ is a tool of analysis and can assist historians in ‘discovering, exploring and
evaluating the nature of … how people make sense of their past, how they connect
individual experience and its social context, how the past becomes part of the present, and
how people use it to interpret their lives and the world around them’. 33
28
Alistair Thomson notes that the oral history interview ‘provides access to undocumented experience …
significantly, the ‘hidden histories’ of people on the margins: workers, women, indigenous peoples, ethnic
minorities and members of other oppressed or marginalised groups’. See A. Thomson, ‘Making the Most of
Memories: The Empirical and Subjective Value of Oral History’, Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society, vol. 9, 1999, p. 291.
29
See Patricia M. Thane, ‘Oral History, Memory and Written Tradition: An Introduction’, Transactions of the
Royal Historical Society, vol. 9, 1999, pp. 161-168.
30
Devra Weber quoted in Emily Honig, ‘Getting to the Source: Striking Lives: Oral History and the Politics
of Memory’, Journal of Women’s History, vol. 9, no.1, 1997, p. 139.
31
Kate Darian-Smith, ‘War Stories: Remembering the Australian Home Front During the Second World
War’, in K. Darian-Smith and P. Hamilton (eds.) Memory and History in Twentieth Century Australia,
Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 156.
32
Alessandro Portelli, ‘The Peculiarities of Oral History,’ History Workshop Journal, no. 12, 1981, pp. 96107.
33
M. Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History, Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press, 1990, p. 188.
20
Anna Davin notes that the invisibility of women’s voices in traditional historiography often
drives feminist historians to ‘look for other sources – to find echoes of the “voices from
below” wherever they survive’. 34 The use of personal narratives, then, was a vital tool in
gaining a greater understanding of a hitherto silent experience of perinatal loss, and for
most of the women involved, the very act of participating in this research was part of a very
personal process of reinterpreting their long-buried memories of a lost baby – a process of
reclaiming a part of their past that had been long denied and ignored by their communities.
The motivations behind some older women’s quest to reinscribe their deceased babies were
varied but several persistent themes emerge from the oral history interviews. Paul
Thompson and Raphael Samuel argue that ‘we need as historians to consider myth and
memory, not only as special clues to the past, but equally as windows on the making and
remaking of individual and collective consciousness, in which both fact and fantasy, past
and present, each has its part’. 35 The usefulness of the oral history interview to this project,
therefore, was in gaining insight into how women internalised, negotiated with and resisted
the dominant medical constructions of perinatal loss at different stages in their lives. 36
‘Finding’ women
Women were invited to be a part of the oral history project through a range of media
requests, including radio interviews on ABC Radio National in Perth and Hobart,
Tasmania, and 6PR in Perth; newspaper articles in Western Australian newspaper The
Sunday Times and various publications of the Community Newspaper group; and through a
34
Davin, ‘Redressing the Balance’, p. 72.
Paul Thompson and Raphael Samuel quoted in Jean Duruz, ‘Suburban Houses Revisited’, in Darian-Smith
and Hamilton (eds.) Memory and History, p. 176.
36
Feminist scholars in particular view oral history as a means to gain insight into how individuals have
negotiated their experiences within particular discourses. Marilyn Lake, for example, notes that ‘the task of
the historian of women is … twofold: first, to identify the variety of discourses in force at any one time and
second, to explain why particular groups of women, in particular historical circumstances, were more likely to
respond to some representations of their identity and experience than others’. See M. Lake, ‘Female Desires:
The Meanings of World War II’, in Scott (ed.) Feminism and history, p. 431. Writing in specific regard to oral
history and feminist history, Marie-Françoise Chanfrault-Duchet notes that ‘the life story approach in oral
history makes it possible to go beyond the preconstructed discourses and “surface assertions” collected
through survey research. It highlights the complexity, the ambiguities, and even the contradictions of the
relations between the subject and the world, the past, and the social and ideological image of woman – that is,
how women live, internalize, and more or less consciously interpret their status’. See M. Chanfrault-Duchet,
‘Narrative and Socio-symbolic Analysis’, in Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai (eds.) Women’s Words:
The Feminist Practice of Oral History, New York: Routledge, 1991, p. 89.
35
21
feature piece in UWA’s staff newsletter, UWA News. I also discovered that women were
told about the project by friends or daughters who had read one of the articles or heard me
interviewed on the radio about my research and my request for interview participants.
Over 100 women responded to my request to be interviewed; the actual number of women
interviewed for my research was twenty eight, with a number of other women sending me
written correspondence; one father also wrote me a long letter about his experience of loss.
The number of participants was reduced to twenty eight primarily out of sheer necessity –
as the sole researcher, I was forced to limit myself to only interviewing a relatively small
group of women in order to complete the project in a timely manner. Also amongst those
not chosen for interview were several women who had experienced the death of a baby in a
country other than Australia – mostly England – or had lost a baby only recently and so
who regrettably fell outside the time frame considered for this project.
During the course of my research I frequently encountered interested acquaintances whose
reactions to this subject ranged from the horrified – ‘how macabre!’ – to the sympathetic,
and a common question was ‘and what about the men? Will you be interviewing fathers,
too?’ This was a question I had myself grappled with early on in my research. Was I
actually continuing the process of devaluing certain voices in the historical record if I
omitted men’s experiences of perinatal death? Whilst I argue that men’s voices have long
assumed dominance in constructing understandings of perinatal death in the past – in terms
of the masculinist discourse of medicine - there are no histories of how fathers have
understood perinatal death, and as such, the voices of fathers, like mothers, are silenced in
historical scholarship.
With this is mind, it has been with reluctance that I have omitted the perspectives of
bereaved fathers, yet this was an omission that was necessary. I have chosen to focus on
women’s experiences of perinatal death for two reasons: firstly, I have approached this
work with the conviction that, historically, women’s lives have been considered
unimportant and unworthy of historical scholarship in general, and in my thesis I have
attempted to contribute to the feminist tradition of rewriting women’s lives back into
history. The second, and equally compelling, reason is purely logistical. The sheer
magnitude of this research has meant that I have been unable to consider with any sort of
22
focus men’s understandings of the death of a baby or ending of a pregnancy through
miscarriage. In my thesis I have briefly considered how meanings of perinatal death have
been gendered in medical discourse and in popular understanding, whilst also exploring
how gender roles have served to fix men to the role of silent protector in times of perinatal
death. Although I received some written correspondence from fathers who had experienced
the death of a baby, my work does not extend to include a systematic analysis of how men
have negotiated their understandings of the death of a baby.
The particular group: analysis
Twenty eight women were interviewed about their experiences of losing a pregnancy
through miscarriage, or the death of a baby through perinatal death. Two participants were
interviewed but later requested that their involvement in the project be withdrawn. The
group was diverse in some respects while displaying some similarities. With the exception
of one interviewee, Astrid, all the interviewees had been born in Australia and all identified
themselves as white, working-class or middle-class women. The majority of the group were
still in relationships with the father of the baby concerned, although three of the women had
separated from this partner and had remarried. Two interviewees had been single women at
the time of their baby’s death, and had since married another partner.
Although I did not apply any other criteria for selection in the project except for a time
limit, it was inevitable that, as self-selected interview participants, certain themes would
develop from the project as a whole. Whilst each woman was shaped by her own particular
social and cultural context, an analysis of the group is limited to the experiences of white
women. Perhaps for a variety of reasons, I was not contacted by any women of non-white
or immigrant background.
Process of interviewing
Over the course of 2004 and 2005, I visited most of the women in their homes, although
several women elected to be interviewed in my office at UWA, and one woman chose to be
interviewed at the home of a friend because she felt uncomfortable being interviewed while
her family was present in the house. The interviews were all scheduled to accommodate the
23
women’s individual responsibilities including paid work, volunteer work, and childcare.
Each interview lasted approximately two hours, and the women were asked general
questions about their experience, such as when and where they had delivered their baby,
where the baby was buried – if known – and their recollection of their treatment while in
hospital. The flow of the each interview however was largely led by the woman concerned.
This was particularly important because the age range of the group was from ninety one to
twenty six years of age, and each interviewee had a sense of their own individual reasons
for volunteering for interview.
Using oral history
Oral history has been an important way to uncover the hitherto silenced understandings of
perinatal death in Australia’s past. Throughout the thesis I have considered the ways in
which women have negotiated their experience of losing a baby or a pregnancy within the
particular sociohistorical context in which the loss occurred. Rather than simply taking the
personal narrative as a straightforward recollection of the past, I have sought to understand
how a group of women have interpreted and reinterpreted their experiences within changing
cultural constructions of perinatal death. For example, in Chapter Three I have used
narratives of older women against the backdrop of the discursive authority of the medical
profession and the cultural rejection of grief and death; these narratives are then revisited in
Chapter Six where I seek to gain insight into how one’s memories are shaped and reshaped
at different stages of one’s life, particularly against the backdrop of changing cultural
responses to death and grief in Australia.
A primary motivation behind using oral history was to understand how women challenged
or internalised medical constructions of perinatal death. This was particularly pertinent to
women whose babies died in what I argue are the ‘emerging’ years; the period between the
early 1970s and the late 1980s where the authority of the medical profession was being
questioned and new models of understanding pregnancy and childbirth were being
suggested. Many of these women, whose babies would now be in early adulthood had they
lived, exemplified the process of the interaction between the past and the present, as they
both recalled their compliance to medical authority whilst rejecting this compliance in their
24
lives more recently, as they acknowledged the influence of second-wave feminism in
shaping their adult lives.
Structure of the thesis
Broadly speaking, this thesis is organised in a thematic-chronological structure. Because, as
I discuss further in Chapter One, I am operating from the theoretical understanding that
reproduction is not ahistorical, I consider understandings of miscarriage, stillbirth and
neonatal death within changing social and cultural contexts in the past one hundred years in
Australia.
In Chapter One, I locate my thesis in the historiography, and discuss the existing
scholarship which has informed my research. Although there is little historical scholarship
concerned with perinatal death in Australia, many feminist historians have located this
topic within a wider study of women’s experiences of motherhood and maternity.
Sociologists, feminist critics and psychologists have also produced numerous critiques of
the medical discourse of pregnancy, with particular emphasis on notions of maternal
responsibility during pregnancy. Feminist theory has also shaped this thesis, and I discuss
in particular theories of ‘the body’ as a surface of social inscription, and the relevance of
these theories to my work. There are also a number of studies on the changing responses to
death and bereavement in Australia which greatly inform this thesis. I end the chapter with
a brief historical context of the meanings of perinatal death prior to the turn of the twentieth
century, arguing that although the medicalisation of childbirth in the early 1900s
constructed a dominant understanding of perinatal loss, this event was imbued with a
variety of meanings before the twentieth century.
In Chapter Two, I analyse the impact of the medicalisation of childbirth in terms of the
positioning of the medical profession as authority in constructing meanings of perinatal
death. The medicalisation of childbirth positioned medical knowledge as a powerful way of
understanding and defining women’s pregnant bodies, and in this chapter I argue that the
medical discourse of childbirth constructed miscarriage and perinatal loss as ‘failed
pregnancies’. I also consider the way in which women’s behaviour was linked to
miscarriage and perinatal loss; the development of the antenatal clinic as an ‘essential’ part
25
of a normal healthy pregnancy strengthened the idea that women should place their bodies
under the supervision of the medical profession in order to avoid producing a deceased or
‘sickly’ baby. As the birth rate continued to fall dramatically in the early twentieth century,
pronatalist concerns reinforced the perceived need for medical surveillance over the
pregnant body in order to ‘preserve the (white) race’, and motherhood was ostensibly
venerated as the ultimate fulfilment for women, not to mention an act of patriotism. Women
were urged to fulfil their ‘patriotic duty’ by producing healthy, live babies; in this way,
those women who ‘failed’ in this duty were not considered to be mothers, and were
stigmatised for having failed to attain the goal of motherhood.
In Chapter Three, I consider women’s experiences of miscarriage or perinatal death within
the culture of ‘death avoidance’ which shifted cultural understandings of ‘appropriate’
expressions of grief and mourning after World War I and World War II. Within their
families and communities, many women whose pregnancies ended in miscarriage or
perinatal death in the postwar years were expected to repress their grief and to respond
stoically and silently. I argue that compounding this silence was the medicalisation of
childbirth which had invalidated the language with which women could speak of pregnancy
and sexuality, replacing it with the discursive authority of scientific understandings of the
pregnant and sexed body. Because the processes of birth and dying had been shifted from
the home to the hospital most women were subject to the medical management of perinatal
death and the idea that, because the foetus held little individual value, the speediest and
most healthy resolution was to shield women from their babies whilst in hospital.
In Chapter Four I explore the beginnings of a shift within two major maternity hospitals in
Australia, KEMH in Perth and RWH in Melbourne, changes which were initially motivated
by emerging research into the psychosocial impact of miscarriage and neonatal death and
intensified by the concerns of second-wave feminism and the consumer health movements.
This shift signalled the beginning of radical changes in the care of women who had suffered
the death of a baby – for example, a move away from shielding mothers from their babies
towards encouraging women to form bonds with their deceased infants. I have called this
chapter ‘Emerging Changes’ because I argue that although some staff involved in caring for
women whose babies died were supportive of these changes, it was a sporadic and slow
process which would only be consolidated towards the end of the twentieth century.
26
In Chapter Five, I explore the extent to which the emerging theories of grief and loss in the
1970s and 1980s challenged the dominant construction of perinatal death. Women’s
recollections of the experience of losing a baby during this period give insight into the
gradual nature of these shifting understandings, and demonstrate the dominance of the
medical profession in continuing to claim the right to speak about perinatal loss. Although
some social workers and a number of medical professionals had begun the process of
challenging the silence which characterised women’s treatment in the hospital setting, the
prevailing beliefs that perinatal loss was both repugnant and ‘basically a sad event’, soon
forgotten, limited the growth and acceptance of changing practices.
In the final three chapters of the thesis I explore the competing understandings of perinatal
loss which emerged at the end of the twentieth century. Firstly, in Chapter Six I argue that
the gradual shift away from shielding women from their babies in the hospital setting
became formalised in official policy, at least at KEMH and RWH Melbourne, towards the
end of the twentieth century. The last decade of the twentieth century saw the efforts of
social workers and midwives in the 1970s and 1980s bear fruit with the formalising of
hospital policy which better reflected current psychological theories of grief and loss; these
measures had enormous impact on the way that some Australian women were able to
memorialise and express their sorrow for the death of their infants.
In Chapter Seven I consider the ways in which some older women were able to reinterpret
and revisit their memories of a long-ago death of a baby, within a wider cultural change
towards a greater openness towards death and bereavement. The changing practices within
the hospital, combined with the activities of the parent support group Stillbirth and
Neonatal Death Support [SANDS] provided a space in which some women were able to
reinterpret and recast their memories of a perinatal loss many years ago. In this chapter I
also consider ‘memory’ as a useful tool of historical analysis; whilst oral history has been
contested by critics as merely subjective, I argue that the personal narrative provides insight
into the meanings which have been given to perinatal death and how these meanings have
changed over time.
27
However, the rise of prenatal testing and the emergence of the notion of the foetus as a
patient problematised these changes to a great degree. In Chapter Eight I consider the
continuing construction of perinatal death as an instance of ‘failed’ pregnancy, framed
within the neo-liberal values of individual responsibility and self-determination. The rise of
prenatal diagnosis reinforced the inscription on the foetal body within the duality of
‘viable’ and ‘unviable’, inscriptions which were at times at odds with how some women
viewed their unborn babies, and which renewed the notion of maternal responsibility in
producing a ‘successful outcome’. I also explore the role of prenatal testing in cultivating
the belief that technology had succeeded in conquering perinatal mortality; a belief which
again rendered perinatal death as falling outside the bounds of what constituted a ‘good
death’.
A note on terminology and spelling
Throughout the thesis I use the terms of miscarriage, stillbirth and neonatal death
interchangeably with the briefer ‘perinatal death’ or ‘perinatal loss’. When referring to
women’s experiences of the perinatal loss I have also used the terms ‘baby’ or ‘unborn
child’ in favour of the more abstract and impersonal ‘foetus’ to reflect the way the oral
history participants understood their pregnancies. I have also adhered to British spelling, for
example, ‘foetus’, except for in direct quotes from sources which use ‘fetus’ and its
variants. I have placed inverted commas around the usage of the words ‘deformed’,
‘defective’, and ‘abnormal’ and their variants to acknowledge that ideas of ‘deformity’ are
social and cultural constructions inscribed on particular bodies at different times in the past.
My position in the thesis
In his book A Concise History of Australia Stuart Macintyre observes that the image of the
historian as ‘observer of events has fallen into disrepute’. No longer is the historian
accorded the authoritative role as lofty surveyor, ‘placed at a good distance’ from his
subject. Rather, argues Macintyre, contemporary historians are expected to be ‘inside the
history, inextricably caught up in a continuous making and remaking of the past’. 37
37
Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia, Cambridge, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press,
1999, p. 291.
28
I began my research into the history of perinatal loss as a self-described ‘bereaved mother’.
My first child was stillborn shortly after I was accepted as a doctoral candidate at the
University of Western Australia, and my initial project - a study of masculinity in popular
images of the Australian colonial bushranger Ned Kelly - was abandoned after my
pregnancy ended. Initially, I was concerned that being placed so close to the subject would
be detrimental. Would such a personal experience influence a neophyte historian towards
making prejudicial and unbalanced conclusions?
However if, as Macintyre argues, the historian should be ‘inextricably part’ of history
making, then my experience can be considered to be advantageous - both in theoretical and
practical terms. My experience has given me both the requisite motivation and passion for
the hard slog of writing a thesis, whilst also proving beneficial in that most of the women
who responded to my requests for interview participants had felt compelled to respond
because they knew that I was myself the parent of a deceased baby.
Furthermore, having been warned of the risk of being close to a subject I have consciously
sought to distance myself from my own experience in order to risk essentialising the
experience of other women and from making conclusions which sit comfortably with my
own memories of losing a baby. Indeed, as Alistair Thomson notes, feminist historians
have ‘debunked’ the traditional idea of the entirely objective historian, advocating in its
stead the historian who examines their own subjectivity throughout the research process. 38
Throughout my research I have uncovered evidence which is in stark contradiction to the
ways I have understood my own loss; particularly in the oral history project I was often
confronted with different ways of remembering the death of a baby. Whilst these factors
may seem to be potential detractors to a balanced thesis, it is my belief that being so close
to this subject has actually made me more conscious of the need to be both participant and
observer, an intertwining of both Scott and Macintyre’s ideals of the role of the historian. 39
My own experience of losing a baby served to remove any lingering feelings of historical
38
A. Thomson, ‘Memory as Battlefield : Personal and political investments in the national military past’, The
Oral History Review, vol. 22, no. 2, 1995, p. 55.
39
Macintyre cites Ernest Scott’s description of the ideal historian: ‘Historical events, like mountain ranges,
can best be surveyed as a whole by an observer who is placed a good distance from them’. Scott quoted in
Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia, p. 291.
29
authority on my behalf, whilst helping me appreciate the complexities and intricacies of
such an experience and the diversity of response after the death of a baby.
30
CHAPTER ONE
‘The babies scarcely mattered’: Literature review and historical context
In her study of the RWH in Melbourne, Janet McCalman notes that, in an age of high
maternal, mortality stillbirths or the deaths of newborn babies at the turn of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries often went unrecorded. 40 Indeed, this observation could similarly be
applied to the sparse treatment of stillbirth and neonatal death in the historical record:
whilst there is a wealth of scholarship concerned with women’s experiences of pregnancy
and childbirth, motherhood and sexuality, there is no Australian historical study which
focuses on either the experience of losing a baby through stillbirth or in the newborn
period, nor on the changing cultural and social constructions of perinatal death in the past.
In this chapter I begin by reviewing the historiography of perinatal death, and in doing so I
discuss the chief concerns of this work and the related theoretical considerations. I also
present scholarship from other disciplines which give insight into the ways in which the
maternal and foetal bodies have been understood by contemporary writers in the social
sciences and humanities, including feminist philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists.
Lastly, I frame the remaining chapters of the thesis by examining the historical context of
perinatal death, considering the ways in which perinatal death was understood prior to the
turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The history of death and grief
Writing with reference to her own pioneering research into the history of bereavement in
Australia, Joy Damousi observes that the cultural silence towards death and grief which
characterised much of the twentieth century in Australia has, to some degree, extended to
the scholarly community as evidenced by traditional attempts to recreate a ‘more
wholesome, dignified and comforting image of our past’. 41 With this in mind, several
historians in recent years have begun the process of filling in the gaps in our understanding
40
Janet McCalman, Sex and Suffering: Women’s Health and a Women’s Hospital, Royal Women’s Hospital
Melbourne, 1856-1996, Carlton, Vic., Melbourne University Press, 1998, p. 156.
41
Joy Damousi, ‘History Matters: The Politics of Grief and Injury in Australian History’, Australian
Historical Studies, vol. 33, no. 118, 2002, p. 101.
31
of attitudes towards death and bereavement in Australia’s past, with particular emphasis on
the gendered expectations of the expression of grief. As Damousi observes, the study of
grief and loss in the past constitute a significant category of historical analysis; ‘emotional
life’, she argues, ‘is an important, and ever-changing, part of our social and cultural
history’. 42
Patricia Jalland and Damousi argue that the early twentieth century would see a radical shift
in cultural expectations of ‘appropriate’ responses to death and grief. The trauma of World
War One served to reinforce the nineteenth century belief that the ‘appropriate’ masculine
response to death was characterised by a silent stoicism – an expectation of ‘appropriate’
behaviour which, in the interwar years spread to women as well. 43 Both Jalland and
Damousi note that whilst it is apparent that there did exist a kind of ‘code of silence’ that
was reserved for those who had served in either the Great War or World War Two, which
was only occasionally broken when in the company of fellow servicemen, other family
members - and in particular wives - were expected to abide by this silence.44 In her study of
changing patterns of bereavement in the twentieth century, Jalland argues that stoicism –
and a corresponding public restraint of sorrow – was increasingly considered the only
acceptable response to the mass slaughter of young men in war, with letters indicating that
many families felt that this was a response that honoured and respected the memory of
those who had died. 45
42
Joy Damousi, Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-war Australia, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 196.
43
From both wars, but particularly the Great War, there also existed the common misconception that returned
servicemen would be able to resume their former lives with few difficulties, a misunderstanding that forced
many men to internalise their horrific memories and which created a protective silence around their
experiences in the war. The cultural restriction of male grieving was not new to the twentieth century –
Patricia Jalland notes that men in the nineteenth century in Britain and Australia had little opportunity to at
least publicly express their sorrow after the death of a loved one, yet the cumulative impact of the two world
wars extended this expectation to women as well. See P. Jalland, Changing Ways of Death in Twentieth
Century Australia: War, Medicine and the Funeral Business, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006, p. 35.
44
Damousi’s study of wives of servicemen in several of Australia’s wars shows the impact of this silence,
with the wife of one World War One veteran commenting that men ‘kept it under covers. They didn’t express
themselves … Men talked among themselves … but they wouldn’t talk to the women about it all’. Truda
Naylor quoted in Damousi, Living with the Aftermath, p. 101.
45
Jalland cites an excerpt of a letter from a son to his mother; whilst he acknowledged that ‘yours is a great
sorrow,’ he exhorted her to ‘not give way … we must think of the thousands that have been bereaved by this
awful war’. See Jalland, Changing Ways of Death in Twentieth Century Australia, p. 95. As Jalland argues in
her earlier research, the expectation of stoicism was a long tradition in Australia, derived from the struggles
and hardships of life in the bush, but notions of stoicism, privacy and survival were strongly reinforced by the
two World Wars. See P. Jalland, Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural history, Melbourne, New
York: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 326.
32
Writing about maternal grief following the Great War, Damousi notes that whilst
motherhood was ostensibly revered, maternal love was not considered to be ‘true love’ and
‘therefore could never attain the status of “true” loss’. 46 Although women’s grief initially
preoccupied the Australian press and the grieving mother was seen as symbolic of the great
sacrifice made by the Australian nation in wartime, by the 1920s and 1930s, argues
Damousi, women’s loss was ‘public[ly] neglected’. As the categories of ‘mother’ and
‘widow’ were conflated into ‘women’, the experience of losing a loved one in the War
became ‘marginal to the memory of war because they were no longer defined by their
‘sacrifice’. 47 Tanja Luckins argues that the cultural expectation of repressed sorrow after
the World Wars had the greatest impact on women in Australia, because of the traditional
assumption that women are ‘naturally’ nurturers.48 In terms of rituals and the enactment of
mourning, then, the repression of expressive sorrow undoubtedly had most impact on the
way that women had customarily mourned their dead. In relation to deaths in war, women
in particular were expected to lay their own feelings aside and to emulate the stoicism of
their sons and husbands. The impact of this expectation of appropriate feminine
bereavement responses after the two world wars would also extend to other deaths;
particularly in the case of a stillbirth or neonatal death, the expectations of ‘appropriate’
mourning after pregnancy loss were sharply gendered.
Despite these attempts to fill the gap in our knowledge of death and bereavement in the
past, relatively little attention has been paid to the historical understandings and experience
of perinatal death in Australia; although some historians have made reference to perinatal
death, this has been in the context of a wider focus. For example, Jalland’s otherwise
invaluable work on death in Australia makes passing reference to the simplicity of funerals
for stillborn babies in the late nineteenth century, yet she does not examine in detail as to
why this was the case. 49 Despite its frequency both in the past and in the contemporary
times, the history of stillbirth and neonatal death is a significantly under-researched area of
feminist history in Australia.
46
Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia, Cambridge,
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 27.
47
Damousi, The Labour of Loss, pp. 30, 35-37.
48
See Tanja Luckins, The Gates of Memory: Australian People’s Experiences and Memories of Loss and the
Great War, Fremantle, WA: Curtin University Press, 2006, p. 55.
49
Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, p. 121.
33
Maternity and Motherhood
Notwithstanding the paucity of scholarship specifically concerned with the experience of
perinatal death in the past in Australia, some historians have paid brief attention to this
issue as part of a wider study of the history of obstetrics and women’s experiences of
pregnancy and childbirth. Many historians have challenged the so-called ‘ideology of
motherhood’ of the early twentieth century which constructed motherhood as a happy,
supremely fulfilling experience in women’s lives, seeking instead to gain insight into the
ways women themselves experienced pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood, as well as the
ways in which some women in Australia’s past have defied cultural expectations of
‘appropriate’ femininity. Marriage and motherhood were the dominant, most socially
acceptable roles available to Australian women, at least for the first half of the twentieth
century, and pregnancy, childbirth and childrearing have therefore occupied a significant
share of feminist historiography.
The veneration of the figure of the ‘mother’ at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries has been well documented by feminist scholars. 50 Kerreen Reiger in particular
observes that the construction of the ‘maternal citizen’ was part of a wider anxiety that
Australia must consolidate its position as a strong, healthy nation. Implicit in the
construction of the maternal citizen was the rhetoric of nation-building, and the white
Australian mother was seen to be the ‘lynchpin of hearth and home’; furthermore, the
success of mothers’ ‘nest building efforts’ would ensure the future of Australia and its
people. 51 Katie Holmes observes that motherhood was constructed as a ‘crucial stage on the
path to a woman’s mature expression of her femininity’ in the early twentieth century;
however, whilst women would be fulfilled by motherhood, the medicalisation of childbirth
resulted in the expectation that ‘women’s most natural function should be supervised by
50
See for example Kerreen Reiger, The Disenchantment of the Home: Modernizing the Australian Family,
1880-1940, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985; Joan Eveline, ‘Feminism, Racism and Citizenship in
Twentieth Century Australia’, in P. Crawford and P. Maddern, Women as Australian Citizens: Underlying
Histories, Carlton, Melbourne University Press, 2001, pp. 141 - 177; M. Lake, ‘How Men Gave Birth to the
Australian Nation: Nationalism, Gender and Other Seminal Acts’, Gender and History, vol. 4, 1992, pp. 30522; Kerreen Reiger and Margaret James, ‘Hatches, Matches and Despatches’, in V. Burgmann and J. Lee
(eds.) Constructing a Culture: A People's History of Australia since 1788, Ringwood: Penguin, 1988, pp. 117.
51
Reiger, Disenchantment of the Home, p. 39.
34
men’. 52 Jill Matthews attributes this focus on the mother to the increasing anxiety over the
composition of the population in Australia. Population ideology, she argues, was firmly
based around notions of racial purity and belief in the superiority of white British stock,
emerging from Enlightenment ideas of moral, economic and civil progress.
Furthermore, scholars argue that the regulation of women’s bodies was particularly focused
on the pregnant body. 53 The rise of antenatal care and the ‘infant welfare’ movement were
crucial components of the surveillance over the maternal body in order to preserve the
(white) race; the notion of ‘scientific mothering’ went hand-in-hand with the cultural
veneration of motherhood-as-citizenship. 54 It was widely believed, as Reiger argues, that
Australian women needed instruction and education in the ‘scientifically correct and
morally approved’ manner of motherhood and maternity in order to prevent the
deterioration of the race and to assist sturdy little Australian babies in flourishing. 55
Damousi observes that, although the grief of bereaved mothers had been publicly neglected
after World War One, a ‘different kind of war’ became forged in the 1920s and 1930s in
Australia, underscored by the rhetoric of nation-building; within this landscape, the figure
of the mother and motherhood itself became a central focus. 56
The increased scrutiny over the pregnant body and the understanding that women of
childbearing age were vital to Australia’s efforts in the project of nation-building increased
expectations placed upon women, argues Joan Eveline, to ‘bear even children they did not
want’ 57 and to place their bodies under the supervision of the medical profession to ensure
that these pregnancies came to fruition. Eveline, amongst others, argues that the infant
welfare movement was motivated by eugenics and the concern over racial hygiene; in
particular the Maternity Allowance from 1912 was designed to reward ‘appropriate’
52
Holmes, Spaces in her Day, p. 71.
Matthews, Good and Mad Women, p. 75.
54
Fiona Paisley, ‘Feminist Challenges to White Australia, 1900 – 1930s,’ in Diane Kirkby (ed.), Sex, Power
and Justice: Historical Perspectives on the Law in Australia, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995, p.
253.
55
Reiger, Disenchantment of the Home, pp. 128-129.
56
Damousi, Labour of Loss, p. 38.
57
As Eveline argues, legislation was enacted to ensure this; the Western Australian Criminal Code Act 1902,
for example, outlawed infanticide and the abandonment of children, and provided for up to fourteen years
imprisonment for abortion. See Eveline, ‘Feminism, Racism and Citizenship’, p. 152.
53
35
procreation, with non-Caucasian women excluded from receiving the bonus. As Eveline
argues, the clear message was that white babies were prized. 58
The place of the unborn child in the rhetoric of pronatalism has considered by writers
although only in abstract terms. Marilyn Lake and Farley Kelly, for example, argue that the
(white) unborn child was constructed as the future Australian citizen, 59 but there has been
little in-depth consideration of the values inscribed on the ‘imperfect’ foetal body and the
cultural meanings of the death of such a foetus, an omission that is particularly surprising
considering many writers acknowledge that eugenics, ‘to be well born’, played a significant
role in the regulation of the female body. Eveline, for example, notes that the white mother
was considered to be the ‘saviour of the race’; 60 Reiger also observes that ‘unable to force
women to bear more children, the State placed emphasis on improving the ‘quality’ of
those children who were born; their health and upbringing became matters of professional
concern’. 61 Although notions of ‘defectiveness’ are considered in these studies, there is no
systematic analysis of how perinatal loss may have been constructed within these
inscriptions on the foetal body.
Bryan Gandevia’s social history into high infant mortality rates in the nineteenth century
also touches on meanings of perinatal loss, but does not provide a broader analysis of the
diversity of understandings. Gandevia notes that high infant mortality in the latter years of
the nineteenth century was considered to be an issue of grave importance for the colonies
and later, the newly Federated nation; accordingly, the issue of ‘maternal neglect’ became
increasingly considered to be at the root of the problem of the shockingly-high rate of
infant mortality. For example, although the Registrar-General of New South Wales [NSW]
noted the problem of lead contamination in drinking water and its impact on infant health in
the mid 1850s, he carefully sidestepped discussing any possible remedial measures,
declaring instead that deficient mothering was to blame: ‘the great sacrifice of life ...
exhibited ... is the result of a sinful degree of neglect and recklessness, which call for the
58
Eveline, ‘Feminism, Racism and Citizenship’, pp. 150-151. See also Paisley, ‘Feminist Challenges’,
pp. 252 – 254.
59
Marilyn Lake and Farley Kelly (eds.) Double Time: Women in Victoria – 150 Years, Ringwood, Vic.:
Penguin, 1985, p. 259.
60
Eveline, ‘Feminism, Racism and Citizenship’, pp. 150-151.
61
Kerreen Reiger, ‘Vera Scantlebury-Brown: Professional Mother’, in Lake and Kelly (eds.) Double Time, p.
291.
36
most earnest consideration’ by those entrusted with ‘the education, the moral training and
the government of the people’.62 The figure of the expectant mother, then, was imbued with
weighty and serious responsibility.
According to several historians, the introduction of the Maternity Allowance or ‘Baby
Bonus’ in 1912 by the Fisher Labor government was explicitly designed to encourage and
reward ‘good’ mothering practices and to discourage ‘undesirable’ people from
procreating. 63 Scholars rightly show that Asiatic and indigenous mothers were excluded
from receiving the Allowance, an explicit way of excluding such women from the ‘national
project’ of maternity. Fiona Paisley, for example, further explores the role of the State as
‘father’ in the lives of Aboriginal mothers, whose attachments to their babies and children
were constructed as inferior, with great ramifications beyond exclusion from the Maternity
Allowance scheme. 64 Although Reiger, for example, notes that the issue of the Allowance
extending to instances of stillbirths was a matter of debate, 65 a serious omission from most
arguments that the Maternity Allowance was a reward for ‘appropriate’ procreation is a
focused examination of the exclusion of women who produced stillborn babies. The
exclusion of women who delivered a stillborn baby – women who were constructed as
‘failed mothers’, as I argue in Chapter Two, is just as instructive to the historian seeking to
understand the motivations behind pronatalism.
Maternal responsibility: antenatal care
Sociologists and historians alike have written extensively on the construction of antenatal
care in the early twentieth century as an ‘essential’ and ‘responsible’ response to one’s
pregnant condition. The British sociologist Ann Oakley observes that antenatal care, as an
articulated concept, did not exist prior to the twentieth century, yet by the 1930s the
expectation that women would place their pregnant bodies under the supervision of a doctor
62
Bryan Gandevia, Tears Often Shed: Health and Welfare in Australia since 1788, Rushcutters Bay, NSW:
Pergamon Press, 1978, p. 79.
63
As Eveline argues, the Maternity Allowance was ‘naturalised to the assumed whiteness of the legislation:
‘the more young Australians we have,’ [Prime Minister Fisher] declared, ‘the wealthier the country must be’.
See Eveline, ‘Feminism, Racism and Citizenship’, p. 151. See also Gandevia, Tears Often Shed, p. 130;
Paisley, ‘Feminist Challenges’, p. 253; Reiger, Disenchantment of the Home, p. 89; Damousi, The Labour of
Loss, pp. 38-39.
64
Paisley, ‘Feminist Challenges’, pp. 252–269.
65
Reiger, Disenchantment of the Home, p. 86.
37
was fast becoming an accepted custom in both Britain and Australia. Driving what Oakley
has conceptualised as the ‘claim[ing] [of] the care of pregnant women as its expert
territory’ was a widespread fear that ‘race suicide’ was imminent if the high maternal and
infant mortality rates were not halted – a fear particularly heightened in the newly federated
Australia particularly after the great losses of the Great War. Childbearing, argues Oakley,
‘became singled out as an activity of proper concern to the state – one in which it was
essential for the state to intervene in the interests of maintaining and improving the quantity
and quality of the population’. 66
The key to improving the quantity and quality of the population was, in essence, an appeal
to the ‘regulated and scientific’ approach as postulated by the medical profession; Damousi
argues that the elevating of white motherhood as a ‘new science’ was borne not only out of
the ‘modernist tendencies’ of the period but was also a ‘response to the broken bodies
which had returned’ from the Great War. 67 The great tragedies of the First World War
served to reinforce the notion that the fledgling nation needed a more robust and ‘racially
hygienic population’. 68 McCalman observes that this view was to some extent borne out of
the sheer numbers of babies being born to syphilitic mothers in the early twentieth
century; 69 however, the births of venereal disease-affected babies only served to strengthen
eugenic ideals. Several historians problematise the incidence of syphilis and other sexually
transmitted infections, arguing that the attempted eradication of venereal disease became a
crucial part of efforts to ‘moralise’ the lower classes. Stephen Garton, for example, argues
that the interwar years were host to the prevailing view that ‘undesirables’ should be
restricted in their procreation, for the nation’s sake; the concern over ‘race suicide’, brought
about by what Eveline sees as ‘the war, influenza and poverty, and the feared influx of
Asia’s ‘millions’ 70 strengthened the activities and concerns of eugenics groups. 71
66
Ann Oakley, The Captured Womb: A History of the Medical Care of Pregnant Women, Oxford: Blackwell,
1984, p. 34.
67
Damousi, The Labour of Loss, p. 38.
68
Damousi, The Labour of Loss, p. 38.
69
McCalman, Sex and Suffering, pp. 135-136.
70
Eveline, ‘Feminism, Racism and Citizenship’, p. 152.
71
Stephen Garton, ‘Sound Minds and Healthy Bodies: Re-considering eugenics in Australia, 1914-1940’,
Australian Historical Studies, vol. 26, no. 103, October 1994, p. 164.
38
As Lisa Featherstone notes, to be a woman within eugenic discourse was ‘simply to be a
mother. Marriage equated maternity, femininity equaled motherhood’. 72 However, she
continues, the ideal of motherhood was ‘just a representation – bearing little resemblance to
the reality of lives of real, flesh and blood women’. 73 The ideal of motherhood, however in
conflict with the real lives of Australian women, became the justification and impetus for
the scrutiny over women’s bodies in the early twentieth century. Irish sociologist Jo
Murphy-Lawless argues that, within the context of the growing cultural expectation that the
pregnant woman would place herself under the care of a doctor in order to conceive a
healthy, robust baby, antenatal care was a coercive measure; the medical profession began
to rely on ‘scare tactics’ in order to convince women of their inability to monitor their
pregnancy satisfactorily, and the ensuing need for medical supervision. 74
Furthermore, according to Deborah Lupton, the surveillance of women’s bodies was part of
the shift to remove women’s authority over their bodies and their babies: she argues that
‘women were depicted as the sites of production, alienated from their work by medical
praxis, the baby the end product, the uterus the labourer and the doctor the supervisor’. 75
Oakley also suggests that antenatal care can be seen as part of an effort to control women’s
bodies, particularly when the declining birth rate intersected with fears of ‘race suicide’ and
the ‘hygiene’ of the race. She argues that, in seeking to exert control over women’s bodies,
antenatal care was symbolic of an unequal alliance between mothers and doctors, with the
‘main imperative for mothers … to solicit and pay attention to medical advice’.76
The intertwined factors of the medicalisation of childbirth and the cultural avoidance of
death had great impact on the way that pregnancy loss and baby death was understood both
72
Featherstone cites the example of eminent Melbourne obstetrician, Sir Walter Balls-Headley, who insisted
that maternity and domesticity should be the sole occupations for women; intellectual pursuits, for example,
would upset the reproductive processes and Balls-Headley, argues Featherstone, ‘felt that the position
assumed during study would compress the uterus, this, combined with tight lacing, would lead to uterine
dysfunction’. Walter Balls-Headley quoted in L. Featherstone, ‘Race for Reproduction: The Gendering of
Eugenic Theories in Australia, 1890 - 1940’, in Martin Crotty, John Germov, Grant Rodwell (eds.) A Race for
a Place: Eugenics, Darwinism and Social Thought and Practice in Australia, Callaghan, NSW: Faculty of
Arts and Social Sciences, University of Newcastle, 2000, p. 183.
73
Featherstone, ‘Race for Reproduction’, p. 183.
74
Jo Murphy-Lawless, Reading Birth and Death, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1998, p. 19.
75
Deborah Lupton, Medicine as Culture: Illness, Disease and the Body in Western Societies, London,
Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1994, p. 70.
76
Oakley, The Captured Womb, p. 257.
39
within the medical community and by much of Australian society. Jalland argues that the
professionalising of medicine hastened the cultural avoidance of death because institutions
came to be synonymous with healing, so that the ‘death of a patient represented failure and
death became a topic to be evaded’.77 The evasion of death was particularly marked in the
maternity hospital, which as I discuss in following chapters, had become constructed as a
site for birth, not death. Perinatal death, accepted with a certain sense of philosophical
acceptance prior to the turn of the twentieth century, transgressed both the notion of a ‘good
death’ and the increasing view that modern medicine had been able to control perinatal
death. 78
As I argue in Chapter Two, the medicalisation of childbirth had seen the steady decline in
both infant and maternal mortality rates, cultivating the notion that perinatal death was
avoidable providing the pregnant woman placed her body under the supervision of the
medical profession. McCalman observes that the decline in maternal mortality and
significant discoveries in obstetrics from the 1940s onwards, such as the discovery of the
Rhesus factor, led to a new focus on the foetal body; the rise in perinatal medicine as a subspectrum of obstetrics shifted the concerns of the medical profession and also supported the
notion that, as had been the case with the maternal mortality rate, medical knowledge had
the ability to conquer perinatal mortality. 79
Murphy-Lawless argues that a significant component of the medicalisation of childbirth
was the construction of pregnancy and childbirth as a time of ‘dire peril’ for women and
their unborn children; however, as the incidence of deaths in childbirth fell, she argues,
obstetrics was ‘loathe to let go of its use of the risk-death pairing’. 80 Coupled with
advances in perinatal medicine, antenatal care and the ‘active management’ of labour were
perceived to be the means by which this risk could be minimised, and as perinatal mortality
declined incidents of stillbirth and neonatal death served to ‘expose the obstetric system at
its most vulnerable point, revealing such guarantees about its capacity to deal with risk to
77
Jalland, Changing Ways of Death, p. 194.
Anthropologist Michael C. Kearle observes that a ‘bad death’ was one where the individual was ‘taken
prematurely’. With secularisation and advances in medical knowledge, death became anticipated and the
notion of ‘dying on time’ was the distinction between a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ death. See M. C. Kearle, Endings:
A Sociology of Death and Dying, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 122.
79
McCalman, Sex and Suffering, pp. 239-240.
80
Murphy-Lawless, Reading Birth and Death, p. 198.
78
40
be meaningless’. 81 In other words, perinatal death transgressed the ideals and aims of
obstetrics to produce ‘successful issue’. In this thesis I explore how the construction of
perinatal death as an instance of ‘failure’ impacted the ways in which women experienced
the death of a baby, having transgressed the expectations placed upon them to produce
‘successful issue’.
The ‘bad’ woman
Trangressing ‘appropriate femininity’ is a common theme in feminist scholarship in
Australia. Through her analysis of case records of female inmates in lunatic asylums,
Matthews provides a disturbing insight into the impact of such transgressions – which she
notes is based around the idea of ‘normative heterosexuality’ - of which motherhood is a
crucial component. 82 In Matthews’ analysis, transgressing ‘good’ motherhood does not
extend to women who lost babies, although she does consider the expectations placed upon
mothers to behave in ways that were considered ‘appropriate’ to their position in society. 83
Lake and Kelly consider the role of feminism at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries in promoting notions of ‘good’ motherhood through their lobbying for the
‘mother’ to be considered valuable to the cause of nation-building. The so-called
‘pronatalism push’ meant that women were ‘confronted with exacting new standards of
mothering and housewifery’; these demands were predicated upon ideas of national
responsibility. ‘Modern methods’ of mothering were valorised as helping women achieve
and fulfil their domestic ‘responsibilities’; critical to the assessment of women’s success
was the regulation of mothering – exemplified, argue Lake and Kelly, by the image of the
baby on the scales. 84 Neither Lake and Kelly or Matthews consider the possibility of
women failing as mothers even before their babies could be measured on those scales.
Whilst not a feminist history, Neville Hicks’ study of the 1904 NSW Royal Commission
into the Decline of the Birth-Rate [RCDB] is a useful analysis of the expectations placed
upon Australian women at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; as he argues,
81
Murphy-Lawless, Reading Birth and Death, pp. 198 & 214.
Matthews, Good and Mad Women, p. 111.
83
Matthews, Good and Mad Women, pp. 173-197.
84
Lake and Kelly (eds.) Double Time, p. 259.
82
41
the Report is fairly littered with references to women’s ‘selfishness’ in choosing to restrict
their family size. Women who were apparently practicing contraception to limit their
family size were labelled as lazy, self-absorbed, and a threat to Australia’s future health and
security. Delaying childbirth or avoiding pregnancy was equated to a lack of commitment
to the nation and the selfish desire to avoid the ‘natural’ obligations of femininity, and
witnesses to the Commission openly called for such women to be stigmatised. 85 This
stigma, however, could be problematised in light of the Report’s continual conflation of
spontaneous and ‘criminal’ abortion; the focus on women’s childbearing activities was, as
Hicks observes, of such significance at the turn of the twentieth century that an analysis of
the meanings given to miscarriage and perinatal death is warranted.
Several feminist writers have sought to chart the developments in birth control and
contraception in Australia’s past, and in doing so have considered the apparent disparity in
women’s inscriptions on the foetal body and those inscriptions produced by the medical
profession and government authorities. As part of her research into induced abortion, Judith
Allen notes the sheer prevalence of miscarriage and perinatal death in Australia at the turn
of the twentieth century and argues that pregnancy, despite being culturally venerated as the
avenue for ‘appropriate’ feminine fulfilment, was not always welcomed in reality. Rather,
for some women it was a devastating event. For already overburdened and often
impoverished working-class women, induced abortion and, to a lesser extent, infanticide
and concealment of birth, were common forms of contraception; therefore, argues Allen,
for many women the death of a child was accepted with a sense of relief, as ‘one less mouth
to feed’. 86
Furthermore, Allen argues that infanticide was often used as a last- resort form of birth
control, although the practice did lessen in the early twentieth century as regulation over
birth was tightened. Previously however the regulation of births and deaths, including
stillbirths and neonatal deaths, was virtually non-existent; despite a few arrests being made
of women charged with infanticide at the turn of the century, many a suspicious infant
85
Neville Hicks, This Sin and Scandal: Australia’s Population Debate 1891-1911, Canberra: Australian
National University Press, 1978, pp. 33-35 & 51.
86
Judith Allen, Sex and Secrets: Crimes involving Australian women since 1880, Melbourne: Oxford
University Press, 1990, pp. 26-27.
42
death was accepted as a stillbirth by the public and officials alike. 87 Because of this lack of
official intervention, Allen argues that this indicated that childbirth and its associated
dangers were seen to be women’s business and treated with far less ‘shock and moralism’
as would be the case in contemporary Australia. 88 Allen’s otherwise significant and useful
study ignores the substantial body of source material which suggests that fatalism may be
but one response to pregnancy loss in the past. Stefania Siedlecky and Diana Wyndham too
do not explore the complexity of meanings of perinatal loss in the early twentieth century
within their argument that women’s increasing agitation for safe, effective and reliable birth
control is evidence that most Australian women viewed their pregnancies as burdensome. 89
A more useful analysis to the concerns of this thesis is found in the work of Lynette Finch
and Jon Stratton, who explore the changing ideas of what constituted a ‘child’ amongst the
working-class and middle-class respectively at the turn of the twentieth century, arguing
that there was a shift towards constructing the foetus as a human entity deserving of
protection – both medical and legal. Finch and Stratton note that the value placed upon
unborn children was a notion which gradually spread to the working class at the turn of the
twentieth century. 90
Medicine and perinatal loss
McCalman’s comprehensive study of the RWH in Melbourne focuses on medical
developments which saw both the maternal and infant mortality rates significantly decline
in the early twentieth century. McCalman argues persuasively for the medical profession’s
role in this decline, yet any impact on the constructions of pregnancy loss is not afforded a
87
Allen, Sex and Secrets, p. 33.
Allen, Sex and Secrets, p. 33.
89
Stefania Siedlecky and Diana Wyndham, Populate and Perish: Australian Women’s Fight for Birth
Control, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990, passim.
90
Lynette Finch and Jon Stratton, ‘The Australian working class and the practice of abortion 1880-1939’,
Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 23, 1988, pp. 45-64. See also Lynette Finch, The Classing Gaze: Sexuality,
Class and Surveillance, St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1993, p. 70. However, one cannot conclude
that the ‘respectable’ classes completely imposed the notion of the foetus as human on the unsuspecting
working-classes. Letters from working-class women in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century provide
insight into the diversity of inscriptions of the foetal body; for example, one woman wrote of her deep sadness
at losing her first child: ‘We had a little girl, which we had always longed for, only to lose it as soon as it
came into the world, for I have no strength in my inside (the doctor said) to bring a child into the world’.
Another commented that, after her stillbirth, ‘I did nothing but cry. I could not get what I ought to have’. See
Letter 120 and Letter 49 quoted in Margaret L. Davies (ed.) Maternity: Letters From Working Women,
London: Virago, 1978, pp. 76 & 152.
88
43
systematic analysis. McCalman asserts that ‘the mothers mattered, the babies were scarcely
mentioned’; this conclusion, however, requires further consideration. In Sex and Suffering
McCalman notes that this was primarily borne out of the medical profession’s need to focus
on maternal mortality without further examining how this may have affected
understandings of perinatal loss at this time. 91
Reiger’s study of the ‘forgotten women’s movement’, childbirth reform in the late 1960s
and 1970s, addresses the gaps in McCalman’s analysis and moves beyond the positivist
approach that the medical profession usually acted in the best interest of pregnant women
and their babies. Although Reiger makes only brief mention of changing understandings of
perinatal loss, her work provides the social and historical framework for changing attitudes
towards pregnancy in the 1960s and 1970s; in later chapters I discuss Reiger’s work in
greater detail. 92
Although the cultural construction of pregnancy and childbirth as satisfying and fulfilling
events in many Australian women’s lives has been convincingly challenged by writers such
as McCalman and Reiger, the reach of these studies do not extend to include the historical
experiences of those women whose pregnancy ended in a stillbirth or neonatal death.
Where Our Bodies, Our Babies makes an invaluable contribution to enlarging our
knowledge of the particular social context in which dramatic changes to childbirth practices
were able to occur, this thesis extends this research to reclaim perhaps the most historically
silent aspect of pregnancy, perinatal loss The growing recognition that perinatal death was a
significant event in a woman’s life – a recognition couched within the context of social
change which Reiger has explored in depth - would dramatically change the way that
perinatal death – like other aspects of pregnancy and childbirth - was managed within the
clinical setting.
Contemporary scholarship of perinatal loss
I now move my attention away from the historiography of maternity and motherhood in
91
McCalman, Sex and Suffering, p. 156.
Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies: The Forgotten Women’s Movement Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University
Press, 2000.
92
44
Australia to consider contemporary literature concerned with perinatal death and pregnancy
and notions of responsibility in general. Whilst little attention has been paid to perinatal
death as an historical subject, there is a significant body of scholarship which analyses the
constructions of perinatal loss in contemporary Western societies. Due to the extent of these
works, these texts have been selected as examples of the range of literature about stillbirth
and neonatal death in western societies including the United States of America, the United
Kingdom, and Australia.
For the purpose of this literature review I have assessed these texts using the key themes
which underpin my own research, asking questions such as: have these writers examined
women’s own understandings of perinatal death and have they acknowledged the silence
surrounding women’s voices? If so, have they sought to examine women’s own
understandings of perinatal death, and how was this information accessed and analysed? Do
these texts implicitly or explicitly challenge the medical model of perinatal death and its
authority over knowledge concerning the loss of a baby? Have these authors considered the
historicity of perinatal death, or is it viewed as fixed and unchanging, interpreted through
the grid of scientific understandings of stillbirth and neonatal death?
American cultural anthropologist Linda Layne has contributed perhaps the richest body of
work on contemporary meanings of pregnancy loss in North America within what she
terms the rise of the ‘consumer culture’. Layne’s research into contemporary pregnancy
loss is predicated upon the understanding that pregnancy, and by extension pregnancy loss,
is socially constructed, rather than an essential or an ahistorical event. She argues that,
since the emergence of the abortion reform movement in the 1960s and 1970s, motherhood
has become something to be ‘achieved’ rather than a status ascribed to women by virtue of
their femaleness; furthermore, in a culture of individualistic effort, pregnancy is interpreted
in terms of ‘production’. In making parallels to the measuring of worth in a business
context, Layne notes that the ‘successful production’ of a baby can be ‘credited as a moral
achievement, the result of self-discipline and labor, [and] that the inability to bear children
is often attributed to a moral failing on behalf of the woman’. 93 If reproduction is viewed in
93
Linda Layne, ‘‘True Gifts from God’: Motherhood, Sacrifice and Enrichment in the Case of Pregnancy
Loss’, in L. Layne (ed.) Transformative Motherhood: On Giving and Getting in a Consumer Culture, New
York and London: New York University Press, 1999, p. 171.
45
these terms then pregnancy loss or early newborn death is by extension, as Layne argues,
viewed as ‘an instance of failed production’. 94
Notions of maternal responsibility in the late twentieth century fit more broadly within the
discourse of individual responsibility and the emphasis on personal achievement evident in
many Western cultures, including Australia. Layne argues that pregnancy loss is a ‘moral
problem’ for those women whose babies die. In a cultural context where pregnancy is
constructed as an ‘achievement’ and the birth of a healthy baby as a ‘success’, pregnancy
loss is constructed as a ‘failure’. 95 Layne observes that Western cultures ‘often [understand]
pregnancy in terms of capitalist production and [deem] moral stature and worldly success to
be the result of purposeful, individual effort’. 96 Furthermore, Layne applies anthropologist
Emily Martin’s idea of the ‘currency of health’ to explore how women who suffer the
ending of a pregnancy or death of a baby are caught between the tension of the ‘out-ofcontrolness of most fetal and early infant deaths and the cultural mandate to be in control of
one’s body/self’. 97
Feminist scholars have increasingly critiqued the rise of what is termed the ‘maternal/foetal
conflict’, a privileging of the foetal body over the maternal body with the expectation, as
Susan Markens et al note, that ‘women as mothers [should] subordinate their own needs to
their children’s. With regard to pregnant women, this expansion of maternal responsibilities
to the gestational period signals a shift in the focus of pregnancy from the health of the
woman to the health of the fetus’. 98 Ruth Hubbard, for example, argues that the ‘selfish
mother’, intent on fulfilling her desires at ‘the expense of her unborn child’, is part of a
tradition of portraying mothers as ‘bad for their children’.
99
Katha Pollitt notes that the
94
Layne, ‘True Gifts from God’, p. 170.
Layne, ‘True Gifts from God’, p. 169.
96
Layne, ‘True Gifts from God’, p. 169.
97
Martin argues that the cultural model of the immune system emerged as a new form of Social Darwinism in
the late twentieth century; she notes that whilst the ‘relative strength of immune systems is sometimes
understood in terms of an individual’s or group’s genetics … it is also frequently understood to be the result
of an individual’s conscious efforts at self-improvement’. A similar model, argues Layne, can be applied to
perinatal loss; after the emergence of abortion activism motherhood shifted from a ‘status that was ascribed to
one that was achieved … a moral achievement’. See Layne, ‘True Gifts from God’, pp. 169-170.
98
Susan Markens, C.H. Browner, Nancy Press ‘Feeding the Fetus: Interrogating the Notion of Maternal/Fetal
Conflict’, Feminist Studies, vol. 23, no. 2, 1997, p. 353.
99
Ruth Hubbard, ‘The Politics of Fetal/Maternal Conflict’, in Gita Sen and Rachel Snow (eds.) Power and
Decision: The Social Control of Reproduction, Boston, Mass.: The Harvard Centre for Population and
Development Studies, c1994, p. 312.
95
46
discourse of maternal responsibility positions women as antagonists towards their foetuses;
the behaviour of men in as contributing to the wellbeing of their partner’s pregnancy is
rarely, if ever, implicated. 100 Feminist philosopher Rebecca Kukla observes that the rise of
the mother-as-antagonist has been reinforced with the increasingly widespread use of
prenatal screening techniques, which she terms the ‘project of turning the uterus into a
public theater and the fetus into its lead actor’; as it became revealed through ultrasound
and later, other technology, the foetus became imbued with greater significance in medical
discourse at the expense of the maternal body. 101
Lupton argues that the discourse of ‘good mothering’ has been always been a corollary of
the medicalisation of childbirth; however, in contemporary times this has been extended to
the moment of conception and even to those women planning to fall pregnant. She argues
that ‘once again, the primary emphasis of such discourses is upon the health and well-being
of the foetus’. 102 Barbara Katz Rothman considers the inscription of ‘perfection’ upon the
foetal body; in contemporary Western societies, she argues, reproduction is viewed as
‘products of conception’ – but not in the manner of the terminology used by the medical
profession. Rather, for Rothman, the phrase ‘products of conception’ signifies the
disturbing trend towards the pursuit of reproductive ‘perfection’ and demonstrates the
‘commodification’ of procreation. She claims that reproductive technologies capitalise on
the commodification of the foetal body; ‘we work hard, some of us, at making the perfect
product, what one doctor calls a “blue ribbon baby”’. 103 The growth of reproductive
technologies has fundamentally and radically changed how the pregnant body is supervised
by the medical profession; until the 1970s, supervision meant watching the labouring
100
Katha Pollitt, ‘Fetal Rights: A New Assault on Feminism’, in Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky
(eds.) ‘Bad’ mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth Century America, New York: New York University
Press, c1989, pp. 295-296.
101
Kukla cites a 1981 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association to support this assertion;
according to Kukla, the article signifies the shift away from the maternal body toward the foetal body. The
author of the article argued that ‘the fetus could not be taken seriously as long as he remained a medical
recluse in an opaque woman; and it was not until the last half of this century that the prying eye of the
ultrasonogram … rendered the once opaque womb transparent, stripping the veil of mystery from the dark
inner sanctum and letting the light of scientific observation fall upon the shy and secretive fetus … The
sonographic voyeur, spying on the unwary fetus, finds him or her a surprisingly active little creature, and not
at all the passive parasite that we had imagined’. See Rebecca Kukla, Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and
Mothers’ Bodies, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2005, p. 111.
102
Lupton, Medicine as Culture, p. 155.
103
Barbara Katz Rothman, The Tentative Pregnancy: Prenatal Diagnosis and the Future of Motherhood, New
York: Viking, 1986, p. 2.
47
woman, but reproductive technologies have served to render what was once invisible as
visible. 104
Yet in arguing that women are expected to produce ‘perfection’ through self-sacrifice, few
scholars consider the potential values inscribed on the ‘imperfect’ foetus – one might argue
that, in attempting to turn the maternal/foetal dichotomy on its head, they have only
succeeded in privileging the maternal body without consideration of the diversity of values
embedded in the foetus. 105 Layne notes that the issue of foetal personhood and the rise of
the ‘maternal/foetal conflict’ has been a crucial focus of feminist scholars since the end of
the twentieth century and are ‘central to arguments about women’s right to terminate
pregnancies’. Pregnancy loss, therefore, has been ‘careful[ly] … avoided’ by feminist
writers. This has been a central concern in Layne’s work; as she argues, ‘because the
ambiguous status of fetuses is central to both pregnancy loss and abortion, pregnancy loss
provides an ideal arena from which to explore alternative ways to conceptualize
maternal/fetal relations’. 106
Scholars concerned with the medicalisation of disability in the recent past have provided
useful insight into the possible inscriptions on the foetal body produced by the medical
classifications of ‘viable’ or ‘non-viable’. Melinda Tankard Reist’s study into ‘defiant
birth’ – the experiences of women who have chosen to continue their pregnancies despite
medical opposition on grounds of ‘foetal abnormality’ – provides useful insight into the
construction of the ‘imperfect’ conception. Reist argues that, as prenatal testing has become
increasingly considered a routine part of pregnancy in Australia, it has become couched
within a discourse of ‘denial’ or ‘courage’. She claims that ‘women are often led to infer
that it is only those who are weak-willed and avoidance-seeking who do not avail
themselves of all medical technology has to offer’. 107
104
Rothman, The Tentative Pregnancy, pp. 26-28.
Rothman, for example, makes the unequivocal assertion that ‘the meaning of the abortion lies in the
meanings the pregnancy holds for the woman. If a woman sees a pregnancy as an accident … then in her
definition the fetus is not a person and not meant to be one’. See Rothman, The Tentative Pregnancy, p. 5.
106
Linda Layne, Motherhood Lost: A Feminist Account of Pregnancy Loss in America, New York: Routledge,
2004, p. 28.
107
Melinda Tankard Reist, Defiant Birth: Women Who Resist Medical Eugenics, North Melbourne: Spinifex
Press, 2006, p. 4.
105
48
Rothman’s thesis in The Tentative Pregnancy is similar, although from a different
theoretical vantage as a feminist scholar. Reproductive technology, she argues, is
constructed as the ultimate expression of women’s choice to decide which babies they will
or will not bear; however, whilst this is an attractive proposition – the definitive symbol of
women’s reproductive freedom - the reverse is true in reality. Reproductive technologies
and the ensuing values embedded in the so-called ‘products of conception’ are the ‘illusion
of choice’; the authority of the medical profession in naming and classifying what is
deemed ‘imperfect’, the delivery of results in scientific language, and social concerns over
the cost of ‘imperfection’ all contribute to this illusion. 108
Linked with the coercive nature of prenatal screening is the ‘diminished personhood’ of the
‘imperfect’ foetus, argues American anthropologist Gail Landsman. Both Landsman and
Layne observe that, in a ‘consumer culture’ women’s moral worth is made intrinsic to the
products of their womb; to give birth to a disabled infant then, by extension, is to have
failed to attain ‘perfection in foetal outcome’. 109 The women interviewed for Landsman’s
study – all of whom were mothers of children with disabilities – had been reassured by
medical professionals that their behaviours had not contributed to their respective
children’s disabilities but, as Landsman notes, the expectation of maternal responsibility
strongly shaped the women’s own narratives. In her study, Landsman interrogates the
seemingly-harmless and, one might argue, positivist rhetoric that ‘God gives special kids to
special parents’; rather, argues Landsman, at the heart of this discourse is the expectation
that the pregnant woman will take all possible precautions to avoid producing a child with a
disability. Although women may be reassured that they ‘did nothing wrong’, the
expectation of maternal responsibility strongly leads to the prevailing view – amongst
women concerned and their communities – that any individual woman has the power and
available choices to self-manage and self-control her pregnant behaviour, to gain mastery
108
Rothman, The Tentative Pregnancy, p. 14.
Gail Landsman, ‘Does God Give Special Kids to Special Parents? Personhood and the Child With
Disabilities as Gift and Giver’, in Layne (ed.) Transformative Motherhood, p. 135.
109
49
over reproduction and produce ‘perfection’. 110 To fail in this, then, strips women of the
protection assured by the discourse of maternal responsibility; to produce a disabled or
stillborn baby then shifts the woman to the margins, to become the ‘other’. 111
Historicisation of perinatal death
A number of other texts have considered the incidence of stillbirth and neonatal death in
western societies from an historical perspective. Many of these texts have considered both
changes in knowledge and also gendered meanings of these understandings, whilst others
are motivated from an empiricist methodology which devalues women’s own
understandings of loss. Here I will discuss a range of these texts and in doing so will
provide some historical contextualisation for my study.
Lawrence Stone, amongst others, argues that the high infant mortality rate in early modern
Europe and Britain served to limit parents’ emotional investment in their children,
particularly infants. He argues that the parent-child relationship amongst the wealthy upperclass of Europe and Britain was ‘usually fairly remote’, and suggests that ‘one reason for
this was the very high infant mortality rates, which made it folly to invest too much
emotional capital in such ephemeral beings’.112 For poor parents, another pregnancy
signified yet another burden; although he does not cite primary evidence such as letters or
diaries, Stone claims that ‘the absence of birth control, the struggle to find enough food to
feed the hungry mouths, must have made children less than welcome’. 113 In his history of
bereavement, psychiatrist Colin Murray Parkes argues that most parents ‘expected’ to lose
infants and young children and accepted these losses ‘more readily’ than parents in
contemporary times. 114 According to Stone, the practice of wet-nursing is indicative of the
110
Landsman, ‘Does God Give Special Kids to Special Parents?’, pp. 138-139. Linda Layne argues that the
deceased foetus or newborn is a ‘liminal being’, a source of both ‘power and danger’. She notes that ‘in the
United States … dead newborns combine the potency of women’s life-giving power with the destructive,
polluting power of life-forces gone awry; thus, it is not surprising that such entities should be subject to taboo.
Dead embryos or newborns are an unwelcome reminder of the fragility of the boundary between order and
chaos, life and death. In Western cultures, the ‘abnormal’ foetal corpse is constructed as particularly
dangerous; as Layne argues, ‘[w]hen pregnancy loss involves a visible malformation, the status of both
mother and baby are affected’. See Layne, Motherhood Lost, pp. 62-65
111
Landsman, ‘Does God Give Special Kids to Special Parents?’, p. 139.
112
Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1977, p. 105.
113
Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage, p. 107.
114
Colin Murray Parkes, Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life, Middlesex: Penguin, 1978, p. 148.
50
‘better classes’ indifference towards their children, 115 whilst Edward Shorter postulates that
the custom of referring of infants as ‘it’ in early modern Britain and Europe was further
proof of the ‘indifference’ with which adults viewed infants and children. 116
Several historians of childhood have roundly rejected these arguments; Linda Pollock, for
example, notes that whilst the practice of wet-nursing was a hazardous one, many literate
parents recorded their anxiety over the wellbeing of their infants whilst in the care of wetnurses. She rejects Stone’s claim that wet-nursing, fraught with danger and often leading to
the infant’s death, ‘made the appalling level of infant mortality much easier to bear
[because] at least the parents did not see them or know about’ any deficiencies in their
care. 117 Rather, argues Pollock, the ‘continuance of wet nursing was more evidence for the
inertia of social custom than evidence for the neglect of infants. Furthermore, it is clear
from these texts that infants sent to a wet-nurse were not ignored by their parents; frequent
visits were made, particularly if the child was ill’. 118 In her extensive analysis of the private
diaries of European and British parents written between 1500 – 1900, Pollock argues that
although some parents were apparently accepting – and at times indifferent – of the loss of
an infant, most parents did welcome the birth of a baby, albeit at times with anxiety over
their ever-increasing family, and often viewed baby death with sadness. For example,
British mother Mrs Housman recorded in her diary her grief after the stillbirth of her child,
writing that: ‘the last Time prevented our Enjoyment of a living Child; at once disappointed
our Hopes, and cutt of [sic] our Expectations, which was a great Trial to our weak
Graces’. 119
Rosemary Mander and Rosalind Marshall argue that wealthy upper-class families in
Western European cultures in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries invested a great deal
of emotion in their infant offspring, and in the event of baby death sought to memorialise
their deceased babies through the medium of art. Analysing depictions of deceased babies
115
Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage, p. 105.
Edward Shorter quoted in Linda A. Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500-1900,
Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 218. Pollock notes that diarists in the nineteenth
century continued to use ‘it’ to refer to their children, but their diaries clearly demonstrate that they were not
‘indifferent’ to their children; she argues that ‘the calling of a child ‘it’ has no connection with the possessing
of a concept of childhood’. p. 218.
117
Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage, p. 107.
118
Pollock, Forgotten Children, p. 216.
119
Pollock, Forgotten Children, pp. 205-207.
116
51
in family portraits, Mander and Marshall note that most of the paintings of deceased infants
were for at least semi-public display, but some, like the depictions of the noblewoman
Catherine de Medici’s stillborn twins, were clearly for individuals’ private consumption –
but whatever intent was behind the depiction of these babies, it is clear that some families
viewed the death of a baby as a significant event. 120
Milton Lewis focuses on the health and population benefits gained from the medical
takeover of pregnancy and childbirth, arguing that although infant mortality was largely
reduced at the turn of the twentieth century due to improved sanitation, it was the curbing
of the dangerous activities of unqualified, ‘incompetent’ midwives which would prove the
most significant step in the reduction in the infant mortality rate. Taking a positivist
approach to writing history, Lewis notes that the medical profession were ‘quite justified’
in seeking to gain control over pregnancy and childbirth, arguing that the regulation of
midwifery was a necessary and progressive step towards a healthy and stable Australian
population. 121 With reference to this thesis the limitations of this approach are obvious;
Lewis considers both perinatal death and the foetal body as fixed and unchanging and does
not ground his analysis in terms of changing social and cultural contexts and perinatal loss
as subject to sociohistorical constructions.
Critiques of medical authority
As Patricia Crawford points out, the main biological events in an individual woman’s life
are often focussed on reproduction and its processes, yet these apparently ‘natural’
120
For example Catherine, the wife of Henri II of France, delivered the infants – a boy and a girl – after a
lengthy and difficult labour. Both children were named; Mander and Marshall suggest that perhaps the girl,
Victoire, was named to reflect the pious Catherine’s belief that the child’s soul had triumphed victoriously
over death into eternal life. A 1556 painting in Catherine’s prayer book shows a small child: ‘his eyes are
open and he holds his hands in an attitude of prayer’. Behind this presumably living child are the twins,
tightly swaddled with their eyes closed. However else Catherine was expected to grieve, there clearly was the
expectation that these stillborn infants should not be forgotten as members of the family. In a similar manner,
a painting depicting the quadruplets of the Dutch Dordescht family, born in 1621, show the three surviving
babies positioned vertically, with the third of the quad, Elisabeth, who lived only ninety minutes, lying on a
pillow with her eyes closed. Each baby is named in the painting: another apparent recognition that the death
of a baby need not be hidden and sorrow avoided, but rather acknowledged and grieved, albeit in a manner
dependent upon the particular familial context. Rosemary Mander and Rosalind K. Marshall, ‘An historical
analysis of the role of paintings and photographs in comforting bereaved parents’, Midwifery, vol. 19, 2003,
pp. 230-242.
121
Milton Lewis, ‘Maternity care and the threat of puerperal fever in Sydney 1870 – 1939’, in V. Fildes, L.
Marks and H. Marland, Women and Children First: International Maternal and Infant Welfare, London:
Routledge, 1992, pp. 29-47.
52
experiences are often interpreted through discourses other than those of the individual
woman herself. 122 In particular, medical constructions of perinatal death have had
important implications on the ways in which meanings of stillbirth and neonatal death have
been constructed and understood.
In Australia as in many other Western nations, birth was once the exclusive female domain
of midwives and family members, with the majority of women giving birth at home;
however by the twentieth century pregnancy and childbirth had been ‘taken over’ by the
burgeoning medical profession. The central obsession of the medical profession was
women's bodies, and it was stressed by the medical profession, politicians, religious groups
and advocates of eugenics alike that women had a responsibility to breed healthy, strong
Australian citizens. For example, Angela Booth, a leading advocate of eugenics and
member of the Victorian Eugenics Society, stressed that white women had ‘racial’
responsibilities’ to procreate. 123 With the medicalisation of childbirth, the female
reproductive processes of menstruation and pregnancy were constructed at this time as
abnormal rather than normal, as sicknesses rather than healthy bodily functions. 124
Pregnancy was treated as a ‘delicate’ time, often described in euphemistic terms such as the
‘time of trouble’ or ‘the difficulty’. 125 Furthermore, women's own knowledge of the
changes occurring in their bodies during menstruation and childbirth was largely dependent
upon the medical profession's dissemination of information; as such, most women lacked
even a basic understanding of the reproductive process. Instead, they were urged to spend
their pregnancy preparing the baby's layette and calming their spirits and nerves in order to
give birth to a healthy baby. 126
Using a Foucaldian approach, Lupton traces changing discourses of illness and disease in a
Western sociohistorical context, with a particular emphasis on examining the contemporary
tensions between a growing disquiet with medical ways of knowing illness and disease, and
the continuing expectation that medical knowledge can and should provide solutions to
infirmity. Although primarily concerned with a sociological analysis of medicine’s
122
Patricia Crawford, ‘From the Woman’s View: Pre-industrial England, 1500-1750’, in P. Crawford (ed.)
Exploring Women’s Past: Essays in Social History, Carlton: Sisters Publishing Limited, 1983, p. 63.
123
See Lake and Kelly (eds.) Double Time, p. 259.
124
Lupton, Medicine as Culture, p. 135.
125
Reiger, Disenchantment of the Home, p. 85.
126
Reiger, Disenchantment of the Home, p. 85.
53
relationship with the body in the past, Lupton considers the historicity of the female body
in medical discourse, arguing that ‘women’s bodies have historically been represented and
treated in medicine as especially threatening to the moral order and social stability of
society’ primarily because of the construction of female sexuality as ‘dangerous’ and
‘uncontrollable’. 127
Lupton’s critique of the medical discourse of feminine sexuality is underpinned by the
argument that women have traditionally been constructed by medical discourse as the
poorer version of man: sick, weak and unstable, incomplete to man’s completeness,
inexplicable and irrational to man’s rationality. Lupton considers the role played by
medical understandings of female sexuality in shaping constructions of ‘appropriate’
feminine sexuality. In her book Medicine as Culture Lupton uses this analytical tool to
locate what she refers to as a key theme of the early twentieth century: that motherhood
would serve to diffuse ‘women’s dangerous sexuality’. Because the female body was
constructed as inherently diseased within medical discourse, the assumption of medical
control over pregnancy and childbirth led to a reconceptualisation of the processes of
reproduction as a potentially pathological state; accordingly, argues Lupton, the pregnant
body was cast as a ‘medical problem’ subject to ‘medical surveillance’. 128 Femininity and
sickness were conceptualised as being intrinsic to each other on the one hand, whilst
maternity and motherhood was cast as being crucial to taming the potentially ‘dangerous’
female sexuality.
In critiquing medical surveillance of pregnancy and childbirth, Lupton’s research provides
a useful analysis of the historical development of the medical profession and its assumption
of control over reproduction, challenging the notion that ‘rational’ scientific knowledge is a
core and essential body of knowledge about the female body and reproductive processes.
However Lupton does not take a strictly cultural approach to constructions of the female
body and female sexuality; indeed, she is well cognisant of the debates surrounding
subjectivity and embodiment which have characterised much feminist scholarship in recent
years. The female body, she suggests, is subject to both cultural constructions of health and
ill-health, as well as the biological differences between the male and female bodies, such as
127
128
Lupton, Medicine as Culture, p. 132.
Lupton, Medicine as Culture, p. 136.
54
the uniquely female ability to conceive and bear children. 129 Further to this, she resists the
idea that women’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth can be essentialised, instead
suggesting that amongst women themselves there is a diversity of engagement with or
resistance to medical constructions of reproduction, and an equally diverse ‘degree of
interpretation’ amongst women as to the lived experience of uniquely female reproductive
processes. 130
Layne also critiques the medicalisation of childbirth and the medical inscriptions on the
maternal and foetal bodies as objects to be ‘fixed’ using medical knowledge and
interventions. She argues that the pathologising of pregnancy has led not only to women’s
own understandings of their body becoming devalued, but has also served to reinforce the
expectation that the pregnant body – encapsulating both the maternal and foetal bodies –
requires supervision and control in order to produce ‘successful’ outcomes. She argues that
the medicalisation of childbirth in contemporary times has fostered an expectation that
perinatal death should not occur:
The overreporting of neonatalogy’s “miracle babies”, combined with the
underreporting of pregnancy losses … has led to a situation in which expectations
concerning reproductive outcomes are higher than the level of medical competence
… The experience of loss represents a clash between people’s expectations
regarding the efficacy of biomedicine and the actuality. 131
Within this context, Layne argues, perinatal death is still considered ‘taboo’ in Western
cultures; the death of a baby transgresses the prevailing view that medical expertise can
‘save’ babies’ lives. Perinatal death therefore is not only the loss of ‘innocence’ for
expectant parents, but its emotional impact is further worsened by a widespread faith in
medical science’s ability to produce healthy babies. 132
The body
Since the 1970s there has been a considerable amount of feminist scholarship concerned
with the regulation of women’s bodies throughout history; Elizabeth Grosz, for example,
argues that whilst many feminist writers who are concerned with issues surrounding
129
Lupton, Medicine as Culture, p. 148.
Lupton, Medicine as Culture, p. 143.
131
Layne, Motherhood Lost, p. 95.
132
Layne, ‘True Gifts from God,’ pp. 171-172.
130
55
women’s bodies – such as pregnancy and childbirth, for example – they are nonetheless
‘[reluctant] to conceptualise the female body as playing a major role in women’s
oppression’ focusing instead on gender as the sole category of historical analysis. 133 For
Grosz, the body is ‘the primary object of social production and inscription, and can thus be
located within a network of socio-historical relations instead of being tied to a fixed
essence’. 134 She argues that in order to adequately understand subjectivity and the cultural
construction of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’, one must also recognise the body as ‘pliable
flesh … the unspecified raw material of social inscription that produces subjects as subjects
of a particular kind’. 135
However, as Maynard and Purvis point out, in rejecting the notion of the sexed body as
natural and invoking in its stead the argument that sexuality is wholly socially constructed,
feminist writers utilising this mode of analysis risk creating instead a new form of
essentialism by rejecting any explanations of nature in their arguments. 136 In order for
contemporary feminist writers to avoid either cultural or bodily essentialism, the answer,
argue Maynard and Purvis, may lie in an acknowledgement that sexuality can be both
natural and constructed: ‘while bodily features and functions might be there as givens, the
meanings and significance attributed to these, together with the various ways in which
sexuality is expressed, are in some sense ‘constructions’ because they are historically and
culturally located’. 137
Despite the insistence that the body – as opposed to gender – is the primary theoretical
vantage point for the feminist historian, the work of Grosz and others has great relevance to
this research. Susan Bordo notes that ‘our bodies are trained, shaped, and impressed with
the stamp of prevailing historical forms of selfhood, desire, masculinity, femininity’, 138
whilst Grosz argues that bodily inscriptions can occur violently – in prisons, psychiatric
hospitals, and so on – or in more subtle, insidious forms.
Furthermore, these more
133
Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies, New York: Routledge,
1995, p. 32.
134
Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Notes Towards a Corporeal Feminism’, Australian Feminist Studies, no. 5, 1987, p. 1.
135
Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion, p. 32.
136
Mary Maynard and June Purvis (eds.) (Hetero)sexual Politics, London, Bristol, PA.: Taylor and Francis,
1995, p. 3.
137
Maynard and Purvis, Hetero(sexual) Politics, p. 3.
138
Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body, Berkeley, CA.: University of
California Press, c1993, pp. 165-166.
56
insidious forms are no less coercive than violence used to restrain and oppress the body.
Through the inscriptions of cultural values, norms, and the organising of the body into
social groups, argues Grosz, ‘bodies are made amenable to the prevailing exigencies of
power … the body is more or less marked, constituted as an appropriate, or as the case may
be, an inappropriate body’. 139
The theory that the body is a surface for cultural inscriptions has great relevance to this
thesis. Particularly with the rise of ultrasound technology and prenatal testing in the latter
decades of the twentieth century, the foetal body became ‘disembodied’ from the maternal
body in medical constructions of pregnancy, and later, in popular understandings of foetal
development. The increasingly routine use of ultrasound, for example, was hailed for its
ability to ‘lift the corner of the veil’ into the womb, 140 promoting the image of the foetus as
separate to the mother. This had the effect of transforming, argues Hubbard, the ‘cultural
status of embryos and fetuses … [and] render[ing] pregnant women transparent’. 141
Advances in obstetrical technology which sought to monitor the development of the foetus
increasingly rendered women as merely a receptacle whilst the status of the previouslyhidden foetus was elevated to individual patient. Within the context of these developments
in perinatal medicine, Iris Marion Young observes that ‘pregnancy does not belong to the
woman herself. It is a state of the developing fetus, for which the woman is a container; or
it is an objective, observable process coming under scientific scrutiny; or it becomes
objectified by the woman herself as a ‘condition’ in which she must “take care of
herself.”’ 142
Placing this thesis in the historiography
This thesis both extends and challenges existing historiography of women’s lives in
Australia. Since the 1970s, feminist scholars have built a rich body of scholarship which
challenges the traditional view that women’s lives were unimportant, unworthy of historical
research, and indeed, that women played insignificant and merely dependent roles in
139
Grosz, Volatile Bodies, pp. 140-142.
See for example B. Smulders and M. Croom, Safe Pregnancy: The Complete Handbook to a Healthy
Pregnancy, South Melbourne: Ibis, 2005, p. 260.
141
Hubbard, ‘The Politics of Fetal/Maternal Conflict’, p. 312.
142
Young, Throwing Like a Girl, p. 160.
140
57
Australia’s history. However, whilst invaluable in addressing some of the gaps in
historiography of the experience of pregnancy and childbirth in the era of childbirth reform,
this body of work does not extend to include perhaps the most forgotten of childbirth
experiences – that is, miscarriage, stillbirth and neonatal death.
This thesis, therefore, fills a lacuna in our knowledge of the social construction of maternity
and motherhood; in doing this, I analyse the range of knowledge about miscarriage and
perinatal death in Australia in the twentieth century. Certain groups such as the medical
profession, social workers and psychologists, community support groups and popular
writers have sought to understand the experience of losing a baby through miscarriage and
perinatal death. Throughout my research I have primarily been interested in analysing how
constructions of perinatal death over the last one hundred years in Australia have changed. I
have also considered how these meanings have, at times, competed and been in
contradiction with each other. For example, towards the end of the twentieth century, the
foetal body was imbued with greater significance and women were expected to ‘take care
of themselves’ in order to produce a healthy baby; many feminist critics argue that at this
time the foetus became privileged over the mother. 143 At the same time, however, the rise
of perinatal medicine and the growing ease with which the medical profession could
‘screen’ foetuses for defects led to a greater scrutiny of the perceived value of an unborn
child. The persistence of the idea that a perinatal death was a ‘failed pregnancy’ was also at
odds with many of the changes which were occurring at the time in terms of the care of
bereaved women, and notions of ‘successful birth’ and inscriptions on the ‘inappropriate’
foetal body problematised how women understood their experience of the death of a baby
or ending of a pregnancy.
In this thesis I complement existing feminist scholarship concerned with contemporary
understandings of maternal responsibility and the discourse of failure and blame. I consider
the ways the pregnant body has been placed under surveillance by the medical profession in
order that ‘abnormality’ may be detected in both the foetal and maternal bodies, and I
explore how this has challenged some women’s own understandings of their body and
those of their deceased children. I am also particularly interested in the notion of authority
143
See Mira Crouch and Lenore Manderson, New Motherhood: Cultural and Personal Transitions in the
1980s, Yverdon, Switzerland: Gordon and Breach Sciences, c1993, p. 31.
58
which underpins medical supervision of the pregnant body and which has had powerful
ramifications for women experiencing a miscarriage or perinatal death. Because medical
discourse positioned itself as authority based on an appeal to ‘science’, it also claimed the
right to ownership of the deceased body, bringing with it the right to testing and disposal
often in a manner in contradiction to a woman’s wishes. The authority of medicine lies in
its power to surveille and classify the foetal body which has had significant impact on the
way perinatal death has been constructed and managed in Australia’s past.
However, in this thesis I challenge some feminist scholars’ reluctance to conceptualise the
foetal body in terms other than a source of conflict - a body which is privileged over the
maternal body. I consider the foetal body as a surface of cultural inscription and in terms of
its ‘docility’, to acknowledge Michel Foucault’s work on the body and oppression. 144 For
example, contemporary debates surrounding abortion laws and foetal rights clearly see the
foetal body as fixed and essential; although understandings of the foetal body from the proabortion or the pro-life perspective are clearly at odds, what is similar to both sides of the
debate is an understanding of the foetal body as ahistorical and biological. Whether the
foetus is conceived of in terms of biology – a collection of cells in a host body (the
maternal body) – or in human terms – as a life-in-waiting – both positions do not consider
the foetal body as subject to sociocultural inscriptions, and it is my aim in this work to
provide an analysis of changing understandings of the foetal body within the changing
historical context.
Historical Context: Understandings of perinatal death in the late eighteenth century
In Chapter Two, I argue that the medicalisation of childbirth positioned doctors as an
authoritative voice in constructing understandings of perinatal loss. Prior to the
medicalisation of childbirth, however, miscarriage, stillbirth and neonatal death were
144
Foucault argued that ‘discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies; “docile’ bodies”’. See M.
Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Vintage Books,
1979, p. 138. Jana Sawicki notes that, although Foucault did not write specifically on women’s bodies, he had
‘planned to do so’, intending to ‘locate the processes through which women’s bodies were controlled through
a set of discourses and practices governing both the individual’s body and the health, education and welfare of
the population, namely, the discourses and practices of “biopower.”’ See J. Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault:
Feminism, Power and the Body, New York: Routledge, 1991, p. 67.
59
imbued with a host of meanings. I now consider some of these meanings and in doing so
provide a historical context for the remainder of the thesis.
For many in the medical profession prior to the turn of the twentieth century, it was widely
believed that some instances of pregnancy loss, and in particular early pregnancy loss, were
inevitable – the development of the foetus in utero was widely believed to be an
unfathomable mystery. 145 The lack of the profession’s involvement in pregnancy and
childbirth stands as testament to this: motherhood and maternity were believed to be
beneath the concern of the medical profession and were largely dealt with by women.
Historians have generally agreed that there was indeed a general disinterest in infant
welfare amongst the medical profession, and it would appear, a corresponding disregard for
the welfare of babies in utero. In an age of high maternal mortality, saving women’s lives
was of primary concern. 146 The baffling loss of many women’s lives during childbirth was
perceived by many in the medical profession and government as an affront to the colonies’
standing as part of the civilised world. Indeed, the colonies, and later the newly federated
Australian nation, lay claim to the dubious distinction of the highest maternal mortality rate
out of England and continental Europe; a distinction that was especially significant for
Australia, considering the widespread belief that would become part of the founding
rhetoric of the new nation in 1901 that the people of this new land must ‘populate or
perish’. Accordingly, the health and welfare of the Australian mother as maternal citizen
was privileged over the welfare of the unborn baby.
Some modern historians have tended to believe that women shared the same fatalistic
acceptance as the medical profession with regards to the ending of their own pregnancies in
loss. In her history of midwifery in New South Wales, Adcock argues that the sheer
frequency of pregnancy loss and baby death at the beginning of the twentieth century
rendered the experience as an inevitable part of life, particularly considering the fact that
for most Australian women, maternity and motherhood were the principal occupations and
145
See for example Royal Commission into the Decline of the Birth-Rate and on the mortality on infants in
New South Wales [RCDB], vol. 1, Report and Statistics, Sydney: NSW Government Printer, 1904, p. 38.
146
McCalman, Sex and Suffering, p. 156.
60
were thus viewed with a certain resignation of fate:
Families were large and babies were born at home. The number of small graves in
cemeteries everywhere is evidence enough that the neonatal and childhood mortality
rate was extremely high. From letters and other written matter of the day it would
seem the women accepted philosophically the numerous pregnancies, miscarriages
and infant deaths. 147
Certainly the frequency of pregnancy loss or baby death is not in doubt - many women
would have been affected by some form of pregnancy loss or the death of an infant or older
child. The personal narratives of women living in Australia in the mid 1800s, as recorded in
private letters and diaries, are testament to the frequency of pregnancy loss and perinatal
death, with some women experiencing more than one death of a baby or older child.
Christiana Cameron, a Presbyterian minister’s wife in the New England region of NSW, for
example, wrote at length about the deaths of two of her daughters within a fortnight in
1867; although she wrote more briefly about her stillborn baby, a daughter named Sarah,
the child was still included in the family tree and counted as a member of the family, albeit
absent. 148
Particularly in small communities the frequency of stillbirth and neonatal deaths at the turn
of the century is astounding by contemporary standards and lends weight to the argument
that the sheer regularity of the incidence of stillbirth and neonatal death led to a sense of
fatalistic acceptance. For example, the small mining town of Hillgrove near Armidale,
NSW, buried at least six stillborn babies or babies dying shortly after birth in a single
period of three months between September 1890 and January 1891. 149 Several years later in
1894 the Dumaresq Shire Council records note that the Bounsell family lost twin newborn
babies, with their mother, Elizabeth, dying shortly after the birth of another daughter a year
later; similarly, the Spicer family of Hillgrove buried 4 newborn babies between 1890 and
1895. 150 Those who attended births in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries usually untrained midwives or peripatetic physicians who delivered the child in the family’s
home– were often also well acquainted with perinatal death. Wilhemina Haub, for example,
147
W. Adcock, With Courage and Devotion: A History of Midwifery in New South Wales, Warnambool, Vic,
1984, p. 31.
148
Christiana Cameron, ‘Diary, 1861-1906’, in Donald McLeod Cameron Collection, A0216, University of
New England and Regional Archives.
149
Dumaresq Shire Council Records for Hillgrove, Kilcoy and Black Mountain, Reading Room Reference
Section, University of New England and Regional Archives.
150
Dumaresq Shire Council Records for Hillgrove, Kilcoy and Black Mountain.
61
was a rural Western Australian midwife whose meticulous case notes record several
incidents of miscarriage, stillbirth and neonatal death, usually after a prolonged and
obstructed labour. The great distances that Mrs Haub traveled often meant that she arrived
after the baby had already been delivered, and her notes reveal that she was not unused to
finding upon arrival that the child had either been born dead or was seriously ill and not
expected to survive. 151
As I mention in the literature review, Allen argues that in an age of restricted and highly
unreliable contraception pregnancy was often an unwanted event in some women’s lives
and for many overburdened, fatigued mothers, miscarriage was often a blessed relief – one
less mouth to feed. 152 Mary Taylor, a farmer’s wife in Albany, Western Australia, noted in
her diary that she had received a letter from her niece Josephine, informing Mary of her
recent miscarriage. Although Josephine’s own response to her miscarriage is not known,
her aunt was filled with relief and wrote that ‘I am so thankful that the dear girl has lost her
baby’. 153 According to Margaret Anderson, the possibility of miscarriage often far
outweighed the grim reality of the continuation of the pregnancy which could be ‘both a
painful and a relatively violent and dangerous experience’.154 Women, it seems, were well
aware of the shockingly high maternal mortality rate, as well as the injuries that could result
for those who did escape death. 155
For some particularly desperate women, concealment of birth and infanticide were the
drastic measures taken to attempt to render their pregnancies as invisible events. Although
infanticide and spontaneous miscarriage are two completely different outcomes of
pregnancy, it is telling that some women apparently acted upon the routineness of stillbirth
151
Wilhelmina Auguste Haub, Midwives Notification Register of cases attended notes, 1912-1920,
ACC4208A, Battye Library.
152
Allen, Sex and Secrets, p. 27.
153
Mary Taylor quoted in Margaret Anderson, ‘Helpmeet for Man: Women in Nineteenth Century Western
Australia’, in Crawford (ed.) Exploring Women’s Past, p. 95.
154
Anderson, ‘Helpmeet for Man’, p. 96.
155
McCalman’s rich analysis of case notes of the Women’s Lying-in Hospital (later the RWH Carlton) are
testament to the physical and mental trauma women faced in pregnancy and childbirth at the turn of the
twentieth century. Mrs J.C., for example was twenty-nine, and having begun her childbearing at age sixteen,
had borne nine children and suffered three miscarriages. McCalman notes that the ‘last confinement, fifteen
months before, had been a nightmare. Her womb was now too tired and she laboured for two days, forceps
were needed and she haemorrhaged afterwards. She had spent two months in bed, and now the pain was
constant. On examination it was seen that the perineum was “quite gone to within the margin of the anus –
parts bluish and congested.” ’ Dr Stephen Burke, Case Notes 1, 9 July 1884 quoted in McCalman, Sex and
Suffering, p. 101.
62
and neonatal death by using it as an alibi for their acts of infanticide. According to Allen,
infanticide was not an uncommon event and whilst some women were charged with the
offence, few were indicted. With the absence of any legislation that regulated the issuing of
birth and death certificates for newborns, this practice was difficult to police and more
often than not, presiding judges and sympathetic juries dismissed the charges. Allen argues
that in a climate of such a high infant mortality rate:
Official and professional surveillance over late nineteenth century obstetrics,
confinement and infant and maternal death was minimal. Police, coroner, medical
and community decisions regarding dead infants took place in a context in which
the high infant mortality rate was normal and in which child care and social security
provisions for unmarried women were virtually non-existent. A certain fatalism
accompanied the death of babies … The lack of regulation of infant births, deaths,
burials and adoptions underlined the reality that this was women’s business, to be
managed by them as best they could. 156
However, other sources give insight into a more nuanced analysis of the diversity of
understandings of perinatal death. Burial rituals can provide clues as to the degree of
validation afforded to a loss, 157 and cemeteries around Australia stand as evidence of at
least the degree of public validation given by some parents after their newborn babies died
or were stillborn. In the Australian context, letters and diaries from the nineteenth century
indicate that some women mourned the untimely loss of their infants and did not hesitate to
share their grief with their sisters or other female relatives. Margaret Wyndham, for
example, was one woman in the late nineteenth century who felt free to discuss childbirth
in letters to her daughters and daughter in law. In a letter dated 7th September 1868
Margaret implored her daughter in law Fan to ‘take care of herself’ during her pregnancy,
noting anxiously that ‘we know so little how things may happen that is it never wrong to
take very precaution. You are so well formed that I have no doubt please God all will go
well as it does with thousands of women but when … the mother loses her life it is so sad
for those left behind!’ 158
In the light of other evidence the claim that the high incidence of induced abortion was
evidence of many women’s view that spontaneous miscarriage was a ‘blessed escape’
156
Allen, Sex and Secrets, p. 33.
For a broader discussion of the symbolism of rituals, including burial rites, see Paul Connerton, How
Societies Remember, New York & Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 44-53.
158
Wyndham Family Papers Dalwood Station, 1827-1870 c.1900, University of New England and Regional
Archives, A611 v 3024/1.
157
63
requires a more nuanced analysis. A philosophical acceptance, rather than fatalism, would
perhaps be a more subtle analysis of parents’ attitudes towards their deceased offspring. 159
Jalland, for example, cites the example of well-known Western Australian pioneer,
Georgiana Molloy, whose first baby died after nine days in 1830; for Molloy, the death of
her baby was scarcely viewed with fatalism but was considered a tragedy, even though she
credited her religious beliefs in helping her accept the child’s death. Molloy wrote to a
friend who had recently lost a baby that ‘I could truly sympathise with you, for language
refuses to utter what I experienced when mine died in my arms in this dreary land … Oh! I
have gone through so much … It was so hard’. 160
Jalland argues that although infant mortality was common the death of an infant in the
nineteenth century could be the ‘supreme test of faith’ for middle-class Australian families.
As she notes, the proliferation of religious material aimed to comfort and explain the death
of an infant or young child gives insight into the emotional and mental anguish many
parents suffered after such a loss. 161 In the years preceding the First World War and the
accompanying cultural rejection of the Christian notion of the afterlife, it is apparent that
for many families the loss of a baby was interpreted through the lens of ‘God’s will’.
Furthermore, in choosing to individualise the stillborn child or deceased newborn can be
held as strong evidence for an individual family’s affection for that particular child and its
place as a valued family member.
Whilst it is apparent that many babies were buried with scant ceremony and little
memorialisation, the many headstones memoralising individual stillborn and young babies
in cemeteries around Australia stand as evidence of at least the degree of public validation
given by some parents after their newborn babies died or were stillborn. Such public
declarations of parents’ attitudes towards their newborn babies can be instructive to the
historian, particularly in the absence of sources such as letters and diaries that may reveal
bereaved parents’ private feelings towards their deceased infant. Many parents who chose
to memorialise their babies on the headstones of family graves or separate individual graves
159
Jalland notes that the death of a baby was viewed as a tragedy by many parents in the nineteenth century,
arguing that ‘most Victorians believed that the death of a child was the most distressing and incapacitating of
all. What consolation could any parent find on the death of a beloved child?’ See P. Jalland, Death in the
Victorian Family, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 119.
160
Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, p. 293.
161
Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, pp. 70-71.
64
identified with the dominant Christian understandings of death, such as the inscription on
the family grave of baby William Newell, buried in the family grave at St George’s
Anglican Church, Hurstville NSW, with an older relative. The headstone on this grave
reads:
In affectionate remembrance of Sarah Ann
The beloved wife of William Newell, who departed this life 25th January 1883.
Aged 69 years.
The hour of my departure at last
O Lord let trouble cease and let thy servant die in peace
Now oh My God let troubles cease in peace
Now Also in affectionate remembrance of
William … infant son of Robert W. and Annie Newell …
Aged 3 days who died 5th November 1881
Suffer little children to come to me. 162
It appears that religious faith and a belief in eternal life for children of believing parents
helped some parents to accept the death of their beloved infants somewhat philosophically.
Jalland observes that many parents were able to accept the deaths of their infants – albeit
after some time – because of the prevailing Christian view that ‘a benevolent God had
removed their children prematurely from a world of pain, sin, and temptation to a happier
world with God’. 163 The parents of George Mallery Cowley, who died and was buried in
Armidale in January 1894 aged 3 weeks, marked their infant son’s grave by declaring that
their comfort lay in the belief he was ‘safe in the arms of Jesus’. 164
What is also apparent is the great degree of variation at the turn of the century. Certainly
not all parents chose to publicly individualise their child, or were financially able to do so;
similarly, some district burial registers record only the surname of the child with the simple
notation ‘stillborn’ whilst other stillborn children were given first names; likewise, some
parents chose not to name infants who died in the month after birth. However, although
there seems to be a wide variation on the manner and degree of memorialisation it does
appear that for some parents, it did matter greatly if the child was born alive or not, with
some registers taking care to note how long a child was alive, if only for a minute or two.
The Spicer family of Hillgrove in NSW, for example, defy the argument that children in
162
St George’s Hurstville, ‘Names and inscriptions of all available headstones as at 30th November 1961 in
the graveyard of the above church’, ML MSS 573, Mitchell Library.
163
Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, p. 71.
164
Gravesite of George Mallery Cowley, Anglican section, Armidale Cemetery, Armidale NSW.
65
large families were viewed as replaceable and therefore their deaths accepted more
fatalistically; 165 all four babies were named, even William and Reuben, who lived three
minutes and two hours in 1894 and 1895 respectively. 166
However memorialisation – or lack thereof – cannot be the sole marker of parents’ attitudes
towards their deceased infants. Economic restrictions could mean that working class
families were largely unable to access many avenues of publicly mourning a stillbirth or
death of a newborn child. Particularly in the case of memorialisation in a cemetery, the cost
would have often proved prohibitive and some parents were either content to bury their
child in their backyard or in an anonymous grave, or were forced to do so;167 certainly there
was a vast difference in cost to bury a child privately or as part of the government burial
provision. The fee for a grave plot in private ground in Karrakatta Cemetery in 1901 was
£1.11.6; the burials of stillborn babies and ‘indigent persons’ was the exception to this rule,
when a fee of 10s. 6d. was charged to cover the cost of the iron number plate that served as
the grave’s only marking. 168 In the Karrakatta Annual Reports, stillborn babies and paupers
were classed together as ‘government burials’, making it difficult to assess the number of
babies buried in the communal graves. Des Tobin and Graeme Griffin note that over 30 000
babies were buried ‘without plaques and often without any burial ceremonies in a
windswept plot’ at the back of the main cemetery in downtown Adelaide. 169 Cemetery lists
for the main Brisbane cemetery also give some indication of the sheer number of stillborn
babies buried at this time, most likely without ceremony and certainly without the
distinction of individual graves. 170
165
Jalland has also refuted both the claim that the high rates of infant mortality meant that Victorian parents
‘limited’ their emotional investment infants and young children. She argues ‘[c]olonial parents did not feel
that several remaining children would compensate for the loss of any one, however alarming the child
mortality statistics … most Australian parents grieved at the deaths of their children’. See Jalland, Australian
Ways of Death, pp. 73 & 121.
166
Dumaresq Shire Register records for Hillgrove, Kilcoy and Black Mountain.
167
The Cemeteries and Burials New England NSW Database, held in the Department of Archaeology, School
of Human and Environmental Studies at the University of New England, record several examples of deceased
infants being buried on the family’s property. For example, S. Saunders, a gold miner at Rocky River near
Armidale buried his unnamed infant daughter under a pine tree on ‘Theleme’, Williams Road Uralla in 1863.
168
Karrakatta Cemetery Board [KCB] Minutes, 23 December 1903. Unpublished document held in KCB
archives.
169
Des Tobin and Graeme Griffin, In the Midst of Life: the Australian Response to Death, Carlton, Vic.:
Melbourne University Press, 1997, Rev. ed., pp. 116-117.
170
Twenty-six stillborn babies were buried in the same plot, 89A, of the South Brisbane Cemetery, between
1897-1898. The records identify these babies only by surname (for example, ‘McKenzie, Stillborn’) and their
sex was not recorded. See http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au for detailed burial registers of Brisbane cemeteries.
66
The issue of perceived ownership of the deceased body would have also limited some
families’ access to the body of their stillborn child. Whilst most women gave birth in the
family home, thus giving death a sense of normalcy and a degree of family control over the
burial of the deceased, poorer women who delivered their baby in the lying-in hospital for
destitute women were likely to have never seen their baby after delivery, let alone had the
choice about burial methods. However, although Leonie Liveris argues in her history of the
Karrakatta Cemetery Board [KCB] in WA that there was little memorialisation of even
privately buried stillborn or newborn babies, 171 tangible evidence suggests otherwise, with
some parents erecting grand monuments to their babies and many recording their child’s
birth and death as part of the family headstone. This option, was of course, restricted to
those who were able or willing to pay the normal fee for the burial of a child, highlighting
the sharp economic barriers that restricted the ways that Australian women were able to
publicly mourn their babies and leading perhaps erroneously to the belief that these women
did not afford their child the same status as their more affluent counterparts. Ken Inglis has
argued that the anonymous ‘pauper’s burial’ was a deep social disgrace in the late
nineteenth century, and gives insight into the way that stillborn babies of the working-class
were conceptualised. 172
At this time undertakers enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy in terms of burial fees
charged, and the issue of stillborn burials was debated several times in the first decade of
the twentieth century between the KCB and representatives of the undertaker trade in
Western Australia. In particular, the Board was keen to spare parents the necessity of
engaging an undertaker – and thus paying a higher fee – and proposed and moved in a
Board meeting in September 1905 that parents be permitted to leave bodies at the cemetery
gate, ‘appropriately contained in a box,’ with only a minimal fee charged to cover the cost
of the lead number plate. In justification of this decision, the Secretary of the Board cited
the Crown Solicitor of Western Australia’s opinion that bypassing the services of an
undertaker was quite safe; the minutes of this meeting note that ‘the Crown Solicitor gave it
171
Leonie Liveris, Memories Eternal: The first 100 years of Karrakatta, Claremont, W.A.: Metropolitan
Cemeteries Board, 1999, p. 61.
172
Ken Inglis, ‘Passing Away’, in Bill Gammage and Peter Spearritt (eds.) Australians 1938, Fairfax, Syme &
Weldon Associates, 1987, p. 241.
67
as his opinion that stillborns could be buried anywhere (even the backyard) and remain
until it became a nuisance, or the Health Department ordered exhumation’. 173
Not surprisingly, the undertakers of Perth were none too pleased with this arrangement,
calling upon the Board to reverse their decision. A meeting of influential undertakers met in
June 1907 with the express purpose to object to the practice of stillborn babies being
discreetly left at the cemetery gates, arguing that ‘we should be protected by the Board’. 174
At two subsequent Board meetings the KCB voted to adhere to the decision, despite the
undertakers’ constant letters. 175 In reality, however, it appears that few parents chose this
method of burial; those who were able to make an active choice preferring to engage an
undertaker and those who were financially unable had to be satisfied with their child being
buried in a mass grave.
Supervising the pregnant body
The turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw women’s bodies, or more precisely,
their wombs, become subject to intense scrutiny. Some in the medical profession began to
lament the ‘deplorable’ situation of high infant mortality, particularly at birth, with the
retiring President of the Queensland chapter of the British Medical Society, Dr Wilton
Love, urging his colleagues in 1907 to value obstetrics for its role in saving the lives of
Australia’s ‘potential citizens’:
Were this mortality to occur in cattle or sheep there would be a Parliamentary Select
Committee appointed to inquire into the matter, and legislative action would be
taken and Government assistance forthcoming. But it is only children – children, the
potential citizens of the future – who are thus removed, and no heed is paid to the
warning voice and no action is taken to save the stricken multitude. 176
Dr Love’s impassioned call to his colleagues would be heeded. By the turn of the century,
pregnancy and childbirth were largely ministrated to by fellow women, but within the
context of the concern over the declining birth rate and the high childbearing mortality
rates, the self-described ‘medical men’ increasingly saw it as their duty to assume
173
KCB Minutes, 27th September 1905. Unpublished document held in Karrakatta Cemetery archives.
Messrs C. Coulson, W.F. Deslanes, T.J. Hogan, W.C. Bowra and M. O’Dea, letter to KCB, 4 June 1907.
Unpublished document held in KCB archives.
175
See KCB Minutes, 7 June 1907; KCB Minutes 31 July 1907; KCB Minutes August 28 1907.
176
Wilton Love quoted in R. Patrick, A History of Health and Medicine in Queensland, 1824-1960, St Lucia:
Queensland University Press, 1987, p. 158.
174
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governance over the treatment of this ‘pathological’ condition. In his Presidential Address
to the Intercolonial Medical Congress in 1902, Sir Walter Balls-Headley, inaugural lecturer
in obstetrics and gynaecology at Melbourne University affirmed the separate roles of the
sexes and articulated the importance of the medical profession in assisting women to fulfil
their ‘natural’ role of mother: ‘the object of women’s development is the propagation of the
race, but the advantage of the degree of propagation is dependent on the environment’. 177
The environment Balls-Headley was appealing to was, of course, a direct reference to the
scientific environment of obstetrics-controlled pregnancy and birth which, it was argued,
would produce strong, healthy babies. McCalman argues that the great losses of the Great
War ‘fanned anxieties over race suicide’, linking the loss of young men to the loss of
‘unborn citizens’, promoting the idea within medical discourse that a manipulation of the
‘environment’ would help improve the quality, not just the quantity, of babies born to
Australian mothers. 178 That is, amidst the rising concern over Australia’s declining birth
rate, the foetus held a position of abstract value within the rhetoric of nation-building,
amplified by the great losses of World War I. Although the lives of women as maternal
citizens were privileged in this nationalistic discourse, the foetus was nonetheless valued
for its potential value as future citizen. It is within this context that the medical profession
assumed authority over pregnancy and childbirth, and I now move to Chapter Two to
explore the ramifications of this on constructions of perinatal death in the early to mid
twentieth century.
177
178
Walter Balls-Headley quoted in Hicks, This Sin and Scandal, p. 33.
McCalman, Sex and Suffering, p. 156.
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CHAPTER TWO
‘A delicate girl has no right … to bear children’: the medicalisation of childbirth and
discourses of responsibility and success
In 1906, a newly-graduated doctor, Mary de Garis, witnessed first hand the risks that
childbirth posed to both mother and child at the turn of the century. As part of her training
at the women’s lying-in hospital in Carlton, Melbourne (later to become the RWH), de
Garis observed a total of fifty nine cases of eclampsia: fourteen mothers died, whilst all the
babies were stillborn. 179 Three years earlier, as a medical student at the University of
Melbourne, de Garis had recorded in her lecture notes the telling statement that likely
shaped her understanding of the role of the doctor in childbirth: ‘the parturient woman is a
surgical case … the successful obstetrician must be well versed in modern surgery’. The
high rates of maternal and infant deaths, she was taught as a student, were primarily caused
by an ignorance of modern obstetrical knowledge and recklessness on behalf of untrained
birth attendants and their patients, 180 and her early experience as a resident likely confirmed
this view.
I begin this chapter with an excerpt from de Garis’ lecture notes to exemplify the increasing
medical interest in pregnancy and childbirth at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. In this chapter I explore the impact of this interest – manifest in the
medicalisation of childbirth - with a particular focus on the dominant involvement of the
medical profession in constructing meanings of perinatal death in Australia from the turn of
the century and for many decades beyond. Three key themes underpin this chapter and
these are discussed in a broadly chronological fashion throughout: firstly, the positioning of
the medical profession as the authority in matters related to childbirth and pregnancy, with
particular emphasis on the profession’s authority in constructing ideas of the foetus and the
pregnant body – cultural inscriptions which were drawn more generally from scientific
ideas of the body; secondly the growing expectation that ‘responsible’ women would place
themselves under the care of a doctor whilst also constructing notions of what constituted
179
Mary de Garis, ‘Case Notes’, contained in Book: Student’s lecture and clinical notes, MHM02030,
Medical History Museum [MHM] archives, University of Melbourne.
180
Mary de Garis, Lecture notes from Rothwell Adam’s lectures, Lecture XVI, 3 April 1903, in Book, MHM
archives.
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‘appropriate’ behaviour for pregnant women and the linking of this behaviour to foetal
wellbeing; and thirdly, notions of what constituted ‘successful’ birth, or its reverse, ‘failed’
birth, which were derived from expectations of ‘responsible’ motherhood as well as
inscriptions on the foetal body.
Because of the dominance of the medical profession in shaping understandings of perinatal
death for a large part of the twentieth century, this chapter necessarily encompasses a
reasonably large time frame whilst also utilising a variety of sources from this period –
including medical journals and medical textbooks, the Report of the 1904 NSW RCDB,
medical records and case notes, and oral testimony of some women whose babies died
during this period. The time frame and themes of this chapter overlap somewhat with
Chapter 3, in which I discuss further the impact of the medical profession’s authoritative
voice in constructing meanings of perinatal death as framed within the cultural context of a
shifting away from the public expression of grief after the two World Wars towards the
expectation of ‘spartan control’.
Pathologising pregnancy: the medicalisation of childbirth
In her study of medical inscriptions on the female body, Lupton argues that women’s
bodies had been regarded as ‘the poorer version of man, the ‘other’ in medical discourse’
for centuries. Accordingly, pregnancy and childbirth were seen as pathological states
worthy only of the ministrations of fellow women. 181 Evan Willis notes that in Australia
the field of obstetrics held an inferior status within the medical profession prior to the
medicalisation of childbirth, a status so low that the 1858 Medical Act did not require
medical practitioners dealing with obstetrics and gynaecology to be qualified, a situation
which remained unchanged until 1886. 182 However the concern over the perceived ‘race
suicide’ and the declining birth-rate led to a greater degree of interest in infant and maternal
mortality in the early twentieth century; witnesses to the 1904 NSW RCDB, for example,
181
Lupton, Medicine as Culture, pp. 133-135.
Evan Willis, Medical Dominance: The Division of Labour in Australian Health Care, Sydney: Allen and
Unwin, 1989, Rev. ed., p. 96.
182
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decried the medical profession’s lack of involvement in obstetrics and pointed the finger of
blame squarely at untrained midwives. 183
At a national level, the first major survey of health was carried out in 1916 ‘concerning
causes of death and invalidity in the Commonwealth’; the primary cause of concern was the
shockingly high maternal and infant mortality rates, attributed again to the medical
profession’s lack of authority in this area. 184 The consolidation of medical dominance over
midwifery was finalised in the late 1930s; this consolidation was the result of the
widespread concern over the infant and maternal mortality rates in the early years of the
twentieth century which led in turn to the consolidation of the medical profession into a
position of dominance and control over allied health occupations. Various midwifery
registration acts from 1915 to 1920, culminating with the incorporation of midwifery into
nursing in 1928, signalled the beginning of medical dominance over pregnancy and
childbirth. 185
Although the late nineteenth century was characterised by a sense of inevitability towards
stillbirth and neonatal death amongst the medical profession, several eminent physicians
began to argue that stillbirth and miscarriage were preventable in many cases provided the
pregnant body was carefully supervised and guided by the tenets of science and so-called
rational knowledge. James Jamieson, for example, a well-known obstetrician at what would
become the RWH Melbourne, and lecturer at University of Melbourne, spent several years
scrutinising the pregnancies of over 500 women; 3113 pregnancies were reported, with just
under two-thirds producing what Jamieson termed ‘successful’ issue. From these results,
Jamieson concluded that the reduction of ‘pregnancy wastage’ was the key to increasing the
population of Victoria, rather than simply an increase in fertility rates, and that this aim
could only be achieved through careful supervision of the pregnant body. 186
183
Based on the ‘large amount of evidence’ given to the Commission, the Report was unequivocal in
apportioning blame to midwives. The Report stated that ‘whilst medical schools and universities in this State
[NSW] and elsewhere have been giving increasing attention to the teaching of this art to medical students and
whilst much progress has been made by the art itself, in consequence of recent scientific discoveries, the vast
majority of women who practice as midwives, monthly nurses, or accoucheuses are uneducated, untrained,
and unsuitable’. See RCDB, vol. 1, p. 32.
184
See I. Loudon, Death in Childbirth: An International Study of Maternal Care and Maternal Mortality,
1800 - 1950, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992, p. 463.
185
For a detailed discussion of the progression of the subordination of midwifery see Willis, Medical
Domination, p. 111.
186
Hicks, This Sin and Scandal, p. 35.
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As medical scrutiny increased over women’s bodies, the pregnant body was also
reinscribed by science. In her social history of menstruation in Australia, Suellen Murray
notes that whilst medical ideas of reproduction are positioned as essential and fixed to
biology, the discourse of medicine is itself socially constructed, reflected in and
participating in the construction of ideas about femininity. By the turn of the century,
dominant ideas of femininity and the female body were intrinsic to science: as Murray
notes, ‘reproductive differences were fundamental to definitions of sex and gender, and, at
the turn of the century, femininity was ‘naturally’ and biologically determined by
femaleness’. 187
The feminist critics Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore point out that an appeal to ‘nature’ in
terms of defining women and women’s bodies has always been a powerful tool against
change. 188 In the context of the discursive authority of the medical profession in
understanding women’s bodies, this assertion is relevant to this thesis. In constructing the
pregnant body as unstable and irrational, in need of masculine supervision and
surveillance, 189 the medical profession made a trenchant claim to the fixed nature of
women’s bodies. Ironically, however, it was precisely this appeal to nature that precipitated
change. That is whilst women’s bodies had long been defined in relation to men’s bodies –
the ‘rational’ sex – it was the appeal to nature which cemented medicine’s self-proclaimed
authority in not only describing, but dealing with, the pregnant body, a shift away from the
female-only domain of pregnancy and childbirth.
The medicalisation of childbirth was a cultural shift which not only professionalised the
activities of those involved with the care and management of pregnancy and childbirth, but
– of most significance to this thesis – constructed dominant and authoritative
understandings of the foetus, as well as the ending of a pregnancy through miscarriage or
187
S. Murray, ‘Being Unwell: Menstruation in Early Twentieth Century Australia’, in J. Brash, J. Long and J.
Gothard (eds.) Forging Identities: Bodies, Gender and Feminist History, Nedlands, WA: University of
Western Australia Press, 1997, p. 137.
188
Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore, The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary
Criticism, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Education, 1989, p. 3.
189
As Philippa Martyr observes, the medical profession at this time was overwhelmingly male. The 1891
Victorian census revealed that of 777 medical practitioners in the state, just one was female. By 1901, out of
743, fifteen were women. See P. Martyr, Paradise of Quacks: An Alternative History of Medicine in
Australia, Sydney, 2002, p. 162.
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perinatal death. In The Disenchantment of the Home Reiger argues for the importance of
the period between the 1880s to the 1930s in terms of changing understandings of
pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood, noting that it ‘charted not only the rapid growth of
gynaecology as a professional specialty but increased interest in obstetrics on the part of
both doctors and some women’s organisations’. 190 By the end of this period of
professionalisation, obstetrics and gynaecology were almost exclusively seen to be the
domain of the medical profession, with perhaps the most significant developments being
the normalising of antenatal care as an ‘essential’ part of the experience of pregnancy, and
the shift away from home birth to hospital birth under the watchful eye of the maledominated medical profession. 191
An appeal to the rationality of science: medicine as authority
I now consider the positioning of the medical profession as authority in constructing
understandings of perinatal death within the context of the medicalisation of childbirth. The
principal factor in achieving a reduction in ‘pregnancy wastage’ was seen to be ‘rational’
scientific knowledge of the pregnant body. As noted earlier, the medical profession was
keen to gain control over obstetrics, armed with and supported by an appeal to this ‘modern
scientific’ knowledge. It is apparent that the medicalisation of childbirth was driven by two
linked aims: to end the midwife’s unregulated activities and to gain control over obstetrics
by claiming an authority over the pregnant body. In order to achieve these aims, the
supposed culpability of midwives in producing ‘poor’ results – that is, high rates of infant
and maternal mortality - became a powerful tool in medical constructions of perinatal death
in the early twentieth century. 192 Later in this chapter I consider the linking of maternal
behaviour to birth ‘outcomes’, but in the early years of the medicalisation of childbirth, it
was the figure of the untrained birth attendant who bore the burden of responsibility for
high infant mortality and whose activities were scrutinised and discredited as the medical
profession sought to establish authority over obstetrics.
190
Reiger, Disenchantment of the Home, p. 84.
Reiger, Disenchantment of the Home, p. 84.
192
See for example, ‘Editorial’, Australasian Medical Gazette [AMG], March 20, 1903, p. 116.
191
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Although the mid eighteenth century saw the birth of the lying-in hospital for destitute
women, most women during this period still gave birth at home, attended by female
relatives and friends, whilst those expectant mothers of some means were often attended by
a midwife, who was unregistered and most likely had not had any formal training. 193
However by the turn of the century the practice of midwifery was starting to be a topic of
hot debate amongst the medical profession who were keen to establish an authority over
pregnancy and childbirth. Within the context of a rising anxiety over high rates of infant
and maternal mortality, midwives and the so-called ‘monthly nurse’ soon found themselves
to be the bane of the ‘medical men’ of obstetrics and gynaecology in Australia, and initially
bore the brunt of the blame for the high rates of stillbirths and neonatal deaths. Ironically,
midwives came to be seen as interlopers upon the ‘rightful’ domain of the medical
profession.
In his analysis of the medical profession’s bid to assume authority over pregnancy and
childbirth, Willis notes that the caricature of Sairy Gamp – the dirty, incompetent creature
of Charles Dickens’ creation - became an image synonymous with midwifery in general; he
argues that ‘its usage must be seen as an attempt to discredit midwives as a whole and as an
element in the strategy of male medical takeover’.194 Ida Saunders, for example, an
obstetrician during the 1920s in Sydney, recalled in an interview for the NSW BOHP that
her ‘daily rounds’ to the homes of childbearing women were made difficult by the presence
of untrained midwives; one in particular – ‘an old gamp’ – was described as Saunders as
‘unhygienic’ and ‘incompetent’. 195 Whilst Willis acknowledges that one cannot deny that
‘ghastly’ mistakes were made in cases of flagrant ignorance, he argues that an underlying
motivation in the drive to discredit midwifery was the ‘fear of competition’. Willis observes
that the oft-cited claim that the unsupervised and untrained midwife was ‘ignorant and
193
Willis, Medical Dominance, pp. 98-122.
Willis, Medical Dominance, pp. 100-101.
195
Ida Saunders recounted her experience of visiting a labouring woman in a terrace house in inner-city
Redfern, NSW; she was called because the mother was bleeding profusely; upon her arrival, she was greeted
by the ‘old gamp’ who ‘had a black serge skirt, she had a bit of tape around her back and a pair of scissors
that had been dangling near her buttocks on this old serge [skirt] that she’d been sitting down on anybody
else’s buttocks for years and cut it … that [kind] of thing was still going on’. The interviewer then asked Dr
Saunders if the midwife was trained, to which she replied ‘God only knows who she was!’ Ida Saunders,
interview with Bronwyn Hughes, 1987, NSW BOHP, ORAL TRC 2301/130.
194
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dangerous’ was ‘used as an ideological weapon in the struggle for control over childbirth,
even in the face of available evidence to the contrary’. 196
Indeed, the issue of ‘meddlesome and ignorant midwifery’ was a constant topic in medical
journals at the turn of the century in Australia. One indignant doctor articulated popular
sentiment within his profession with regards to this issue in a letter to the Intercolonial
Medical Journal of Australasia [IMJA], arguing that:
I am against a class of women being registered as [midwives], because I learnt when
on a recent visit to England that this branch of work is fast slipping away from the
medical man. The public get the idea the midwife’s training and skill is exactly the
same as the doctor, and, seeking a saving in money, they naturally engage only a
midwife. The doctor is called in when the eleventh hour strikes – called in Sir, to
save the midwife at her suggestion. Often these eleventh hour operations are
extremely risky as regards the patient; the case does badly and the medical
profession gets another pushdown. 197
The biomedical sciences in Britain and Australia were characterised by a discourse which
linked nature with women and culture to men; Lupton notes that the dichotomy of women
as fixed to nature became a crucial component in the struggle for control over obstetrics.
During this period, she argues, ‘women as mothers and as midwives were represented as
irrational and irresponsible, their knowledge based on tradition rather than experience,
needing the guidance of men who possessed scientific knowledge’. 198 That is, the
particularly gendered medical discourse of childbirth relied upon the construction of
women as the irrational, emotion-driven sex who, as a rule, was incapable of understanding
rational knowledge, the ‘natural’ domain of men. Irrational, emotional midwives were,
according to several key figures in obstetrics, the primary reason behind many baby deaths
and birth injuries due to ‘defective care of the newborn by ignorant or careless
[midwifery]’. 199
Some medical men blamed the lack of ‘proper’ training for midwives and were incensed
that some women acted as though they had the right to deliver babies simply because they
196
Willis, Medical Dominance, p. 102.
Anon. (signed ‘Self-Preservation’), Intercolonial Medical Journal of Australasia [IMJA], 20th January
1909, pp. 631-633.
198
Lupton, Medicine as Culture, p. 70. See also Grosz, ‘Notes Towards a Corporeal Feminism’, p. 5.
199
See RCDB, vol. 1, p. 38.
197
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were women; one Dr W. Taylor ironically commented in the AMG in 1901 that:
The … midwife is a by no means insignificant poacher upon the medical domain.
Armed with a certificate obtained after a few months’ residence at a lying-in
hospital, she boldly launches forth as an experienced accoucheuse, and attends
confinements without a doctor being present, and handing over the patient when
confined to the care if a relative or neighbour, carries out her daily round of visits
like a medical practitioner … To turn out these so-called certificated midwives in
the manner, and in the short time that I am given to understand is the custom at
some of the lying-in hospitals, is to create a danger to a section of the community
that is unwarrantable. 200
Other doctors echoed these sentiments, openly critical of midwives simply due to the fact
that it was a solely female occupation in competition with the medical profession. Medical
witnesses to the NSW RCDB branded the lay midwife as ignorant of science, particularly
in regards to hygiene; uneducated; and generally unfit for the task, with particular scorn
reserved for the fact that often the only qualification being that the midwife was often a
mother herself. 201 The role of attendant nurse began to be articulated as the only role
available to an attendant woman in the birthing room. Dr R. Arthur, for example,
proclaimed in the AMG that:
The most real and imminent danger …. is the monthly nurse. This worthy woman
has been the ruin of many a rising doctor’s reputation. She has worked the mischief,
and he has got the blame. Let it be laid down as a canon of midwifery that the
doctor is responsible not only for himself, but for the nurse … the wisest thing is for
the doctor to insist on being allowed to choose the nurse, or otherwise refuse
responsibility. This granted, he can select one who he knows will carry out his
instructions strictly - no less, no more. 202
Private case notes also reveal some doctors’ opposition to the continuing involvement of
midwifery in matters of pregnancy and confinement: for example, the well-known
Melbourne obstetrician, Felix Meyer, alluded to midwifery incompetence in one of his
casebooks from the late nineteenth century. In a case in 1889, that of a Mrs Melross of
Carlton, Dr Meyer recorded that the child was dead upon his arrival, ‘possibly stillborn’,
with the cord twice around its neck; his use of a rare exclamation remark in otherwise
characteristically sparse and succinct case notes suggesting his obvious displeasure at his
200
W. Taylor, ‘The position of the medical profession, with special relation to the state of Queensland,’ AMG,
1901, p. 507.
201
The Report’s authors argued that ‘in many cases [of midwifery ‘incompetence’] such a woman’s only
qualification is that she ‘is a mother herself’. See RCDB, vol. 1, p. 32.
202
R. Arthur, ‘Aseptic Midwifery’, AMG, March 21, 1898, p. 110.
77
authority being undermined in a birth that ended badly: ‘Mrs Melross wished to send at
6.30 [for the doctor] but the nurse overruled her!’ 203
‘Building better babies’: antenatal care and the consolidation of medical authority
With untrained and unsupervised midwives clear scapegoats, many doctors believed that
the only means of preventing ‘poor’ birth outcomes was a stricter supervision of the
pregnant body, both during pregnancy and with medical attendance at the birth. Within this
context pregnancy was increasingly rendered as potentially pathological, as the words of
Rothwell Adam in a lecture to University of Melbourne medical students in 1914
demonstrate: ‘An antenatal clinic is for the definite purpose of observing and treating
pregnant women who are suffering from pathological conditions which may prevent their
pregnancy processing to a successful issue, and for the care of the unborn child, so that it
may be born healthy with a good prospect of surviving and becoming a useful citizen’.204
The records of the NSW Bush Nursing Association give insight into the increasing
importance placed upon the role of antenatal care in producing a healthy baby. The sparse
notes of the Midwifery Register Book for the Yetman, NSW area yield little information,
except perhaps to highlight the particular difficulties facing both expectant mothers and
midwives in the bush, but it is significant that patients’ attendance - or lack thereof - at
antenatal clinics was recorded. For example, Linda S. of Warialda, a country town in NSW,
delivered her third baby in 1941; the male infant died fifteen hours after birth. The case
notes are typically brief: the mother’s condition is noted as ‘satisfactory’ and she was
discharged from the Bush Nursing hospital ten days after delivery. Significantly, under
‘further notes’, the attending midwife recorded that the ‘babe was in very poor condition
after birth … the patient had no prenatal treatment’. 205 Similarly, Beryl R. of Yetman,
NSW was delivered of her first child at her home in 1941 at age twenty one; the child was
stillborn before the midwife’s arrival and the otherwise-brief case notes record that the
203
Felix Meyer, ‘Case Notes’, contained in Meyer, Felix Henry and Family Papers, 1872-1936, ACC 75/69,
MHM archives.
204
Rothwell Adam quoted in McCalman, Sex and Suffering, p. 158.
205
Case 2 Linda May Smith, Midwifery Register Book, Yetman area, NSW Bush Nursing Association
Records, ML2815, 48 of 64, Mitchell Library.
78
patient lived ‘eight miles out of town and transport problems prevented more frequent
[prenatal] visits’. 206
Further to the importance of antenatal care, medical intervention in the guise of the timely
use of instruments at the hands of the doctor was heralded as a means of ‘saving’ future
Australian babies; this appeal to intervention also served to reinforce medicine’s authority
over childbirth. Drs Allen and McGregor, for example, waxed lyrical about the use of
instruments and the ability of doctors to prevent infant death, but also placed responsibility
upon the doctor to use them judiciously, trusting in his own rational, measured judgment:
An accoucheur’s hand should be firm, and yet gentle … having made up his mind to
the right course, he should pursue it without let or hindrance, without wavering,
without loss of time. Moments in such cases are most precious; they often
determine whether the mother shall do well, and whether the babe shall live or die.
How many a child has died in the birth, in a hard and tedious labour, from the use of
instruments having been too long delayed? Instruments, in a proper case and
judiciously applied, are most safe … many hours of intense suffering and many
years of unavailed regrets from the needless loss of the child might have been saved
if instruments had been used the moment mechanical aid was indicated. 207
A crucial factor in the medicalisation of childbirth and specifically in the establishment of
antenatal care as a routine part of pregnancy was the positioning of the doctor as a figure of
authority. 208 By the 1940s, the authority of the medical profession in obstetrics was
entrenched in Australia, as the majority of women attended prenatal clinics and delivered
their babies in hospital. The proliferation of pregnancy and infant-care manuals suggests
that many women were aware of the expectation that they should submit themselves to the
doctor’s authority. Women's magazines regularly featured articles that celebrated
pregnancy as a ‘special’ time for women that required special care and attention,
particularly regular medical attention. 209 Women were encouraged to shun advice from
other women, urged to rely instead on medical advice: ‘the first cardinal rule for all
prospective mothers to follow is ... avoid all female relatives, friends and neighbours and
206
Case 19 Beryl Weir Reeves, Midwifery Register Book, Yetman area, NSW Bush Nursing Records.
Monfort B. Allen & Amelia C. McGregor, The Glory of Woman, Sydney & Melbourne: Walker R. Hayes
& Co, 1896, p. 165.
208
Reiger cites the opinion of Bruce Sutherland, a colleague of Lance Townsend, who was professor of
obstetrics at the University of Melbourne during this period; in the former’s recollection Townsend expressed
his delight over the legal ban on domiciliary midwifery: ‘He was saying, ‘Well, that’s taken care of them!’, he
was out to stop the home deliveries and that how he did it … I think it was the power-control and Townsend
wanted the power to control; that’s why he did it. He wanted the midwives out, and that was it, so the boys
were even more in the box seat’. Bruce Sutherland quoted in Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies, p. 22.
209
Holmes, Spaces in her Day, p. 71.
207
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never let them know of your condition. The second is, engage your doctor early, at the sixth
week if possible. Follow his instructions to the letter, in any trouble go to him, and to him
only, immediately’. 210
The authority of the doctor was rarely questioned by women in childbirth in the
medicalised era; as Reiger observes, women at the time were increasingly aware of the
risks of childbirth and therefore placed their confidence in the doctor to ensure the safety of
the birth. 211 In the postwar years, the hierarchy of power – in which women were placed
firmly at the bottom – was reinforced as many doctors were returning servicemen. One
midwife interviewed by Reiger commented that ‘you never queried people in those days.
You were junior; they were senior, and in no way would you ever query them’. 212 Doris B.,
a theatre nurse in the 1940s and 1950s, remembers vividly the hierarchy of power which
existed in the hospital; for example, following the death of both mother and baby following
a caesarean section, Doris recalled that the operating surgeon indicated that the deaths
should not be discussed amongst the staff. ‘Of course,’ Doris recalled, ‘we complied with
this request’. 213
A significant part of the cultural acquiescence to medical authority was, as briefly discussed
previously, the displacing of the language of sexuality and pregnancy from the vocabulary
of ordinary Australian women, invalidated as it was by the authoritative language of the
medical profession. 214 Murray argues that ‘limited everyday language [was] available for
speaking about menstruation … Non-medical public discussion about menstruation was
210
Holmes, Spaces in her Day, p. 71.
Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies, p. 22.
212
Mothers were expected to acquiesce to medical authority but junior medical staff, nurses, and midwives
were also subject to this expectation. A doctor, who later supported the midwifery push for autonomy, is
quoted by Reiger as saying that ‘there never was much criticism of medical treatment of anything. It was just
accepted and that was it; you were the boss. The patients didn’t ever have much to say at all really’. See
Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies, p. 22 McCalman notes that the hierarchies of the military shaped the
structure of the hospital: ‘The hospital had an unquestioned etiquette which cemented the structure of
authority: the honoraries were the generals, the residents the lesser officers, the medical students the officer
cadets, the matron the NCO, the charge nurses the corporals and the pupil nurses were the privates. the
orderlies who cleaned, carried, cooked and served were merely a labour corps’. See McCalman, Sex and
Suffering, p. 148.
213
Doris B., conversation with researcher, 25th July 2005.
214
Although McCalman does not write from a feminist perspective, her discussion of the self-proclaimed
medical right to speak about sexuality is useful. She argues that ‘medical men enjoyed a freedom denied all
other respectable people of speaking and thinking frankly about human sexuality. During a century when it
became increasingly difficult to discuss sexual relationships and contraception, medical men alone were free
to speculate and philosophise’. See McCalman, Sex and Suffering, p. 35.
211
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silenced in the everyday lives of women around the turn of the century’. 215 Applied to sex,
pregnancy and childbirth, Murray’s observation is particularly pertinent: the increasing
secularisation and medicalisation of the body invalidated women’s own understandings of
their pregnant bodies and positioned medical knowledge as authoritative; by extension,
women suffering perinatal loss were subject to the medical discourse of perinatal death
within the context of the dominant medical constructions of pregnancy and childbirth. 216
For example the many women’s handbooks – or ‘wives’ manuals’ – were most often
written by members of the medical fraternity as a means to disseminate medical knowledge
deemed ‘appropriate’ for women. The so-called ‘wives’ handbooks’ played a significant
role in diminishing women’s ability to understand their bodies by promoting the idea that
only those well-versed in modern scientific knowledge of pregnancy were qualified to
understand the pregnant body. The authors of The Motherhood Book – ‘compiled by a
distinguished group of experts and specialists in health, maternity, infant and child welfare’
made available for the Australian audience – exhorted pregnant readers to be mindful of the
necessity for medical supervision to ‘prevent petty discomforts and to guard against real
tragedies’. Pregnancy, the authors argued, ‘should be a natural function, but civilisation too
often causes irregularities, and medical advice should not be dispensed with either from
over-optimism, false modesty, or shyness … the wise modern mother does not
procrastinate about this visit [to the doctor]’. 217
Therefore, such works can also been seen as an attempt to combat the ‘foolish’ advice of
interfering neighbourhood women with an appeal to the higher order of scientific rationale.
In one handbook, doctors Allen and McGregor admonish expectant mothers to ‘[do] away
with gossiping croakers’, warning that dire consequences would follow should women rely
215
Murray, ‘Being Unwell’, p. 138.
Although women are not uninformed and unreflective social actors, medical knowledge of pregnancy and
childbirth – and therefore, by extension perinatal death – was an authoritative way of viewing the female
body. Feminist theorist Grosz uses the experience of menstruation, for example, to give insight into the body
as both a ‘means by which power is disseminated and a potential object of resistance’. She argues the
experience of menstruating, for example, ‘the archetypal ‘symptom’ of women’s unique biologies’ is ‘not
simply responses to hormonal and biological imperatives, but are effects, in the first instance, of the ways in
which menstruation is represented in culture, and as the way it is lived or experienced by women – its
meaning for them. In a culture where it is regarded as a wound, a sign of castration, lack or imperfection (as is
common in patriarchy), it is likely to be experienced as a dreaded burden or debilitation, or unpleasant or
painful’. See Grosz, ‘Notes Towards a Corporeal Feminism’, pp. 14-15.
217
Anon., The Motherhood Book: For the Expectant Mother and Baby’s First Years, London: Amalgamated
Press, n.d., p. 23.
216
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on the local midwife’s advice rather than their doctor’s: ‘If [midwives] have had bad cases,
many of them have probably been of their own making; such nurses, therefore, ought … be
shunned’. 218 In The Mother’s Handbook, the authors warn readers against placing their
faith in the experience of other mothers who falsely claim that antenatal supervision is
unnecessary:
There is still a tendency [amongst women] to belittle the necessity for constant
medical supervision throughout the whole nine months … [some] pin their faith to
‘Nature’, or adopt a ‘let’s wait till something is wrong’ attitude. Those however
with a wider experience realise that, until we all live as Nature wishes, we cannot
expect a birth to be quite a ‘natural’ process, and that there are a large percentage of
tragedies of motherhood which could easily have been avoided had the routine
antenatal examination been given. 219
Responsibility and blame: the ideology of the [good] mother
The success of the medical profession in severely curtailing the midwife’s activities as well
as the construction of antenatal care as a routine part of pregnancy shifted the profession’s
focus from the midwife to the expectant mother. In more general terms, the figure of the
mother had taken on new symbolism and significance at the turn of the century. In the
context of Federation in 1901, suffragists had demanded that mothers be granted equal
rights as citizens and ‘independent, self-governing individuals’. 220 Previously, Australian
mothers had been considered to belong exclusively within the private sphere and were thus
neglected in issues of authority – for example having scarce claim to their husband’s
income or even automatic guardianship over their children should they be widowed. 221 The
early feminists’ redefinition of ‘the mother’ as an important entity to the fledgling
Australian nation, combined with the alarm over the maternal mortality rate, produced a
focusing on the pregnant body previously unseen in Australia’s past; this scrutiny
constructed notions of maternal responsibility in producing a healthy baby. As Featherstone
points out, early feminists played a vital role in attempts to educate women of childbearing
218
Allen & McGregor argued that, in order to avoid miscarriage, ‘the most serious calamity’ for a woman, the
young wife must ‘by a popular work of this kind be enlightened, or loss of life to her unborn babe, and broken
health to herself, will, in all probability, be the penalties of her ignorance’. See Allen & McGregor, The Glory
of Woman, pp. 186-187.
219
Mother’s Handbook, p. 32.
220
Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: the History of Australian Feminism, St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin,
1999, p. 72.
221
Lake, Getting Equal, p. 73.
82
age as to their proper role in Australian society; these efforts relied on casting the childless
woman as disgraceful and shameful, even antagonistic, to the project of nation-building. 222
With the concern mounting over the declining birthrate, (white) children became
conceptualised as the key to the nation’s future health, and (white) motherhood was
accordingly venerated as the noblest feminine duty. 223 As I briefly mentioned in the
literature review, the introduction of the Maternity Allowance in 1912 was part of the
process of the veneration of motherhood, but was also a tacit recognition that childbirth was
a dangerous time for Australian women. 224 The Great War also heralded cause for further
concern; McCalman notes the parallels drawn between the dangers of active service and
mothering that ‘impressed the concerned with the concept of ‘wastage’ of the nation losing
potential citizens and soldiers to disease and poor mothering’. 225 Prime Minister Fisher,
speaking about the Maternity Allowance, drew striking comparisons between the perils of
childbirth and active service: ‘Statistics show ... that maternity is more dangerous than
war’. 226
The introduction of so-called ‘mothercraft’ classes and antenatal care in the first two
decades of the twentieth century was ostensibly meant to address the perils of pregnancy
and childbirth through the monitoring of the health of mother and developing baby. As
antenatal care began to be considered the normal process for pregnant women, mothers
ironically bore much of the burden of responsibility of producing healthy babies. The ‘wise
woman’, declared the Medical Journal of Australia [MJA] in 1921, consulted a doctor ‘as
soon as she realises she is pregnant … and is prepared to follow his directions throughout
the long months of her grossesse until she and her infant can be left to enjoy life and health
as the world’s most useful citizens’. 227 Postnatal checks measured mothers' success in
222
Featherstone cites the editor of the AMG as insisting in 1904 that ‘it must be instilled into the minds of
young married women that barrenness is a disgrace and a sign of weakness. If a social stigma were attached to
a woman who was known or believed to be deliberately attempting to defeat the ends of married life … we
should hear no more about the declining birth-rate’. See Featherstone, ‘Race for Reproduction’, p. 183.
223
Philippa Mein-Smith argues that the white mother took on a symbolic importance within the context of the
concern over racial hygiene: ‘[M]aternity connoted moral responsibility and public duty to ensure the future
of the race. Women’s duty as white mother … corresponded with a code of moral motherhood where moral
purity equated to racial purity’. See P. Mein-Smith, ‘Maternity and Eugenics’, in Crotty et al, Race for a
Place, p. 141.
224
See for example Reiger, Disenchantment of the Home, p. 86; Damousi, The Labour of Loss, p. 38.
225
McCalman, Sex and Suffering, p. 156.
226
Lake, Getting Equal, p. 206.
227
Editorial, ‘Pre-maternity Care’, Medical Journal of Australia [MJA], 26 November, 1921, p. 488.
83
terms of her previous antenatal clinic attendance and her child's adherence to ‘normal’
weights and measurements; 228 whilst a number of government officials and medical men
championed the control of maternal behaviour as a means of ‘saving the race’. The infant
welfare specialist Truby King, at times revered and reviled but still influential in the early
twentieth century in New Zealand and Australia in the push for universal antenatal care and
infant routines, declared that ‘the problem of right or wrong feeding and nutrition in early
infancy determines the health and fitness of the being throughout life and largely
determines the fate of the race’. 229
The idea that maternal behaviour could adversely impact the development of the unborn
child was not original to the twentieth century. 230 In relation to attitudes towards childcare
in seventeenth century England, Crawford argues that a pregnant woman was charged with
the responsibility to care for herself in mind, body and spirit lest her child be afflicted in the
womb, and be born with a ‘deformity’. 231 In a similar vein in nineteenth century Australia,
folklore abounded amongst women as to certain foods and activities to avoid, lest their
unborn child be harmed; in an indirect way, self-administered practices of abortion in the
early twentieth century are also indicative of popular beliefs of activities that were believed
to prove injurious to the developing foetus – for example, douching or bathing in hot water,
as well as falling down stairs or inserting slippery elm, used to open the neck of the womb
and induce miscarriage.
232
In the early twentieth century, women themselves internalised
notions of maternal responsibility; one British woman who suffered ten miscarriages
believed that her pregnancies had ended because of ‘weakness’, but also, she claimed sadly,
because of her own ‘ignorance and neglect,’ 233 whilst one mother wrote that ‘I have lost
228
Lake and Kelly (eds.) Double Time, p. 259.
Truby King quoted in Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Marian Quartly & Ann McGrath, Creating a
Nation, Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1994, p. 228.
230
The twelfth century bishop Albertus Magnus espoused the belief that some women should be held culpable
for miscarriage, because of their evil deeds or intrinsically evil nature, arguing that ‘some women habitually
give birth in the sixth month, and abortively, for they do not produce something with the nature of man but
rather a certain fleshy and milky matter. This can happen for a variety of reasons: either because the matter of
the menses is corrupt, or because of too much motion on the part of the woman which breaks the womb, or on
account of other evils that befall her. [Some] engage in a good deal of activity when they are pregnant. They
move from place to place, from town to town: they lead dances and take part in many other evil deeds. Even
more frequently they have a great deal of sex, and they wrestle with men. They do all these things so that they
might be freed from their pregnancy by the excessive motion’. See Helen Rodnite Lemay, Women's Secrets:
A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus's De secretis mulierum with Commentaries, pp. 101-102.
231
Patricia Crawford, ‘From the Woman’s view, p. 65.
232
Allen, Sex and Secrets, p. 27.
233
Letter 35, in Llewelyn-Davies (ed.), Maternity, p. 62.
229
84
two of my four babies, and had a miscarriage. If I had taken more care before birth, I quite
believe that those children would have lived’. 234 Another argued that women needed to
‘take care’ of herself particularly in the early stages of pregnancy to avoid the many cases
of ‘deformed and deficient’ children. 235
The twentieth century medical discourse of maternal responsibility, however, differed from
these various notions because the construction of maternally reckless behaviour was posited
as having both a scientific basis as well as impacting upon the health of the nation as a
whole. As mentioned, Matthews argues that the twentieth century saw the formation of the
so-called ‘population ideology’ that used motherhood as a vehicle for pronatalist aims.
Within the context of the population ideology, notes Matthews, ‘each birth, each death,
each illness or infirmity became a political event, to be counted and measured and placed in
a pattern’. 236 In order for such accountability to be achieved, population ideology relied
upon the construction of an ‘ideal mother’ – what Matthews terms as ‘the strategies to
instill in each woman the desire and need to be feminine’. 237 The ideal mother, then, was
necessarily part of the duality of ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’ motherhood. This ideal
can be extended to include the construction of the ideal pregnant woman, who was
positioned as the epitome of expectant womanhood, the patriotic mother-to-be, of
femininity wholly fulfilled in childbearing and, in years to come, childrearing.
Maternal behaviour, foetal welfare and the 1904 NSW RCDB
The linking of maternal behaviour to foetal wellbeing is strongly evident in the Report of
the 1904 NSW RCDB. Witnesses to the Commission, a group which included members of
the medical profession, clergy, and government authorities, felt strongly that women who
transgressed boundaries of ‘appropriate’ femininity were partly to blame for high infant
mortality rates. The 1904 NSW RCDB was initially called to investigate the decline in
fertility rates in Australia. Witnesses to the Commission were, according to Neville Hicks,
principally concerned with Australian women’s apparent selfishness as they sought to limit
the number of pregnancies. However, whilst principally concerned with the ever-present
234
Letter 75, in Llewelyn-Davies (ed.) Maternity, p. 101.
Letter 74, in Llewelyn-Davies (ed.) Maternity, p. 101.
236
Matthews, Good and Mad Women, p. 75.
237
Matthews, Good and Mad Women, p. 15.
235
85
problem of criminal abortion, the Commission extended its scope to include discussions of
the health and vitality of the foetus in utero and in the early weeks after birth, signalling a
new focus on the health and welfare of the unborn and newborn child. 238 Whilst some
doctors who gave evidence at the Commission were convinced that some degree of
‘pregnancy wastage’ was inevitable, given the mystery of foetal development in utero, 239
and although the Report made no formal distinction between neonatal deaths and deaths in
the first year of life, 240 it is quite clear that its authors of the report believed that the
neonatal period was a crucial time for a baby. The appallingly high infant mortality rate
was attributed in part to the ‘birth injuries’ caused by untrained midwives, but also due to
‘poor’ mothering, particularly of unmarried mothers. 241
Viewed in this light, the Report of the RCDB is a rich site to explore the role of the medical
profession in the construction of cultural expectations of ‘appropriate’ femininity in the
early twentieth century. Within the discourse of the ‘ideal’ expectant mother, pregnant
women were expected primarily to display a sense of gratitude for their pregnant condition
- pregnancy being the ‘natural’ fulfillment of their femininity. The focus on induced
miscarriage and infanticide and the criticism of women who engaged in such practices
demonstrates the expectation that ‘appropriate’ femininity translated to a submission of
oneself to the duties of maternity and motherhood, and provides an insight into how women
who ‘transgressed’ this expectation were perceived – an insight which has ramifications for
the focus on perinatal death, which was in itself seen to be a transgression against
‘successful’ motherhood. Clearly underlying many of the Commission’s conclusions was a
conviction in the woman’s role – that is, as wife first, followed by mother. Part of the
binary opposition of ‘appropriate’ womanhood was the construction of ‘inappropriate’
feminine behaviour. That is, certain types of women and certain activities which
238
The introduction to the Report of the NSW RCDB states that ‘during the progress of the inquiry,
application was made … by which the scope of our inquiry was extended to include “a general investigation
of the mortality of infants in this state; whether it is, to any extent, preventable, whether it is increasing, and
its relation to the prosperity of the State.”’ See RCDB, vol. 1, p. 5.
239
The Report’s authors commented that ‘[m]ore than one medical witness has referred to the fact that many
newborn children come into the world so badly equipped for the struggle of life that, despite all possible care,
their death during infancy is unpreventable … [when] death occurs in the first two months of life, a
considerable part is due to ante-natal causes, and in the present state of embryonic life, is irremediable’. See
RCDB, vol. 1, p. 38.
240
See RCDB, vol. 1 p. 37.
241
The Report found that the principal causes of infant mortality (under two months of age) were caused by
‘defective viability … defective care of the newborn by ignorant or careless midwives [and] maternal
indifference’. See RCDB, vol. 1, pp. 38-39.
86
transgressed ‘appropriate’ femininity were held as partly responsible for the high rate of
babies dying before or shortly after birth. 242
The Report of the RCDB also gives insight into how the foetus was conceptualised within
the medicalisation of childbirth. Stillbirth due to ‘defective’ midwifery was viewed as
particularly heinous as it equalled the loss of an otherwise useful Australian citizen; the
Report’s authors argued that ‘a number of lives are lost to the State by the children being
killed in the process of birth, either willfully, or through negligence and ignorance of the
midwife in attendance’. 243 Many medical doctors at the time inscribed religious ideas of
conception and the sanctity of life onto the foetal body; in one popular women’s handbook,
Drs Allen and McGregor stated that conception was the ‘generating of an immortal
soul’. 244 Although not all medical witnesses to the RCDB constructed the foetus in such
terms – one doctor, for example, referred to induced abortion as ‘getting rid of the products
of conception’ 245 – it is obvious that many regarded the practice of criminal abortion as
tantamount to murder, and were clearly baffled that women – the ‘saviours of the race’ –
could, apparently, so casually disregard the lives of their unborn children. Religious
witnesses to the Commission were explicit in their condemnation of women who brought
about an end to their pregnancy in such a manner: ‘We recognise the grave immorality and
criminality of inducing miscarriage,’ declared one witness, ‘[as it] ignores the sanctity of
human life’. Another summed it up in one word – ‘murder’. 246
A major concern of the RCDB was the frequency of induced miscarriages, which were,
according to the many medical and religious witnesses to the Commission, conveniently
‘excused’ as spontaneous miscarriages by cunning women who were trading on the
prevailing attitude of miscarriage as an inevitable, common event:
There is a remarkable unanimity of opinion among the medical men, who are
perhaps better able to judge than any other persons in a community, that deliberate
interference with the function of procreation has … become extremely common …
242
Mein-Smith notes that ‘for the pronatalist school, quantity spelt quality, because numbers counted in
displays of vigour, in war and sport, and in claiming terrain. The angst about differential fertility was as much
about numbers as quality: social reform required restricting the sexuality of the unfit and encouraging
motherhood among the “better classes.” ’ See Mein-Smith, ‘Race for Reproduction’, p. 146.
243
See RCDB, vol. 1, p. 33.
244
Allen and McGregor, The Glory of Woman, p. 95.
245
See RCDB, vol. 1, p. 23.
246
See RCDB, vol. 1, p. 28.
87
[as well as] the great and growing frequency of the occurrence of induced
miscarriages. 247
Concern was expressed that women would have the temerity to ‘interfere’ with their
reproductive responsibilities, but the growing incidence of induced miscarriages provoked
moral outrage in the witnesses to the Commission, and the language of the final report
makes it clear what they believed was being destroyed, apart from the ‘natural’ course of
motherhood: it was, the Report’s authors stated, the purposeful ‘destruction of embryonic
life’, a deliberate tampering with the natural progression of conception. 248
Many witnesses to the Commission appeared somewhat baffled that women should reject
their natural roles of wife and mother. Childless women – whether married or unmarried were objects of scorn; barrenness - and not a lifetime of bearing and raising children - made
a woman look old, declared one medical witness to the RCDB. 249 Others openly called for
childless women to be stigmatised; 250 the implication of this call for those women whose
babies died within the culture of ‘death avoidance’ is explored more fully in Chapter Three.
The RCDB Report affirmed the dominant view that women’s primary and natural role was
to bear children. 251 Part of the ‘gross immorality’ of preventing conception, or worse,
terminating a pregnancy, was the havoc it would wreak on a woman’s reproductive system,
further harming her chances of producing a healthy child. Various medical witnesses to the
Commission reported that the practice of preventing conception of interrupting the natural
process of conception was to invite dire consequences upon oneself:
The practice … is the cause of many dire evils, far worse than any bad
consequences that could naturally result from the bearing and rearing of a family.
247
See RCDB, vol. 1, p. 28.
See RCDB, vol. 1, p. 15. Feminist historians have confirmed that the witnesses’ worst fears were, indeed,
true: many Australian women had procured miscarriage, either at their own hands or through a ‘professional’.
As Allen has pointed out, unmarried motherhood certainly spelt financial crisis for an unmarried woman, not
to mention the shame and stigma associated with pregnancy outside of wedlock. Other women were already
overburdened with children and the thought of yet another mouth to feed led women to desperate acts upon
their own bodies: Women did incredible things to bring on miscarriage. One woman took a dozen packets of
Epsom salts [and] finished up in hospital. There was a lot of demoralisation, young girls got pregnant and
there were a lot of bashings amongst families’. ‘Shirley’, recollections of life in Casino, NSW during the
Depression era, quoted in Siedlecky and Wyndham, Populate and Perish, p. 26.
249
Dr John Harris quoted in RCDB, vol. 1, p. 19.
250
See RCDB, vol. 1, pp. 19-20.
251
See RCDB, vol. 1, p. 24. McCalman notes that whilst ‘respectable’ women were expected to not enjoy
sexual intercourse, on the contrary ‘thwarted sex’ – that is, childlessness - was treated with suspicion;
childlessness was constructed as leading to all manner of nervous and physical ailments, as the result of the
‘disappointed womb’. See McCalman, Sex and Suffering, p. 125.
248
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The nervous system is deranged; frequently distress of mind and body are caused,
the general health is often impaired and sometimes ruined, and inflammatory
diseases are set up which disable the reproductive organs. 252
Witnesses to the RCDB clearly believed that judgment would be cast upon a woman
procuring a miscarriage: that evil behaviour only invited evil or deleterious consequences –
in this context, reproductive difficulties in the future. The findings of the Commission
reinforced the notion that women needed supervision and guidance to fulfill their feminine
role; the number of ‘women with a twist in them’ strengthened the perceived necessity for
antenatal care and a strict supervision of the pregnant body. Dr Scot-Skirving, for example,
viewed women who ‘prevent[ed] or unload[ed] children when children are on the way’ as
evidence of the need for medical surveillance over the pregnant body; he argued that
although many women were ‘absolutely good women in the best sense of the word’, some
Australian women shirked their responsibilities – ‘there seems to be a twist in them in that
way’. 253
‘Defective’ conceptions
Although many witnesses to the Commission constructed the foetus as a human-inwaiting, the Report and other medical texts from the early twentieth century give insight
into the notion of what was perceived as ‘appropriate’ humanity. Underscoring the findings
of the RCDB was the strong eugenics rhetoric which decreed that parents must take
responsibility for producing genetically fit – and thus, nationally valuable – offspring. 254
Frank Dikotter observes that eugenics and modernity went hand-in-hand, arguing that
eugenics was less a set of clear scientific principles than ‘a modern way of talking about
social problems’ with an emphasis on race fitness and the avoidance of ‘degeneracy’ and
252
In his evidence to the 1904 NSW RCDB, Dr C.W. Morgan alluded to the fear of ‘sick nerves’, which I
discuss in greater detail in Chapter Three. He argued that the practice of preventing contraception ‘can lead to
deleterious effects on the nervous system, even to the extent of leading to insanity’. See RCDB, vol. 1, p. 18.
253
Dr R. Scot-Skirving quoted in RCDB, vol. 1, p. 23.
254
Mein-Smith notes that ‘eugenics’ in Australia - derived from the Greek word eugenes meaning literally ‘to
be born well’ - was ‘all about birth and making better people by selective breeding’. She argues that ‘as
population growth rates slowed, ‘populate or perish’ phobias came to centre less on migration than on birth
and deaths … The emphasis on whom to include as opposed to exclude – white, “native-born” – grew
stronger, with profound consequences for the concept of maternity’. See Mein-Smith, ‘Maternity and
Eugenics’, pp. 142-144.
89
‘deficiency’. 255 Christina Gillgren argues that calls for state-driven sterilisation of
individuals with an intellectual disability in Western Australia were framed by fears of
racial degeneration and the declining birth-rate in the early decades of the twentieth
century; these calls were driven to a large extent by some in the medical profession. 256
Although state-driven sterilisation was never fully accepted in Australia, failing to heed
such advice nonetheless led to stern reproach in medical journals and popular texts, and
many writers called for such ‘irresponsible’ and ‘undesirable’ people to be held culpable
for ‘imperfect’ conceptions. The Australian physician D.G. Ritchie, for example, argued
that ‘sickly men and women should not marry. People should be ashamed to have a puny
baby’. 257 Women’s manuals echoed this notion, emphasising that deaths in utero or shortly
after birth could be avoided in the first instance if ‘unsuitable’ people avoided conception
altogether. The authors of The Glory of Woman intoned that ‘parents are to be blamed for
the natural, primitive defects of their children, for it is an inevitable law of nature that
constitutional qualities and deficiencies are hereditary’. 258 Some stillborn babies and babies
dying soon after birth were believed to be the result of such deficient couplings; similarly
the ‘delicate’ young woman who ‘foolishly’ fell pregnant before gaining strength sufficient
for the task had only herself to fault when she inevitably could not bring the child into the
world alive:
A delicate girl has no right, until she be made strong, to marry. If she should marry,
she will frequently, when in labor [sic], not have strength to bring a child into the
world, which, provided she be healthy and well-formed, ought not to be. How
graphically the Bible tells of delicate women not having strength to bring children
into the world: For children are come to the birth, and there is not strength to bring
forth’. 259
255
Frank Dikotter, Imperfect Conceptions: Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects and Eugenics in China, Hurst
and Company, London, 1998, p. 3.
256
In her discussion of ‘deficiency’ - centred in this case around constructions of intellectual disability Gillgren cites the opinions of ten ‘known medical men’, reprinted in the West Australian on the 12th March
1926: ‘We consider it to be the duty of the medical profession to impress upon the public the immense
importance of hereditary tendencies in dealing with mental defectives .. we are strongly of the opinion that
sentiment and ignorance should not be allowed to interfere with a means of treatment by which the capacity to
produce an imbecile progeny would be arrested’. See C. Gillgren, ‘‘Once a Defective, Always a Defective’:
Public Sector Residential Care 1900-1965’, in C. Fox et al, Under Blues Skies: The Social Construction of
Intellectual Disability in Western Australia, Nedlands, W.A. : Centre for Disability Research and
Development, Faculty of Health and Human Services, Edith Cowan University, 1996, p. 67 .
257
D.G. Ritchie quoted in Siedlecky and Wyndham, Populate and Perish, p. 111.
258
Allen and McGregor, The Glory of Woman, p. 46.
259
Allen and McGregor, The Glory of Woman, p. 89.
90
There also abounded the idea that ‘debauched’ behaviour resulted in the conception of a
‘feeble’ foetus, with the medical expectation that such a ‘defective’ foetus would die –
which was perceived by some to be a beneficial event. 260 Journal articles used graphic
Biblical imagery to demonstrate that the ‘sins of the fathers’ would be visited upon
generations to come, an idea which, in the twentieth century was based around the quasiscience of eugenics and notions of heredity which decreed that healthy parents would give
birth to healthy offspring. 261 So-called ‘ladies’ handbooks’ explicitly adopted this rhetoric,
urging newly married women to ‘improve their health’ so that they may give birth to a
‘sturdier, more noble’ offspring – with the underlying implication being that, in turn,
‘deficiency’ bred ‘defective’ offspring which in a civilised society, should never be allowed
to happen. 262 The construction of the unmarried mother as particularly sinful, for example,
was vividly illustrated in a 1949 sex education film from the United States which was
approved for use in NSW by the incumbent Minister of Health; in the film, ‘Joan’ became
pregnant whilst a single woman and became ‘sick to the stomach in the morning’. Her sin
brought shame on the family and, Siedlecky and Wyndham observe, it was implicit in the
film’s message that Joan’s baby did not survive because it had been conceived out of
wedlock. 263
Thus a significant part of apportioning blame was the construction of certain ‘types’ of
women as being particularly susceptible to miscarrying or producing a stillborn child.
Medical students in the early twentieth century at the University of Melbourne were
lectured on the ‘degenerate’ woman who selfishly put pleasure above the welfare of her
unborn child: Mary de Garis’ lecture notes record the statement that ‘women who pursue a
life of social pleasures, and women of dissolute habits, badly fed and badly housed, are
260
De Garis, ‘Lecture notes’ Lecture XXXI, 1 July 1903.
Siedlecky and Wyndham, Populate and Perish, p. 114.
262
The authors of The Glory of Woman stated that it was a responsibility of marriage that parents should
ensure that they were ‘free of hereditary disease, his or her organization sound and complete, his or her mind
and body free form all those habits and vices which tend to weaken our powers, debase our feelings, and
render us morally degraded, and he or she in the full, regular and natural exercise of all those powers and
faculties which God … has so beautifully and harmoniously adapted to the wants of our condition … It is
high time that parents should recognise their obligations to understand these sources of hereditary influences
better than they do; and mothers in particular – for if they properly understood them … they would do far
more towards perfecting the human race and ridding the world of vice and immorality than all the benevolent
and moral reform societies in existence’. See Allen and McGregor, The Glory of Woman, pp. 45-47 (my
emphasis). See also Eulalia S. Richards, Ladies Handbook of Home Treatment, Warburton, Vic.: Signs
Publishing Company, 1939, Rev.ed., p. 34; Allen and McGregor, Chapter III: ‘Like Begets Like’, The Glory
of Woman, pp. 27-37.
263
Siedlecky and Wyndham, Populate and Perish, p. 28.
261
91
extremely liable to [miscarriage]’. 264 In particular, the ‘indifferent unwed mother’ was a
target. The Western Australian Statistical Registers from 1901-1914 classified deaths under
one month according to the mother’s marital status, and attributed a number of deaths of
illegitimate children under one month to ‘want of care’ and starvation due to lack of
nourishment. 265
Writing in a cultural and social climate that offered limited ‘appropriate’ roles to women
beyond wife – first- and then mother, the March 1903 editorial of the AMG pinned much of
the blame for ‘pregnancy wastage’ and early infant mortality on women conceiving outside
wedlock. In an argument which relied on the construction of women as ‘naturally’
nurturers, the editor claimed that illegitimate infants were more susceptible to poor
development in utero; coupled with this was the supposed absence of maternal feelings in
unmarried mothers. This potent combination, he warned, would lead to a ‘frightful waste of
life’ which would be a ‘relief to the mother’ – a situation that was inevitable until
unmarried women stopped conceiving children. 266
The Report of the 1904 NSW RCDB echoed these sentiments, attributing high infant deaths
to ‘maternal indifference and the social and economic disabilities of the [unwed]
mother’. 267 Not surprisingly, the Report’s authors felt that the solution lay not in easing
these obstacles but primarily in restricting the procreation of the ‘undesirable’ unmarried
woman. Although the Report made no distinction between neonatal deaths and deaths in the
first year of life, it is quite clear that its authors believed that the neonatal period was a
crucial time for a baby. Seeking to exert control over women who relinquished their babies
at birth to foundling homes, the Report recommended that all relinquishing mothers be
required to stay with their newborns for at least the first few weeks, in order to breastfeed
their babies and thus reduce the incidence of newborns ‘pining’ to death. 268
264
de Garis, ‘Lecture notes’, Lecture XXXI 1 July 1903.
From 1901, the Statistical Registers grouped deaths of infants into ‘illegitimate’ and ‘legitimate’. In 1907,
for example, fifteen infants falling into the former category were listed with cause of death as ‘want of care’.
Statistical Register of Western Australia, Perth, WA: Government Printer, Commonwealth Bureau of
Statistics WA Office, 1903-1907. See also Statistical Register of the Colony of Western Australia, Perth, WA:
Government Printer, 1898-1902.
266
Editorial, AMG, March 1903, p. 117.
267
RCDB, vol. 1, p. 39.
268
RCDB, vol. 1, p. 45.
265
92
Wives’ handbooks: constructions of ‘responsible’ motherhood
In an age of frequent pregnancy loss and the prevailing attitude that women could prevent
miscarriage, women’s handbooks during this time were also instrumental in placing much
of the onus for a successful birth upon the woman. As I mention previously, Crawford
notes the responsibility placed upon a pregnant woman in seventeenth century England to
care for her mind, body, and spirit lest her child be afflicted in the womb and be born with a
‘deformity’. 269 The popular medical handbooks of the early twentieth century persisted
with this idea, even to the point of placing the blame squarely on women’s shoulders in the
some instances of miscarriage. In a ‘wives’ handbook’ published for an Australian
audience, the American doctor Frederick D. Rossiter, for example, gave an exhaustive list
of prohibited activities which pregnant women should avoid: ‘long walks, purgatives,
riding in a carriage or on the cars, overwork, worry, fear, fright, sexual intercourse,
irritation of the breasts, falls, vomiting [and] convulsions’ were all listed as possible causes
of miscarriage and premature birth. 270
The medical authors of The Glory of Woman were convinced that miscarriage and stillbirth
were the greatest tragedies to befall a woman at the turn of the twentieth century – not
primarily because of the loss of the individual child, but because it could potentially rob her
of one of ‘earth’s greatest blessings’ – the role of mother. Miscarriage, they mourned, was
untimely in every sense of the word:
A premature labor (the premature expulsion of the child before the end of the
seventh month), in the graphic language of the Bible, is called ‘an untimely birth’,
and ‘untimely’ in every sense of the word it truly is. ‘Untimely’ for mother;
‘untimely’ for doctor; ‘untimely’ for monthly nurse; ‘untimely’ for all preconcerted
arrangements; ‘untimely’ for child, causing him ‘untimely’ death. A more
expressive word for the purpose it is impossible to find. 271
Furthermore, this particular handbook explicitly linked miscarriage to a failure to place
269
Crawford notes that, even before the birth of psychoanalysis, the subconscious played an important role in
eighteenth century understandings of maternal responsibility. She argues that ‘not only did the woman
contribute to the nourishment of the foetus: her imagination shaped the child’s appearance. The likeness of a
child to its father or other relations was believed to be the consequence of the mother’s thoughts … Maternal
longings were taken seriously, as any frustration of the mother’s wishes would affect the child’. See
Crawford, ‘From the Woman’s View’, p. 65.
270
Frederick M. Rossiter, The Practical Guide to Health, Melbourne: Signs Publishing, 1913, 3rd ed.,
p. 455.
271
Allen and McGregor, The Glory of Woman, p. 186.
93
oneself under medical care – both in person, and from knowledge gleaned from suitable
literature such as women’s handbooks - during pregnancy. The authors warned that
miscarriage could generally be prevented by paying heed to medical advice, and advised
that it was an expectant mother’s duty to ‘be enlightened [through medical advice], or loss
of life to her unborn babe, and broken health to herself, will, in all probability, be the
penalties of her ignorance’. 272
‘Failing’ as a woman
The discourse of maternal responsibility and the construction of the ‘good’ mother are
crucial to understanding the construction of miscarriage, stillbirth and neonatal death as
instances of ‘failed’ birth and ‘failed’ pregnancy. Psychoanalysis in the early twentieth
century understood miscarriage to be inherently linked to the maternal subconscious. 273
The authors of The Mother’s Handbook linked the equilibrium of the mind in producing a
healthy, happy baby, arguing that the expectant mother must remain full of happiness
always, for ‘happiness, which comes from inside … is the basis of all health … and it
means there is none of that nerve strain of fear and anxiety which acts as a poison to the
system… every mother should keep herself [happy] because a healthy, happy mother
makes a healthy, happy baby’. 274
The authors of The Glory of Woman argued that some women subconsciously fled from
272
Allen and McGregor, The Glory of Woman, p. 187.
Reiger notes that pregnancy was often spoken about in euphemistic terms, such as the ‘time of trouble’,
‘the difficulty’ because it was ‘strongly emphasised that the state of mind of the [pregnant] woman would
have a direct and certain effect on the child’. See Reiger, Disenchantment of the Home, p. 85. As Damousi
observes, in the early twentieth century ‘the question of “nervousness” and “worry” figured prominently’ in
women’s magazines and advertisements as “mental conditions to be resisted.”’ By the interwar years the
concern over ‘nerves’ was intensified particularly in relation to women’s relationship with their children. An
‘over-anxious’ mother, it was believed, would cause irreparable damage to her child. See J. Damousi, Freud
in the Antipodes: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in Australia, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005, pp. 100101.
274
Because men were believed to be rational, fathers were cast as important agents in the maintenance of
healthy nerves. The ‘various nervy reactions which may occur during pregnancy’ could, if left unchecked,
have disastrous consequences – unless they were they to be soothed by the attention and comfort of the
husband. ‘If … with the aid of good humour, a little common sense and a great deal of loving-kindness, he
will play the peacemaker, his wife’s nerves will receive the rest for which they are really crying out … by the
gentle taking over of morning tasks, so that the dressing operations can be undertaken very slowly; and the
bringing of a hot drink to the bedside … the mother experiences such a sense of being cared for that
subconscious fears are banished’. Husbands, however, were warned not to ‘indulge’ women’s neuroses: ‘the
young husband can prevent the wife, if she is at all neurotic, from indulging her whims unnecessarily, or
becoming, or making others, a martyr to her nerves’. See Mother’s Handbook, pp. 31-33.
273
94
motherhood, rejecting the foetus within:
There is a proneness for a young wife to miscarry, and woe betide her if she once
establish the habit, for it, unfortunately, becomes a habit. A miscarriage is a serious
calamity, and should be considered in that light; not only to the mother herself,
whose constitution frequent miscarriages might seriously injure and eventually ruin,
but it might rob the wife of one of her greatest earthly privileges, the inestimable
pleasure and delight of being a mother. 275
The ideas of American psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch, who claimed that a miscarriage
often occurred because women fled from motherhood and renounced the foetus within,
causing its death, 276 refined the notion that miscarriage and the subconscious were linked;
this was an influential attitude shared by some in the medical profession. 277 In a medical
textbook, for example, Abraham Stone argued that whilst all women ‘instinctively’ craved
motherhood, the subconscious rejection of this role could have disastrous consequences:
For conception to take place a woman must be a woman. Not only must she have
the physical structure and hormones of a woman but she must feel she is a woman
and accept it … Being a woman means acceptance of her primary role, that of
conceiving and bearing a child. Every woman has a basic urge and need to produce
a child. 278
Medical language itself cast the female body as inherently flawed and held the female body
as culpable in many instances of pregnancy loss. Where the male reproductive organs were
described as ‘robust’, the female body was couched in terms of its tendency towards
275
Allen and McGregor, The Glory of Woman, p. 186.
Deutsch constructed some cases of miscarriage as the ‘earl[y] renunciation of the child’; she argued that
this ‘mother conflict’ occurred when a woman’s ‘psychic motive’ wished the unborn child to die. Deutsch
argued that she had ‘observed several miscarriages provoked by the sharpening of such a mother conflict …
“I shall have no child, I have no right to have one, I shall lose it, I shall pay for it with my death.’’’ Deutsch
cited the case of ‘Mrs Smith’, whose subconscious fear of her inability to become a mother led to several
miscarriages, and Deutsch argued that ‘I have not been able to establish psychologic types of women more
predisposed to abortion than others. But I have gained the impression that, particularly in cases of recurrent
abortion, destructive tendencies directed against the self or against others are involved’. See H. Deutsch, The
Psychology of Women: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation, New York: Grune and Stratton, 1944, pp. 143-145;
189.
277
The ideas of psychoanalysis in general had gained popularity in Australia; Damousi, for example, argues
that Freudian notions had gained credence - even if Freud’s methods had not - in Australia. See Damousi,
Freud in the Antipodes, p. 100; Helene Deutsch’s ideas in particular were influential in the Australian context;
her work was included in a 1950s text used in Australia. See Deutsch, ‘Psychology of pregnancy, labour and
the puerperium’, in J. de Lee and J.P. Greenhill (eds.) Principles and Practice of Obstetrics, W.B Saunders
and Co., Philadelphia and London, 10th ed., 1951, ch. xxiii. For more on this see Reiger, Our Bodies, Our
Babies, p. 40.
278
Abraham Stone cited in Elaine Tyler May, ‘Nonmothers as Bad Mothers: Infertility and the “Maternal
Instinct”’, in Ladd-Taylor and Umansky, ‘Bad’ mothers, p. 198.
276
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incompetency. 279 The lecture notes of Mary de Garis, for example, illustrate how maternal
causes were understood to be the primary factor behind recurrent miscarriages. Not only
were ‘diseases of the mother’ considered to be a primary factor behind many deaths but the
uterus was particularly vulnerable, prone to imbalances which could be caused by ‘nervous
influences’. 280 In analysing the language of reproduction in early twentieth century medical
textbooks, Martin argues that women’s reproductive processes were overwhelmingly
constructed as degenerative and prone to deficiencies:
Ovaries ‘shed’ eggs but testicles ‘produce’ sperm, unfertilized eggs ‘degenerate’
and are ‘wasted’, and ‘menstruation is the uterus crying for lack of a baby’. In
contrast, although millions of sperm that do not fertilize eggs die within a few
hours, the textbooks never called them ‘wasted’, ‘failed’, or ‘degenerating’; rather
they described the male reproductive physiology as a ‘remarkable cellular
transformation … [the] amazing characteristic of spermatogenesis is its sheer
magnitude. 281
Reinforcing the apportioning of culpability was the lack of recognition for those women
whose babies were stillborn. Mothers of stillborn babies were not regarded as mothers,
since their babies themselves were disregarded as ‘failed’ human lives. For example, the
1912 Maternity Allowance, although ostensibly designed to assist women in the
discomforts of pregnancy, made the distinction between ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’
motherhood, ‘successful’ and ‘failed’ motherhood. Not only were indigenous mothers and
Asiatic and Pacific Islander mothers excluded from this bonus, the Allowance was not
extended to include those women whose children were born dead.
Remaining childless was seen as the sign of the ultimate social failing for a woman, and the
language of many medical writers in the early twentieth century employs this rhetoric. Live
born children were termed ‘successful issue’ whereas miscarried or stillborn babies were
referred to as ‘foetal wastage’ and ‘pregnancy failure’. 282 The language of medical
textbooks explicitly affirmed the notion that a woman could only be properly regarded as a
mother until she had produced a living child. A medical textbook authored by Lance
Townsend, professor in obstetrics at the University of Melbourne, defined the medical
terms for ‘gravity’ – the number of ‘successful issue’. Amongst the list provided by
279
May, ‘Nonmothers as Bad Mothers’, pp. 200-201.
de Garis, ‘Lecture notes’, Lecture XXXI 1 July 1903.
281
Emily Martin in May, ‘Nonmothers as Bad Mothers’, p. 201.
282
See for example Lance Townsend, Obstetrics and Gynaecology for Medical Students in the University of
Melbourne, Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1959, p. 576.
280
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Townsend, there is no definition for a pregnant woman who has not yet been delivered of a
‘viable’ child, that is, a pregnancy that had proceeded past twenty eight weeks gestation. 283
Notions of viability and the ‘failed’ foetus
The yearly clinical and medical reports of Victoria’s principal maternity hospital, RWH
Melbourne, are a useful source for detailed analysis of the medical discourse of failure in
the middle of the twentieth century. These reports, most often published yearly although in
the case of several reports, every eighteen months, contain detailed information as to the
number of booked patients at RWH, the number of live births, the perinatal and maternal
mortality rates, as well as information from the gynaecological wards. Most of the reports
contain brief information, with often only the increasingly uncommon maternal deaths
being recorded with any great detail.
The idea that certain women were not suitable to bear children persisted well into the
1950s, and the increasing supervision over women’s pregnant bodies meant that these
women whose childbearing may have previously escaped attention now fell under the gaze
of medical authority, with the result of such surveillance ranging from a forced
relinquishing of the child at birth to the termination of pregnancies considered to be too
‘undesirable’ to continue. For example, within the context of the discourse of ‘mental
hygiene’ in 1956 three women were delivered of live babies at the RWH Melbourne, which
were then removed from their custody, presumably to be adopted, whilst the mothers were
either
transferred to asylums or returned back to the asylum. 284 Other women’s
pregnancies were considered to be ‘unviable’ by the medical profession, within the
283
Townsend, Obstetrics and Gynaecology for Medical Students in the University of Melbourne, p. 57. In a
society that appeared silent towards pregnancy loss, it is interesting to conjecture how many women were
labelled and stigmatised as ‘barren’ and childless, but who had, in reality, suffered the loss of a baby through
miscarriages or stillbirths that were subsequently not recognised.
284
RWH Clinical Report 1956, p. 10. Contained in Box 602, A1999/02/1974, RWH Archives.
97
apparent greater focus on psychological illness and childbearing in the postwar years, and
these pregnancies were terminated at various stages of pregnancy. 285
The 1947 Clinical Report, for example, gives brief details about the five terminations done
at the hospital on women under twenty eight weeks pregnant. Two of the cases were
described as being due to ‘maternal immaturity’ whilst the remaining three cases were,
variously, psychopathic personality; anxiety and neurosis; and psychosis. The former case
was terminated of her pregnancy, as well as sterilised to prevent the possibility of any
future ‘undesirable’ pregnancies occurring. 286 In 1955, also, thirty one women were
terminated of their pregnancies before they reached twenty eight weeks gestation; five were
due to an unspecified ‘psychiatric problem’ and all these women were sterilised to prevent
further pregnancies, whilst one woman’s pregnancy was terminated because she had a
‘difficult obstetrical history’, having previously given birth to several babies with ‘foetal
abnormalities’ and babies who died in the neonatal period. 287 Ten years later, such
terminations of pregnancy were still being done – in 1965 five pregnancies were terminated
in women who were variously classed as ‘schizophrenic’ or ‘psychotic’, with three of the
former group of four also being sterilised. 288 These women were not categorised as
mothers, because their pregnancies were classed merely as ‘products of conception’. 289
From the brevity of the Clinical Reports, it is not known whether these women consented to
or requested the terminations of their respective pregnancies, but the 1940 lecture notes of
Professor R. Marshall Allan at the University of Melbourne indicate that this was unlikely;
rather, evidence suggests that the doctor in charge of the woman’s pregnancy made such a
decision. Although Allan was cautious in declaring that all women displaying signs of
285
For example in 1955 and 1956 thirty one pregnancies under twenty eight weeks gestation – the cut off for
‘viability’ at this time – were terminated. Five patients were terminated of their pregnancies due to maternal
‘psychiatric problems’, and all of these women were sterilised. One woman was terminated of her pregnancy
and sterilised because of her ‘bad obstetrical history’ of ‘recurrent foetal abnormalities’, and one patient was
terminated of her pregnancy because of ‘heredity deafness in all [living] children’. See RWH Clinical Report
1955-1956, pp. 25 & 81. In 1957, the pregnancies of five patients were terminated past 28 weeks – the
gestational cut-off for ‘viability’ at this time - for ‘psychotic disorders’, and two of these patients were
sterilised to prevent further pregnancies. One patient’s pregnancy was terminated before the foetus reached
the viable gestation of twenty eight weeks, due to the woman’s ‘insanity’; she was also sterilised. See RWH
Clinical Report 1957, p. 23 & 36.
286
RWH Clinical Report 1947, p. 57.
287
RWH Clinical Report 1955, p. 81.
288
RWH Clinical Report 1965, p. 30.
289
RWH Clinical Report 1955, p. 14.
98
‘insanity’ or ‘psychosis’ – which included ‘anxiety’ - should be terminated of their
pregnancies, he did note that regarding the offspring of such women, ‘the broad view is that
such children be better off unborn’. 290 While Allan asserted that ‘true insanity’ in
pregnancy was a rare occurrence, he did believe that pregnancy itself was a period of
‘mental instability’, arguing that this, in itself, provided a compelling reason for medical
supervision during the antenatal period with a particular focus on the mental state of the
mother. 291
Allan’s lecture notes also reveal that women suffering from other diseases were regarded as
unfit to continue their pregnancy. Although he noted that ‘termination of pregnancy at any
period is a serious surgical procedure and therefore not without risk’, Allan advocated for
the decision to terminate in cases of serious illness to rest solely with the medical team:
‘The decision to terminate the pregnancy should be based on the unfettered opinion of
obstetrician and physician given after a full review of all the circumstances of the case’. At
no point did Allan raise a consideration of the wishes of the mother-to-be, nor do her
wishes come into play in his further argument for the sterilisation of women with an
‘undesirable’ ‘permanent disability’ that would hinder their ‘success’ in producing healthy
children. 292
Indeed within medical discourse the inscribing of the classifications of ‘successful’ or
‘failed’, ‘viable’ or unviable’ on the foetal body can be seen in the use of the terminology in
medical texts, evident increasingly from the turn of the century as the medicalisation of
childbirth confined obstetrics to the authority of the medical profession. For example,
whilst the 1904 lecture notes of Mary de Garis record the use of the term ‘habit of abortion’
in the 1940s Clinical Reports this had become interchangeable with the phrase ‘habitual
aborter’, a subtle shift in terminology implying that the responsibility for the action of
miscarrying lay within an inherent ‘deficiency’ of the mother, rather than an action of
nature itself. Women’s bodies, which had long been seen as inherently ‘defective’ or
‘inferior’ to the masculine body, were bestowed with a scientific-based inferiority: with the
290
Allan, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, p. 111.
Allan, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, p. 111.
292
Allan, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, p. 117.
291
99
medicalisation of childbirth, the reproductive system was subject to such accusatory terms
as ‘incompetent cervix’ and ‘ineffective uterine contractions’. 293
A variety of sources, including the RWH Clinical Reports, the case notes of the NSW Bush
Nursing Association, and various medical textbooks and lecture notes also demonstrate that
the foetal body was also subject to a wide variety of inscriptions, some of which indicate
the belief that some foetuses had ‘failed’ at being born healthy, whilst other meanings give
rise to the notion that some foetuses were ‘meant’ to die, having transgressed or fallen short
of the bounds of humanity. Certainly there abounded the idea that some babies were not
strong enough to develop in the womb; for example, in his explanation of the phenomenon
known as ‘super-foetation’ – a normal delivery of a healthy child, followed by a small,
dead one – Australian physician F. Milford argued that ‘the explanation of this is that there
were originally twins, and under the law of ‘survival of the fittest’, the healthier has lived,
while the other has died’. 294
For most of the early twentieth century until relatively recently, certain babies were
regarded as possessing little humanity, or a ‘failed’ kind of humanity which rendered them
worthless. Babies with a ‘deformity’ such as anencephaly or hydrocephaly were often
termed ‘monsters’ and in the medical literature, at least, were afforded little humanity. For
example, the lecture notes of Mary de Garis at the turn of the century record the telling
statement that ‘[i]f there is enough enlargement of the head to completely obstruct labour
the child’s life is of no value’. 295 Milford, writing in a text intended for assistants to
doctors, gave a detailed analysis of a so-called ‘monstrous birth’ that he had attended in
1861. As part of his recounting of this incident he notes that ‘the monster respired twice,
but did not cry, and then ceased to breathe’. 296 In later years, the Clinical Reports of RWH,
along with medical texts from the 1940s up to the 1980s, continued to refer to foetuses
affected by the congenital disorder of anencephaly as ‘monsters’, 297 and before caesarean
293
See for example RWH Clinical Report 1957, p. 2; RWH Clinical Report 1954, p. 97. The latter report
recorded the case histories of three patients who had had previous caesarean sections but whose subsequent
deliveries were vaginal, the women having ‘failed to deliver themselves’ of a live baby. See p. ix.
294
F. Milford, Australian Midwife’s and Nurse’s Handbook, Melbourne: E.W. Cole, 1916, p. 203.
295
de Garis, ‘Lecture notes’, Lecture XXI 22 April 1903.
296
Milford, Australian Midwife’s and Nurse’s Handbook, p. 191.
297
The Clinical Report for 1954, for example, made particular mention of a case involving twins who were
both stillborn. The first twin was described as a ‘headless monster’ and its sex unrecorded. The second twin,
presumably not a ‘monster’, was recorded as a ‘macerated female’. See RWH Clinical Report 1954, p. 62.
100
section techniques were refined, such foetuses were not infrequently delivered by way of
destructive operation such as embryotomy or craniotomy, some operations occurring whilst
the foetus was still alive. 298
At the turn of the century, in particular, caesarean section posed enormous risk to the
mother’s life so craniotomy or embryotomy were preferred even if the child was still alive,
not surprisingly given the low regard in which ‘monsters’ were held. As maternal morbidity
in caesarean sections declined, destructive operations were still used so that that the woman
concerned would be able to potentially have a caesarean section in the future for
‘successful’ pregnancies. 299 In 1944, for example, nine destructive operations were
performed, with the Clinical Report noting that although all babies were, obviously, born
dead, not all had been deceased when the operation took place. 300 This significant statement
highlights how, within medical discourse, such babies were not regarded as valuable or
worthy of humane treatment even whilst in utero; the repeated referring to such foetuses as
‘monsters’ can perhaps also be seen as a deliberate measure to reduce the humanity of the
foetus involved, exonerating the hospital for performing a destructive operation on a living
foetus. 301
Of course, not all medical professionals were satisfied with destructive operations on live
children; Milford, for example, in a handbook for nurses and midwives, advocated that it
was best to take such measures only if the child was dead, arguing that the instruments used
were ‘barbarous’ if used upon a living child. Nonetheless, he did concede that the
hydrocephalic or anencephalic child’s life had little value and therefore, if the mother’s life
298
For example the Clinical Report of 1963 noted that ‘in face presentation five of the seven stillbirths were
unavoidable. In four there was an anencephalic monster and the other was dead before labour began. Prolapse
of the cord caused one stillbirth and there was one neonatal death in an anencephalic. Thus the high [perinatal
mortality] was nearly unavoidable’. See RWH Clinical Report 1963, p. 10.
299
Destructive operations on ‘monsters’ were preferred to caesarean section because, as Lance Townsend
argued, the latter operation should be reserved for ‘successful’ pregnancies. He argued that ‘unless the patient
objects, sterilisation is often performed after three caesarean sections, the reason being that the lower segment
is fairly weak after three incisions … This is a factor to be remembered when the first caesarean section is
being contemplated; namely, that it will limit the family to three’. Contraindications for caesarean section
included ‘known foetal death, monster is present, eclampsia’. See Lance Townsend, Obstetrics for Students,
Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1969, pp. 566 & 576.
300
RWH Clinical Report 1944, p. 31.
301
The Clinical Report for 1965 noted that ‘three hydrocephalic monsters had their heads perforated’. See
RWH Clinical Report 1965, p. 26.
101
was in danger, it would be necessary to ‘destroy’ the living child to assist in its delivery. 302
Craniotomy and embryotomy were also denounced roundly by Roman Catholic physicians
and priests at the Second Australasian Catholic Congress, held in Melbourne in 1903. 303
The speakers at the Congress regarded the practice as sufficiently widespread that almost
half the speakers focused their attention towards what was understood to be the unjustified
destruction of the unborn child. Whilst obstetrics students at the University of Melbourne
had been taught that their first priority lay in ensuring the health of the mother, speakers at
the Congress expounded the belief that the foetus had as much claim to the obstetrician’s
attention as did the mother. Although some considered the foetus to be a creature that had
not yet attained full status of human, sanctioned Roman Catholic doctrine as preached in
Australian churches dictated the sanctity of human life at conception; therefore, procedures
such as craniotomy devalued the worth of the unborn child by privileging the life of the
mother.
For example, Dr Michael O’Sullivan proclaimed that ‘all true Catholics accept the right of
the unborn child to live, both on the authority of Divine revelation and Church
pronouncement’. 304 Furthermore, according to O’Sullivan, obstetric situations that
demanded a choice between the life of mother or child were not morally ambiguous: that is,
the Bible clearly taught that ‘Thou shalt not kill’ and that this command included the foetus.
He remarked that ‘the life of the foetus in utero is as valuable in the eyes of the creator as
the child just born … [and] that we cannot do evil that good may follow – Non sunt
facienda mala ut eveniant bona’. 305
Nonetheless, the medical profession was a more authoritative voice than the Catholic
Church in determining which life held value and medical knowledge largely superseded
other forms of knowledge in the hospital setting. In medical literature, the foetus was
classified into ‘nonviable’ and ‘viable’, an inscription which gives insight into the ways in
which such foetuses were treated in the clinical setting, which shall be discussed further in
later chapters. ‘Non-viable’ foetuses were not regarded within medical discourse as having
302
Milford, Australian Midwife’s and Nurse’s Handbook, pp. 113 & 115.
Proceedings of the Second Australasian Catholic Congress Held in the Cathedral Hall, Melbourne
October 24 to 31, 1904, Melbourne: The Advocate Office, 1905.
304
Dr M.U. O’Sullivan, ‘Part II: The Catholic Physician in regard to craniotomy’, in Proceedings of the
Second Australasian Catholic Congress, p. 13.
305
O’Sullivan, ‘Part II: The Catholic Physician’, p. 13.
303
102
fulfilled the criteria to attain full humanity. Significantly, it appears that at times, the
classification of ‘non-viability’ was less about the gestation reached than the weight of the
individual foetus. For example, in the Clinical Report of 1955-56, the report’s introduction
notes that ‘deliveries of previable infants (less than two pounds twelve ounces) have not
been included in the totals,’ even though the report later briefly mentioned that several of
these so-called ‘previable’ infants had actually survived. 306
Pippa, who was a nurse in the 1950s and who also suffered the miscarriage of her first
pregnancy at the same hospital in which she worked, remembers that the definition of
‘viability’ was an important demarcation in terms of how women were treated as patients.
After her own miscarriage, Pippa was asked if she would like to see the remains, but she
refused because ‘it would have been a shock’ – even though, as a nurse she had seen foetal
remains and was firmly of the opinion that because her pregnancy had not been in the
advanced stages, the foetus itself was not viable. 307 However, despite her reticence in
seeing the foetal remains, it was precisely because Pippa was a nurse at that hospital that
she was given this opportunity, unlike many other women for whom the decision to
withhold the baby was made for them. Recalling her work in the gynaecology and
obstetrics wards at a major Perth hospital, Pippa observed that women often asked if they
could view their baby’s body and even have them baptised, but these requests were, as a
rule, refused:
I can remember when I worked in the ward myself, and the people would ask to
have the children baptised, and we would say, well, they’re not viable … In those
days … under a certain time – they just disposed of them in the hospital. But that
didn’t worry me, really, because we were taught that under a certain time they
weren’t viable. 308
Furthermore, as Pippa’s experience illustrates, with the medicalisation of childbirth most
women delivered their babies in hospitals after World War II; a significant cultural shift
which afforded doctors a greater degree of surveillance over their patients during childbirth.
Although criminal abortion had been deplored since the turn of the century, as
demonstrated in the concerns of the RCDB, women delivering miscarried or stillborn
306
RWH Clinical Report 1955-1956, p. ix.
Pippa, interview with researcher, 3 May 2005. Tapes and transcript in possession of researcher.
308
Pippa, interview with researcher.
307
103
babies within the hospital were sometimes subjected to suspicion by the staff. 309 Pippa
remembers caring for many women who had suffered either spontaneous miscarriage and
induced abortion; both cases were treated in the same ward and if a woman was unfortunate
enough to exhibit signs of infection, she was often suspected of having ‘introduced an
instrument’ to procure a criminal abortion, although this was not necessarily the case. 310
The lecture notes used by medical students at the University of Melbourne also advises
practitioners to err on the side of caution when a woman presents with a ‘septic abortion’,
noting that a miscarriage may have occurred for a variety of reasons, including the ‘passage
of an instrument’ or ‘excessive sexual intercourse’; the notes warned students that ‘it must
always be borne in mind’ that criminal abortion may be the underlying factor. 311
Conclusion
The medicalisation of childbirth had positioned medical knowledge as a powerful way of
describing the female body and, as pregnancy was pathologised the perceived necessity for
medical supervision became considered a routine part of an Australian woman’s pregnancy.
Supervision of the pregnant body was a significant factor in the construction of the duality
of ‘successful’ or ‘failed’ pregnancy. Medical terminology and notions of ‘imperfection’
and ‘abnormality’ shaped the understanding that a miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal death
was an instance of ‘failed’ pregnancy. Reinforcing the authority of the medical profession
in the management of perinatal death was the shift away from birth and death at home;
most Australians became separated from the processes of death and dying, and the deceased
body became viewed with disquiet and uneasiness. In Chapter Three I consider the impact
of the culture of ‘death avoidance’ on understandings of perinatal loss, wrought by the
medicalisation of death and reinforced by social change which eschewed the public
expression of grief, replacing in its stead an expectation of stoicism and ‘spartan control’.
309
May, whose first pregnancy ended in miscarriage in 1959, recalled that she was asked by a doctor in the
hospital what she had ‘done’ to end the pregnancy – ‘Had I stuck a knitting needle in myself?’ She said that
she ‘demanded an apology, but the doctors just sneered at me’. May was then placed on what was commonly
referred to as ‘the dirty side’ of the ward, along with other women who were suspected of inducing
miscarriage. May, conversation with researcher, 25 April 2005.
310
Pippa, interview with researcher.
311
de Garis, Lecture Notes, Lecture XXXI 1 July 1903.
104
CHAPTER THREE
‘It was as if she had never existed’: the invisibility of perinatal loss, 1940-1970
Sitting in her lounge room in an inner city suburb of Perth, Margaret recounted to me her
memories of the stillbirth of her first child over fifty years ago; throughout the interview
she repeated her understanding that the stillbirth of her first child was ‘for the best’. That is,
nearly sixty years later, Margaret articulated her experience of losing a baby in the
language of stoicism and controlled grief which characterised the dominant attitudes
towards death and grief for much of the twentieth century, and was critical of more recent
ideas of grieving as healing and appropriate: ‘I think people think they’ve got to be helped.
Instead of being made to say, well get over it’. 312 Margaret finished the interview with the
decisive statement that ‘I’m glad I never saw the baby, because I don’t feel it’s as if I had a
baby, and I don’t like the way women nurse their babies now, and take photographs of them
and people say, you must mourn that baby. I don’t. I feel as if you’ve got to get over it, and
get on with life’. 313
Margaret’s baby, a boy, was stillborn after a protracted and agonising labour, and during
the interview she recalled her deep sadness at not seeing her child after he was delivered,
and the frustration she felt at the time in not being able to participate in the organisation of
her son’s burial. Margaret remembered that she was told whilst in hospital that the best
antidote to her grief was to have another baby: ‘It was a terrible trauma … my sisters came,
my dear husband cried, but the nurse, the sister at St Anne’s said to me afterwards … ‘now
now dear, you’ve got a little baby in heaven, you’ve got a little angel in heaven. Go home
and put all the things away and start having another baby’. That was all, there was no
sympathy, no nothing [sic]’. 314
Margaret’s experience of losing a baby gives insight into the ways which women were
expected to grieve the loss of a baby in the era of medical dominance over pregnancy and
childbirth. These ways were largely dependent upon the prevailing cultural constructions as
312
Margaret, interview with researcher, 31 March 2005. Tapes and transcript in possession of researcher.
Margaret, interview with researcher.
314
Margaret, interview with researcher.
313
105
to what constituted ‘appropriate’ responses to the death of a loved one; a prescription of
bereavement which had been transformed after the great losses of the two world wars into
an expectation of suppressed sorrow. The silence and stoicism expected of bereaved
mothers in the postwar years was framed within the context of what the French philosopher
Philippe Ariès has termed ‘the great twentieth century refusal of death’. 315
In this chapter I continue to explore the interaction between the experience of perinatal
death and the medical construction of pregnancy loss as ‘pregnancy failure,’ an incongruity
in an environment which measured reproductive ‘achievement’ based on live births. Within
medical discourse and the cultural expectation of suppressed sorrow, it was widely
presumed that women needed to be shielded from the bodies of their deceased babies in
order to prevent emotional disturbance and to increase the likelihood of women continuing
on to have other children. Furthermore, the prevailing view that pregnancy loss was but the
‘nonfulfilment of a ‘wish fantasy’, led to the belief that a subsequent pregnancy would
resolve any grief. The impact of this expectation can also be seen in the experience of most
women who were denied any information as to why their baby had died, and who rarely
were told where the body had been buried. In this chapter, then, I again return to the theme
of medical authority and explore how women’s bodies were interpreted by medical
knowledge, which led to the women’s loss of agency as actors in the drama of childbirth,
and the silence which ensued in the hospital setting after the death of a baby.
‘The great refusal of death’: transforming attitudes towards grief and mourning
The late nineteenth century would see a transformation in attitudes towards death in general
in Australia. The turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the widespread cultural
distancing from matters of death and dying in many Western societies; this rejection of the
Christian ideal of the ‘good death’ was originally motivated by the steady increase in
secularism. That is, even before the socially destabilising impact of the two World Wars,
315
Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Towards Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. P. Ranum,
London: M Boyars, 1976, pp. 81-82.
106
most of the Western world was already moving away from the dominant Christian ideas of
death and the afterlife. 316
The emerging ideas of modernity wrought a more widespread rejection of the Christian
notion of a ‘good death’; as Jalland argues, ‘scientific’ ideas of the body rendered the
Christian ideal of the immortality of the soul as a seemingly implausible concept. Rather,
the physical suffering wrought by death became the focus and the ‘good death’ therefore
became more difficult to obtain, leading to an intolerance of death and its reminders. 317
Ariès observes that this led in the early twentieth century to the notion of ‘the interdiction
of death in order to preserve happiness [of those surviving]’. 318 British anthropologist
Geoffrey Gorer observes that there were several components to the culture of death
avoidance; a central element being ‘the generous wish not to make others unhappy in one’s
misery … Frequently coupled with this is what might be described as psychological
hypochondria, a belief that giving way to grief and mourning is ‘morbid’ and
‘unhealthy’. 319
In Australia the unprecedented and wholly unexpected trauma of the Great War served to
precipitate the ‘swifter march in the direction of denial [of death]’. 320 Jalland argues that
the overwhelming death toll of the Great War led to a widespread belief that the
individual’s grief must be ‘restrained’ as a sign of respect and recognition of the enormity
of the nation’s loss of young men’s lives.321 The impact of two world wars in little less than
thirty years was the formation of, to borrow Ken Inglis’ term, an expectation that
Australians would exhibit ‘spartan control’ in matters of death and bereavement; several
writers also argue that the sights and sounds imprinted on the returned servicemen’s
memories were so horrific that they defied description – ghastly experiences that were
316
British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer suggested in 1965 that ‘all versions of Christianity contain dogmatic
statements about the reality of a life after death and its nature, because, traditionally, religion is held to offer
consolations for the grief of bereavement’. See G. Gorer, Death, Grief and Mourning in Contemporary
Britain, London: The Cresset Press, 1965, p. 30.
317
P. Jalland, ‘A private and secular grief: Katharine Susannah Pritchard confronts death and bereavement’,
History Australia, vol. 2, no. 2, 2005. http://publications.epress.monash.edu/doi/full/10.2104/ha050042.
Accessed 10 August 2006.
318
Ariès, Western Attitudes Towards Death, p. 94.
319
Gorer, Death, Grief and Mourning, p. 69.
320
Jalland, Changing Ways of Death, p. 19.
321
Jalland, Changing Ways of Death, pp. 55-56.
107
untranslatable into language that could be understood by civilians. 322 Therefore by the
1950s the effect of the two world wars had, in Damousi’s words, ‘transformed the ways in
which white Australians mourned their dead. Because such huge numbers of men perished
in war, there were no longer the elaborate public processions for the dead. The impact on
communities like Australia was to make mourning a simpler practice and a more private
matter’. 323
Intensifying the expectation of ‘spartan control’ after bereavement was the medicalisation
of death. Early in the twentieth century hospitals increasingly became, as Ariès argues, ‘the
designated spot for dying’. 324 This shift reinforced the medical profession’s authority over
the management of death; as the hospital became the site for dying, individuals lost the
right to control the rituals of the death. 325 Whilst death at home was the norm in the late
nineteenth century with perhaps only one out of ten deaths – usually of paupers – occurring
in a hospital, this number had risen to four out of ten by the interwar years; as Inglis argues,
this had the effect of most Australians being ‘less comfortable than their parents had been
at the prospect of having a dead body in the house: the less people saw of death, the more
uneasy it made them’. 326
‘You must not give way’: death avoidance and perinatal loss
As the shift from home to hospital as the site of death became more entrenched, this
expectation of controlled sorrow grew to encompass any death, not just those brought about
by war. The ways in which many Australians responded to the staggering losses of World
War One and later, World War Two, would have a great impact on the way that other
322
Despite many Australians’ loss of the relative naïveté enjoyed before the First World War, the Second
World War served to confirm the necessity of this restrained grief, especially as the horrors of Auschwitz and
Hiroshima emerged – what Adrian Gregory has described as ‘a silence in which nothing meaningful could be
said’. See Damousi, Living with the Aftermath, pp. 99-100.
323
Damousi, The Labour of Loss, p. 163.
324
Ariès, Western Attitudes Towards Death, pp. 87-88.
325
Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, pp. 326-327.
326
Inglis, ‘Passing Away’, p. 235. For example, because her family knew the matron at the small private
hospital where she delivered her son, Mrs Mead was offered the chance to view her baby’s body after he was
stillborn at the end of the Second World War, but she declined, saying later that she felt uncomfortable with
the idea of viewing a deceased body, particularly the body of her own child. She recalls that she was ‘asked
by the Sister if I wanted to see him and I said, no, no I don’t think so! I had this awful … it was because he
was dead. I didn’t want to be anywhere near him. It was the biggest mistake I’ve made in my life’. Mrs Mead,
interview with researcher, 29 August 2005. Tapes and transcript in possession of researcher.
108
deaths were mourned – at least in public – with the construction of culturally appropriate
responses to loss and a restriction of avenues available to those who would previously have
been expected and permitted to openly mourn their dead. 327 This ‘cultural prescription of
grieving’ - which, according to Jalland, began after the First World War as a kind of
‘suppressed, privatised sorrow’, and which evolved after World War Two into the
‘rejection of expressive sorrow’ 328 - would impact those who suffered the death of a loved
one in the thirty or so years after the end of the Second World War. 329 In Australia, the
widespread rejection of Christian ideas of death and eternity, reinforced by the massive
losses of the Great War, and later, the Second World War, led to a silencing of death and
dying: as Gorer notes, ‘death had superseded sex as a taboo subject’. 330
In her oral history of midwives who had worked in hospitals in the immediate postwar era,
Penny Curtis argues that both the cultural expectation of suppressed sorrow and the medical
discourse of supervision and control over the pregnant body led to the prevailing view that
women should be shielded from the experience of perinatal loss. As Curtis observes:
Midwives whose practice predates such contemporary norms [of collecting
mementoes], indicate that they were influenced by, and helped to maintain, what
can be characterised as a myth of ‘healing-distance’, both during and after the birth.
Professionals assumed that women needed to be protected from the experience of
giving birth to a stillborn baby, and in their practice they sought to construct both
emotional and spatial distance between mother and child.331
The experiences of women who lost babies during the Second World War and in the twenty
or so years afterwards give credence to Curtis’ observation that the prevailing belief held
that women needed to be ‘shielded’ from the experience of delivering a stillborn or
327
Australian psychologist Beverley Raphael argues that the language of bereavement in postwar Australia
was characterised by an expectation that to exhibit emotion was to be considered ‘weak’; one must remain in
control of their emotions following bereavement, an expectation that, unlike the nineteenth century responses
to grief, came to encompass women as well as men. See Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, p. 30. As Luckins
has demonstrated in her study of post-Great War grief, to flout this cultural directive was to risk
stigmatisation and, in some cases, institutionalisation, indicating how strictly Australians, and in particular,
women, were governed by this cultural prescription of mourning. See Luckins, The Gates of Memory, p. 111.
David Walker notes that the ‘fear of sick nerves’ was strong in Australia in the 1930s and beyond. In 1888 the
rural labourer was most likely to be admitted to an asylum; by 1938 the ‘troubled suburban housewife’ had
displaced him. See D. Walker, ‘Mind and Body’, in Spearritt and Gammage, Australians 1938, p. 223.
328
Jalland, Changing Ways of Death, p. 171.
329
It is also apparent that whilst some individuals still continued to respond to grief in different ways, by the
1940s the language of repressed grief had spread to the middle and ‘respectable’ working classes. See Jalland,
Changing Ways of Death, p. 35.
330
Gorer, Death, Grief and Mourning, p. 23.
331
Penny Curtis, ‘Midwives’ Attendances at Stillbirths: an oral history account’, Midwifery Digest, December
2000, p. 528.
109
seriously ill baby. Overwhelmingly the older women interviewed for this project recalled
that they were often sedated after the death of their baby; their babies were either ‘whisked
away’ after delivery without the mother catching a glimpse of the body, and they were
usually excluded from any burial arrangements and rarely were given any detailed
information as to why their baby had died. In describing the attitude of the nurses at the
hospital where she delivered her first child, Barbara commented that after her daughter was
stillborn at term, ‘it was as though she never existed, really, to me. Because I had
nothing’. 332
In her history of the RWH in Melbourne, McCalman argues that the practice of shielding
women from the experience of perinatal loss was borne out of a paternalistic sense of
concern; she suggests that whilst ‘there were also unacceptable lapses of empathy and
sensitivity, these were sins of omission more often than of commission by busy
professionals simply not aware that a patient was … grieving’. 333 As I discuss further in the
chapter, the memories of some of the interviewees support this claim to an extent; some
mothers found that they were treated gently and kindly, even if the circumstances
surrounding the event itself were not mentioned. Certainly it must be acknowledged that
doctors and nurses are themselves individuals with the means to internalise or resist certain
attitudes towards perinatal loss. However, the medicalisation of childbirth had, as I argue in
the previous chapter, positioned pregnancy and childbirth within the dualities of
‘successful’ versus ‘failed’ and accorded the obstetrician an important role in ensuring a
‘successful’ birth. Furthermore, the foetus was understood within medical discourse as
essentially unknowable and ultimately replaceable; therefore the motives behind the
avoidance of stillbirth and neonatal death invite a more nuanced analysis.
The practice of shielding women from their babies was not borne merely out of a desire to
‘protect’ women but was an intersection of several significant understandings of the impact
of perinatal loss and the inscriptions of the deceased foetal body, as well as the prevailing
construction of perinatal loss as ‘repugnant’ – as an incident which reflected badly on the
objectives of obstetrics. Douglas J. Peddicord argues that the silence after a perinatal loss
332
333
Barbara, interview with researcher, 10 June 2005. Tapes and transcript in researcher’s possession.
McCalman, Sex and Suffering, p. 313.
110
was to an extent an extension of the inscribed on the foetus in medical discourse:
In trying to ‘protect’ parents from the reality of their experiences caregivers at times
[made] stunningly incorrect assumptions. For instance, a nurse commented to an
unmarried, teenage mother that her loss, a stillbirth, must have been in some way a
relief … another assumption [was] that a stillbirth was somehow less real, less
painful than the loss of a liveborn infant. 334
The desire to ‘protect’ women from ‘emotional imbalance’ after a stillbirth or neonatal
death was also borne out of dominant medical constructions of women as fixed to nature
and prone to emotional instability - notions which were reinforced by and reproduced
within the cultural shifts towards repressed sorrow after death. In general terms, the
medical profession advocated a distant and aloof approach to obstetrics and
gynaecology. 335 For example, in the 1920s, those women who delivered their babies at
home but were attended to by visiting practitioners from the RWH in Melbourne were often
treated with little empathy - indeed, ‘empathy’ was scorned as being an emotional response
best left to the womenfolk. 336 As McCalman notes, ‘some patients were hysterical and
received careful reassurance by women medical students who were most likely to attend to
the feelings of the patient and her family than were men, who left that ‘women’s business’
to the nurse’. 337 After a perinatal loss, the understanding that stillbirth or neonatal death
would not lead to any long-term impact led to women’s grief being minimised within the
understanding that women would be able to bear other children which would ‘replace’ her
deceased baby. 338 Lorna Lloyd Green, a resident at RWH Carlton in the 1940s, recalled
feeling distressed by the brisk and detached response of male obstetricians who dismissed
the possibility of any
334
Douglas J. Petticord, ‘Perinatal Death’, in George Stricker and Martin Fisher (eds.) Self-disclosure in the
Therapeutic Relationship, Plenum, NY: Springer, 1990, p. 270.
335
As McCalman notes, particularly in the early years of the RWH in Melbourne the daily lives of the doctors
and their patients were often sharply at odds with each other. Although students at this time were taught by
their lecturer in obstetrics, Arthur Wilson, that all patients should receive the same care afforded to their wife,
mother, or sister, there were distinct class-based assumptions at work which impacted the way that medical
students treated their patients. In particular, as McCalman argues ‘the working woman was a tougher breed
than the lady: she felt less pain and she popped out babies like shelling peas from the pod. Alongside
“savages” she had not yet partaken of the moral benefits and reproductive deficits of modern civilisation’. See
McCalman, Sex and Suffering, p. 193.
336
McCalman, Sex and Suffering, p. 192.
337
McCalman, Sex and Suffering, p. 192.
338
The prevailing view that another pregnancy would replace a perinatal loss was largely at odds with how
many women viewed the death of a baby. Although she notes the decline in women recording details of their
intimate lives in the 1920s and 1930s, Holmes observes that for many women, a healthy baby was cause for
‘great rejoicing’. See Holmes, Spaces in her Day, p. 74.
111
emotional ramifications after a stillbirth or neonatal death:
What used to worry me no end … especially one obstetrician was: I would say –
‘it’s just terrible that she’s lost that baby, we should have been able to do something
about it’. And he’d reply, ‘She’ll have another’. And I would get mad – ‘How do
you know that she’ll have another? We have no idea that she will have another’.
Psychologically and physically there was everything against her. 339
Treating the physiological condition: aloofness and distance in general perspective
Reinforcing the distant approach to obstetrics and gynaecology were the sheer logistical
problems facing many maternity wards around Australia during the postwar ‘baby boom’;
whilst individual doctors and nurses may have sought to pay more attention to pregnant
mothers and bereaved mothers alike, the nature of working in a maternity hospital during
this period was likely to be a significant obstacle. Margaret, for example, recalls being left
to her ‘own devices’ whilst she waited in hospital for her labour to begin. The nurses were
busy preparing for the hospital fête, and, according to Margaret, ‘they just sort of didn’t
take much notice of me, and I can remember walking all the way down from the hospital
right down to the river, having a lovely walk down’. 340 Reiger also paints a vivid picture of
the busyness of the postwar maternity wards in Australia during this time. Labour wards
were crowded, noisy, and understaffed and these constraints meant ‘little time for
individual attention and the general authoritarianism of hospital routine was
unquestioned’. 341 It was, as one doctor, Percy Rogers, observed, akin to prison: ‘the sisters
in charge, I’m certain, had been recruited from the concentration camps’. 342 Midwife
Thelma Matson described the delivery suite at the RWH in Melbourne in equally grim
terms:
If I could just describe the actual delivery suite and the archaic and barbaric
conditions under which women, I believe, had their babies … It was a great big
Florence Nightingale ward. On one side there were four beds, and we had screens
round it. At least it wasn’t like Crown Street [Sydney]. As late as 1959 when I went
to Crown Street to have a look, you still had calico-type screens, and ones that you
lifted around … We would have anything up to – well I remember eighteen
deliveries on one shift. And that was really going. You could have anything up to
339
Lorna Lloyd Green quoted in McCalman, Sex and Suffering, p. 200.
Margaret, interview with researcher.
341
Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies, pp. 22-25.
342
Percy Rogers quoted in Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies, p. 20.
340
112
six, seven women in the prep. room. Oh well, they just sat wherever they could find
a seat. There was very little room. 343
As Reiger observes, the conditions under which many staff were working meant that
maintaining a humane approach was an enormous challenge, which concerned some staff
‘but on the whole most were too busy to think about patient needs’. 344 Particularly in the
busy maternity hospital, geared towards the production of live babies, bereaved women
could be treated dismissively by both doctors and nurses. For example, Barbara recalled
that the nursing staff caring for her after her stillbirth were generally kind but brisk:
Oh, they were kind, but nothing was mentioned, really. It was … more or less, you
know, it’s happened. Especially with, I know one of the old nuns, even when I lost
the first baby, she was pretty tough. And going back, I had to have an operation in
the very beginning, I had to have an operation so I could have children at all, so
when I lost the first one at sixteen weeks I was devastated, because I thought, oh,
maybe I won’t ever, seeing as I had had the problem. And I remember her coming
in to see me after I’d lost [the next] one and she said, ‘oh well! You’ve lost your
baby,’ and that was sort of it. 345
Certainly some women were treated with kindness and gentleness despite the hustle and
bustle of the postwar maternity ward; Iris, for example was granted an unusual request
because of, she believes, her friendship with the sister of one of the nurses. Although she
had not been permitted to view her daughter’s body, Iris requested that she be able to hold
someone else’s baby for a while ‘because everything in you just wants to do that’. The
request was met with some consternation, but it was eventually granted, to Iris’ pleasure.
Iris recalled that:
There was a bit of a turmoil amongst the staff, because I’d asked, and whose baby
would it be, that sort of thing. And anyway somehow they agreed, went to the
women and asked for a volunteer, I don’t know how it happened but the next thing
someone brought in – not the mother, a nurse, brought in a little baby, and I just had
a hold and a little cuddle and then handed it back, of course. But if felt, sort of,
expressed something from within me [but] of course it couldn’t go on and on. 346
Several women who experienced less than compassionate care in hospital also found other
doctors who had not been involved in the delivery to be more concerned about their
343
Thelma Matson quoted in Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies, pp. 20-21.
Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies, p. 25.
345
Barbara, interview with researcher.
346
Iris, interview with researcher, 12 October 2005. Tapes and transcript in possession of researcher.
344
113
wellbeing. Barbara, who felt that she was avoided while in hospital having been told
nothing as to why her baby had died, remembers the effort her family doctor took to relay
the news to Barbara’s family. She recalled that:
My [general practitioner] was wonderful. Because it was about nine o’ clock at
night when I had the baby, and she went all the way out to my mother’s house, and
had to climb up this very steep hill, clamber over a barricade that they’d put up to
stop my eldest little girl, who was two, from falling down the steps, and this middle
aged doctor climbed over to tell my husband and my mum and dad, that the baby
had died. 347
Iris was also greatly relieved to find a specialist who was keenly interested in her previous
stillbirth and who encouraged Iris to talk about her experience. After being treated
dismissively at her postnatal checkup eight weeks after her baby’s death – the doctor
brushed off Iris’ insistence that she was still ‘terribly sore’ – her husband suggested she see
another obstetrician:
So I made the appointment, it was with one of the ones that my friend had used, and
she’d talked well of him, so I made an appointment with him, and the day I arrived I
went into his office first, and said, ‘I’m not pregnant, I know that, but about eight or
nine weeks ago I had a stillborn’ - and do you know, he was the first person, other
than my husband, he sat in that big office chair and said, ‘a stillborn? Tell me all
about it’. And he just let me unfold it all, and he was interested too, that people had
these things. At any rate, he was lovely, and sent me off, and said, ‘you have
another baby when you want it’. 348
The practice of ‘protection’: rendering perinatal loss as invisible
However, amongst the women interviewed for this project these experiences appear to be
exceptional. In the late 1960s the British obstetrician, Stanford Bourne, argued that most
doctors had little recollection of their patients who had delivered stillborn babies and
tended to distance themselves from such cases. 349 Although the emotional consequences of
347
Barbara, interview with researcher.
Iris, interview with researcher.
349
Bourne conducted his study by sending out questionnaires to a random sample of 100 doctors who had
delivered live babies and 100 doctors who had delivered stillborn babies. He concluded that ‘the [stillbirth]
doctors know less, remember less, and appear to be able to think less about their patients than the [livebirth]
doctors … The [stillbirth] doctors return fewer questionnaires and two wrote especially [long letters] to refuse
to participate [on the grounds of limited time]. Of the questionnaires returned, fewer [stillbirth doctors]
contained any usable information … tend[ing] repeatedly to ‘not to know’, they confine themselves with
impoverished answers in comparison with the [livebirth] doctors who manage to provide more spontaneous
348
114
stillbirth and neonatal death were rarely, if ever, discussed in medical literature, it was
believed by some medical professionals that perinatal death was an event that had
customarily been repressed by the obstetrician because of its ‘extremely distasteful’ nature.
Emanuel Lewis argued that stillbirth was viewed by the medical profession as
‘extraordinarily chilling’ and ‘repulsive’: an anomaly in an environment which heralded a
live birth as a ‘success’ on the behalf of the medical practitioner. 350 Bourne also suggested
that much of the silence after a perinatal loss was borne out of medical professionals’ own
‘revulsion’ of the event particularly because, in an environment where livebirths were the
norm, ‘we have insufficiently prepared ourselves’. Reflecting on his long career as a doctor
Bourne concluded in the early 1980s, for many decades, obstetricians had reacted with
‘aversion’ to stillbirth because by nature it was a ‘stupefying non-event, defiling, one of
nature’s obscenities’. 351
As reminders of a ‘failed delivery’, women who miscarried or suffered perinatal loss were
often regarded as somewhat of an anomaly within the busy environment of the maternity
hospital, and inevitably, many women slipped through the system and were virtually
ignored or neglected in terms of their postnatal care. Whilst Mrs Mead felt she was not
treated badly in hospital, she remembers that the staff seemed somewhat puzzled as to their
role in caring for her. After she was given a tablet to stop her milk from ‘coming in’, she
was left alone except for intermittent observation; she recalled that ‘there was nothing
much to do for me. I don’t really remember there being anything untoward there, but they
didn’t talk about the baby. I think it was taboo to talk about it’. 352 So taboo was the topic of
stillbirth that Mrs Mead was actually brought a baby by a nurse, as she was preparing to
leave the hospital to return home. In the busyness of the hospital Mrs Mead’s situation was
not clearly communicated to all staff members, and so both she and a nurse were
unwittingly faced with an embarrassing and awkward scenario. She recalled that:
One of the awful things that happened the day that I was leaving hospital … one of
the nurses brought me a baby. She felt terrible, because I said, ‘ooh no, no, no, it’s
not mine’. She’d made a mistake, she’d brought the baby to the wrong room, but I
comment’. See Stanford Bourne, ‘The Psychological Effects of Stillbirth on the Doctor,’ Journal of the Royal
College of General Practitioners, vol. 16, 1968, pp. 103-112.
350
Emanuel Lewis, ‘The Management of Stillbirth: Coping with an unreality’, Lancet, September 18 1976,
pp. 619-620; Emanuel Lewis, ‘The Abhorrence of Stillbirth’, Lancet, June 4 1977, p. 1188.
351
S. Bourne, ‘The Psychological Management of Stillbirth’, The Practitioner, no. 227, Jan 1983, p. 54.
352
Mrs Mead, interview with researcher.
115
was packed up ready to go home. And I don’t know which one of us felt worse, the
nurse or me. 353
The common practice of placing of bereaved women back onto shared wards is also
indicative of the stoicism expected of women after perinatal loss. Rayma, for example, was
placed back on a general postnatal ward after her twin sons were stillborn: ‘afterwards they
put me into a ward with nursing mothers. That was hard’. 354 Iris remembered that upon her
admission to hospital she was initially accommodated in the labour ward in a four-bed
room with a woman who was waiting to deliver her deceased baby, whilst Iris – whose
baby was still alive at this point - herself waited for labour to begin: ‘I sort of said, ‘when’s
yours due?’ Because mine was still to come, but the others had had theirs – it was a fourbed, I think. And she just sat there and said, “I’ve got to wait till it comes. It’s dead
now.”’ 355
Removing women as active players in the drama of childbirth
The practice of ‘protecting’ women from their experience, which manifested itself in
distant and aloof care, was part of a wider removal of women’s existential agency in
childbirth which had taken root as medicine assumed authority over obstetrics and
gynaecology. The medicalisation of childbirth served to distance women from their bodies
– and their babies – during pregnancy and childbirth, in both bodily and psychological
terms. In the previous chapter I argue that the maternal body was reconstructed under the
banner of ‘science’ in the early twentieth century; significantly, the dominance of the
medical language of pregnancy and perinatal death largely rendered silent the ‘language of
the flesh’ from the vocabulary of ordinary Australian women. 356 Murray notes that
women’s knowledge of their bodies was ‘replaced by the authority of the medical
understandings of the body … Medical scientists claimed the right to speak about the
353
Mrs Mead, interview with researcher.
Rayma, interview with researcher, 3 October 2005. Tapes and transcript in possession of researcher.
355
Iris, interview with researcher.
356
In her study of Australian women’s diaries in the early twentieth century, Holmes notes both the decline in
women keeping personal diaries, and amongst those who did continue the practice, the silence imposed upon
women with regard to pregnancy and childbirth. Her analysis suggests that the medical discourse of maternity
largely rendered these topics off-limits to most Australian women, even in the intimacy of a personal diary.
See Holmes, Spaces in her Day, p. 71.
354
116
body’. 357 The physician F. Milford, for example, warned that a medical professional should
never accept a woman’s claim that she was pregnant, but rather should examine the patient
themselves, because, he argued ‘women often deceive themselves and fancy they are
pregnant when they are not’. 358 Women of childbearing age in the 1920s attest to the
authority of medical language in silencing women’s understandings of sex and pregnancy.
Kathleen Baxendale, for example, remembers that after her marriage her employer used to
leave books about sex and reproduction written by the famous author, Dr Marie Stopes,
‘lying around the office’ for her to read, and that this was her only means of gaining
knowledge in this area. Talking about sex and reproduction, ‘the facts of life’, was
considered to be ‘dirty talk … hush hush. Mothers [never] talked about those sorts of
things’. 359
By the postwar years, women were not made privy to either the changes occurring in their
pregnant bodies, nor to the processes of labour and birth. 360 This was further reinforced by
the growing shift away from birth at home to birth in hospital under the supervision of the
medical profession. An oral history participant observed that she had been ‘so naïve’ that
she had not even known how the baby would be actually born – and that finding out during
the actual labour was, to say the least, a great shock. 361 The medical discourse of pregnancy
and childbirth restricted maternal participation by limiting access to knowledge about their
bodies; Holmes argues that the silence towards matters of intimacy in women’s diaries in
the 1920s and 1930s is reflective of the power of the medical profession in removing the
language of sex from women. 362
The medicalisation of childbirth also served to remove women’s autonomy over pregnancy;
in describing the medical assumption of control over childbirth, Helen Woolcock et al note
that mothers were ‘often the least regarded players in the childbirth drama’.363 A significant
357
Murray, ‘Being Unwell’, pp. 137-138.
Milford, Australian Midwife’s and Nurse’s Handbook, p. 46.
359
It was not until she reflected on this that Baxendale realised that her employer had been done deliberately
so that she could become informed about reproduction and childbirth. Still, she felt that sex and reproduction
were not topics to be discussed, so she knew very little. Kathleen Baxendale, interviewed by Josie Castle in
the NSW BOHP, 31 August 1987, ORAL TRC 2301/22, NLA.
360
Reiger, Disenchantment of the Home, p. 85.
361
Ivy, interview with researcher, 6 May 2005. Tapes and transcript in possession of researcher.
362
Holmes, Spaces in her Day, p. 71.
363
Helen R. Woolcock, M. John Thearle and Kay Saunders, ‘My Beloved Chloroform: Attitudes to
Childbearing in Colonial Queensland: A Case Study’, Social History of Medicine, vol. 10, no. 3, 1997, p. 437.
358
117
demonstration of the medical profession’s authority over reproduction was the increasingly
routine use of analgesia during childbirth. Whilst the nineteenth century was host to the
idea that pain in childbirth was part of woman’s fate and nature’s plan, 364 in the early
twentieth century medical discourse constructed pain relief as a blessing - a way to remove
women from this suffering. 365 Although the use of anaesthesia had had a rocky beginning
in the mid nineteenth century, with many suspicious medical practitioners believing that it
‘meddled’ with the ‘natural’ course of childbirth and contradicted the Biblical notion of
pain in childbirth, it began to be increasingly accepted as techniques of administration
improved with an ensuing decline in problems with its use in childbirth. 366 As Woolcock et
al observe, the use of chloroform and other anaesthesia was another justification for the
banishing of midwives and other birth attendants: medical professionals proclaimed that it
was ‘too powerful an agent to be entrusted to nurses or other unprofessional individuals’.367
Therefore sedation, whilst explicitly serving to provide very practical relief for women, also
implicitly reinforced the authority of the practitioner in matters of pregnancy and childbirth,
and ultimately, removed women as active performers in the corporeality of childbirth.
In particular, the use of the so-called sedative ‘twilight sleep’, a mixture of scopolamine
and morphine administered to dull the pain of childbirth and to produce a form of amnesia,
was viewed as beneficial for use in the labour of those women who were considered of
‘nervous temperament’. Within medical and psychiatric discourse, the management of
nerves was considered to play a significant role in reducing any problems in pregnancy and
childbirth. Milford, for example, instructed readers of his midwifery manual to pay
particular attention to a labouring woman’s mental state; arguing that ‘the senses of a
parturient woman are in a most exalted state … in this state it does not take very much
excitement to overthrow the ordinary mental equilibrium’. 368 Furthermore, he noted that
anaesthesia would serve to ‘rob [labour] of its terrors’. 369 A prevailing view amongst
obstetricians who advocated anaesthesia was that middle-class women were not
‘empowered’ like their ‘primitive sisters’ and were unused to the rigours of physical labour
364
Woolcock et al, ‘My Beloved Chloroform’, p. 450.
Hanna Rion, Painless Childbirth and Twilight Sleep: A Complete History of Twilight Sleep from its
Beginning in 1903 to its Present Development in 1915, T. Werner Laurie Ltd, London, 1915, p. 20.
366
Woolcock et al, ‘My Beloved Chloroform’, p. 451.
367
Woolcock et al, ‘My Beloved Chloroform’, p. 452.
368
Milford, Australian Midwife’s and Nurse’s Handbook, p. 222.
369
Milford, Australian Midwife’s and Nurse’s Handbook, p. 150.
365
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and pain. A proponent of twilight sleep, Dr Kronig, argued that sedation would remove
such a ‘highly strung’ woman from the experience and render childbirth as painless and
therefore manageable for the obstetrician.370 Another advocate, Hanna Rion, argued that
the irrational fear of pain in many modern women ‘germinated in the coming child’,
leading in many cases to foetal malformations and birth difficulties; Rion postulated that if
twilight sleep was made readily available to all childbearing women then the fear of pain
would disappear, along with many problems in labour. 371 Several decades later, Australian
obstetrician Lance Townsend advocated the use of anaesthesia during labour to ‘abolish
[the] memory of suffering’. 372
Women delivering babies up until the end of the Second World War recalled being given
sedatives during their labour. Mrs Mead, for example, was sedated during labour with
twilight sleep; in her interview, she remarked that she was given this as a matter of course,
although she was unaware of what this sedative actually contained: ‘Everybody had
twilight sleep … depending on how much fuss you were making. Don’t ask me what it
actually was, but that was what it was called’.373 Similarly, Margaret had also been sedated
with what she believes was chloroform, ‘the heavy stuff’, during labour – she remarked that
this may have been because she had ‘caused a fuss’ because her legs had been ‘aching and
aching’ after a traumatic long labour. 374
The recollections of oral history interviewees suggests that many women who delivered
stillborn babies or very ill newborns were also sedated after the birth, as a way of
diminishing their memories of the experience. That is, just as sedation had been
conceptualised as providing the means to reduce a woman’s physical pain in childbirth, the
sedation of women after perinatal death was a way to suppress any emotional ramifications
of a ‘failed’ birth. Although Reiger observes that the practice of ‘total sedation’ during
childbirth was gradually phased out in labour wards in Australia by the 1950s, 375 there is
370
Dr Kronig quoted in Rion, Painless Childbirth and Twilight Sleep, pp. 17-18.
Rion, Painless Childbirth and Twilight Sleep, p. 20.
372
Townsend, Obstetrics for Students, p. 153.
373
Mrs Mead, interview with researcher.
374
Margaret, interview with researcher.
375
Reiger observes that after the practice of rendering women unconscious for the birth was phased out after
World War II, heroin became a popular method of sedation for a time, as was the predecessor of the
contemporary epidural, the spinal anaesthetic. See Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies, pp. 29-30.
371
119
evidence demonstrating that sedation after perinatal loss remained a common practice until
at least the late 1970s. 376 Where sedation during labour was viewed as means to avoid
women’s hysteria, sedation after birth in cases of perinatal loss was a way to suppress the
possibility of an ‘excessively’ emotional response. 377
For example, Dorothy recalled that she was sedated after delivering her second baby at a
small Catholic maternity hospital in Perth; the infant was born prematurely and died two
days later. She was told little as to why her baby had died; in her recollection, she ‘got a
glimpse’ of the child immediately after the delivery before he was ‘whisked away’,
presumably to the nursery, where he died after two days. Dorothy was put into a shared
room and during these two days, she was not informed as to her son’s progress; after he
died the nuns came into the four-bed verandah ward, pulled the curtain around Dorothy’s
bed, and informed her that her baby had passed away. Remembering her response, Dorothy
recalled that she had cried and when the nun had asked if she was ‘alright,’ she had replied
‘no, I’m just going to cry all day’. After this, Dorothy was sedated, quite possibly because
she indicated to the nurses that she wished instead to be ‘left alone to cry’. However, she
commented that she still allowed herself to be sedated, because, in terms of her experience
with pregnancy and childbirth, ‘of course, I always did what I was told’. 378 Similarly,
Margaret was sedated after her baby was stillborn because she had become highly
emotional after the experience of losing her baby, quite likely exacerbated by the physical
strain of a week-long labour. She recalled that ‘I must have had a few bad nights, and I
remember a lovely nurse, I must have been having a crying fit, sobbing, and this lovely
376
Writing in 1985, Raphael claimed that ‘many women are heavily sedated throughout the stillbirth
experience and afterward’ in order to ‘suppress the grieving response’. See Raphael, The Anatomy of
Bereavement: A Handbook for the Caring Professions, New York: Basic Books Inc., 1985, p. 244. Western
Australian obstetrician Patrick Giles, whose work I discuss in greater detail in the next chapter, urged
colleagues in 1970 to avoid sedation after pregnancy loss ‘as was customary’. See P. Giles, ‘Reactions of
Women to Perinatal Death’, Australia and New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology [ANZJOG],
vol. 10, 1970, p. 209.
377
The midwives interviewed by Curtis framed their own understanding of the benefit of sedation in terms of
the ‘protection’ of bereaved mothers, with one midwife remarking that ‘sedation was used to dull the
experience and distance her from the tragedy’. See Curtis, ‘Midwives’ Attendance at Stillbirths’, p. 528.
378
Dorothy, interview with researcher, 1 August 2005. Tapes and transcript in possession of researcher.
120
nurse that wasn’t a nun, she made me a cup of tea and she made me feel so good … she
gave me some … pills. 379
The widespread use of sedation after perinatal loss gives greater insight into the underlying
motivations behind the ‘protection’ of mothers from the experience of losing a baby. The
presumption that women were fixed to nature, essentially driven by emotion and prone to
irrationality led to the belief that women’s inherently unstable minds needed to be
safeguarded in order to produce a live birth or avoid problems during labour. The belief that
miscarriage and stillbirth could be caused by a woman’s psychological ‘irrationality’ was,
therefore, arguably an underlying factor in the practice of protecting women from the
experience of losing a baby. As I have argued in the previous chapter, medical discourse
understood some instances of pregnancy loss to be the result of women’s subconscious
desire to be rid of the foetus, and this idea persisted well into the 1960s. Dr Heiman, for
example, claimed in 1965 that ‘a woman can never escape her ultimate biologic destiny,
reproduction, and a goodly number of psychologic problems encountered in the course of
pregnancy are the result of conflicts concerning this biologic destiny’. 380 Oakley argues that
women who showed signs of ‘emotional disturbance’ during pregnancy and early
motherhood were treated with suspicion; to be ‘ridden with conflicts about the desirability
of a feminine destiny’ was often presumed to be the cause of problems during pregnancy
and childbirth. 381
The care of women’s minds therefore became a central focus in the management of a
perinatal death. If the subconscious could affect the outcome of pregnancy, then it was
necessary to remove any signs of the ‘failed’ pregnancy in order to ensure a healthy mind
for the subsequent pregnancy. Grantly Dick-Read, for example, argued in his 1942 book
Childbirth Without Fear that many problems in obstetrics could be overcome if more
attention was paid to women’s minds during pregnancy and childbirth. He commented that
‘the mother is the factory, and by education and care she can be made more efficient in the
379
Margaret was also given sleeping pills to take home, but her husband objected to this measure, and
requested that she throw them down the toilet ‘because he didn’t like anything like that’. Margaret, interview
with researcher.
380
Dr Heiman quoted in Oakley, Women Confined, pp. 38-39.
381
Oakley, Women Confined, p. 39.
121
art of motherhood. Her mind is of even greater importance than her physical state, for
motherhood is of the mind’. 382
It was also believed that in order to safeguard against ‘inappropriate’ displays of emotion
after perinatal loss, women should be shielded from the bodies of their deceased babies.
The opportunity to hold their stillborn or seriously ill baby was not an option for most of
the older women interviewed for this research. Ivy, for example, was sedated during the
birth and when she regained full consciousness, was told by a nurse that her baby had died.
The baby’s swaddled body was briefly shown to Ivy, but she was not permitted to either
touch or unwrap the body:
When I really came to, the nurse said, ‘your baby is dead’. And I said, ‘whose
baby?’ And she said, ‘your baby’. And she did bring the baby to me. He was
wrapped in cotton wool, ‘cause he had instruments, you know, they had to use
instruments to get it out I suppose, and she just brought him, and showed me to him,
and I just touched him, pulled it back so I could see his face, and she pushed my
hand away and covered him up again. Maybe there were a lot of marks which I
didn’t see… and that was the last I saw of him … The last I heard of him. There was
no birth certificate, no death certificate, it was as if he wasn’t there. A non-entity. 383
Other women experienced a similar situation after the death of their babies. When
Margaret, for example, regained consciousness after her labour, she was told that her baby
had not survived the birth; she was not permitted to view her baby as her obstetrician
deemed this ‘inadvisable’ because it would be ‘too upsetting’. 384 Daphne was also not
given the opportunity to view her baby, her third child, who was delivered after a very
traumatic birth. Daphne indicated that she would like to see the baby, but she recalled that
she was ‘crying, I was almost hysterical’ and her request was refused. She recalled that ‘the
nun said – there were two nuns – no, they weren’t nuns, they were ordinary nurses, one
said, ‘well what do we do with it now?’ And the other said, ‘just put it in that drawer’. So
that was it. The baby was taken away, we never saw it, they said, ‘she’s a beautiful little
girl with dark hair, and quite a decent size for the circumstances’. 385
‘Undesirable’ and ‘desirable’ knowledge
382
Grantly Dick-Read quoted in Oakley, Women Confined, p. 36.
Ivy, interview with researcher.
384
Margaret, interview with researcher.
385
Daphne, interview with researcher, 9 May 2005. Tapes and transcript in possession of researcher.
383
122
A crucial factor in the practice of shielding women from the experience of perinatal death
was the construction of what was deemed to be ‘desirable’ or ‘undesirable’ knowledge. The
shift from home birth to birth in hospital had served to further reinforce the notion that only
medicine could interpret women’s bodies, an antagonism between medical knowledge and
women’s knowledge. 386 Both the expectation that women should submit to the rightful
authority of the doctor and the dominance of medical language can be seen clearly in Ivy’s
experience. Recalling the loss of her son over sixty years previously, Ivy remarked that in
her recollection, her doctor, an eminent Perth obstetrician, was seemingly brusque and
unsympathetic to her loss. Instead, he reprimanded Ivy for not coming to the hospital soon
enough after her waters broke; because she was a self-confessed ‘naïve’ first time mother
who was loathe to discuss her pregnancy because ‘we didn’t talk about those things,’ Ivy
regarded the doctor’s rebuke as implicating her in the death of her baby. Furthermore,
when she tentatively inquired as to why her baby had died during delivery, his answer was
incomprehensible to her, couched as it was in the language of medical authority: ‘the doctor
told me … I don’t know, cause they speak in their own language, and he said that
something or other happened …but they talk – they understand what they’re saying but you
don’t, do you’. 387 That short exchange was also the last encounter between Ivy and the
obstetrician, and she was never to find out why her baby, a ten pound ‘beautiful boy’, died
before delivery. 388
Because she could demonstrate an understanding of the masculinist scientific knowledge of
the body, Rayma’s experience was different from most of the other women who had
experienced a perinatal loss in this period, as she was allowed to see her babies after
delivery. She recalled that:
When I began to get my brain back together again, I was sitting up, so I asked the
next nurse who was coming by, ‘Can I see the twins please?’ And she was horrified.
You could see all these distasteful expressions crossing her face – you know, ‘this is
386
See Oakley, Women Confined, p. 285. Reiger also argues that women’s knowledge of their bodies was
held as untrustworthy in comparison to medical knowledge; breastfeeding rates in the postwar period, for
example, significantly declined because of the appeal to ‘scientific’ knowledge, as opposed to ‘nature’. Reiger
quotes Dr James Smibert, an early advocate of the Nursing Mothers’ Association of Australia, who
commented that: ‘I think it’s a bit of a question of an ego trip … The obstetrician or the paediatrician is a bit
inclined to control the feeding if it’s artificial. If it’s breastfeeding, he’s not controlling it at all’. James
Smibert quoted in Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies, p. 34.
387
Ivy, interview with researcher.
388
Ivy, interview with researcher.
123
disgusting! This request is disgusting!’ She said, ‘But! But they’re dead, they’re
going to the incinerator’. 389
Although the nurse initially found this request to be repugnant, she eventually brought the
babies in, provided Rayma promised that she ‘wouldn’t tell anybody’; in Rayma’s opinion,
she was granted this request because she managed to convince the nurse that she would not
become ‘emotional’, having seen foetal remains as part of her training in biology. She
recalled that she said ‘I know what they’ll look like, I have seen foetuses in bottles, I know
what they’ll look like, I won’t be distressed’. So [the nurse] said, “well, alright, but don’t
tell anyone.”’ 390
However, despite Rayma’s assurances that she would not find viewing her babies to be
distressing, the reality was quite different than what she had expected, because she had
imagined the bodies would be presented to as ‘babies,’ not foetal remains.
I don’t know what I was expecting, in retrospect I was expecting that they would be
swaddled in little towels or something, but in fact they came in in a kidney bowl, a
stainless steel kidney bowl. Anyway, I knew that I wasn’t going to let [the nurse]
see that she’d made the wrong decision. So I looked at them, and I checked them
out, and they were perfect, ears, nose, five fingers, five toes … little penises, the
eyes were closed, but they had eyebrows … About ten inches long each, something
like that. So I sort of stroked them, I didn’t think to pick them up so I stroked
them. 391
Based on other women’s experiences of perinatal loss during this period it appears that
Rayma’s experience was exceptional; the belief that women could not understand their
bodies and that female biology could only be understood through a scientific framework
meant that many women were denied any information as to why their babies had died.
Women who delivered stillborn or seriously ill babies during this period usually acquiesced
to medical authority and generally did not question medical authority or demand
389
Rayma, interview with researcher.
Rayma, interview with researcher.
391
Rayma’s experience of being allowed to view her twins also gives insight into the notion of ‘appropriate’
knowledge. Because Rayma was able to demonstrate that she would be able to view the bodies with an
objective eye, having trained in biology at university, she was permitted to see the babies, presented as foetal
remains in sterile receptacles. Although women were generally not permitted to see their babies because it
was considered to be inappropriate and likely to cause an emotional disturbance, the medical profession
regarded the foetal body as a site for exploration and the deformed foetus in particular was viewed as a
medical curiosity. Medical textbooks from this period showed explicit photographs of deceased babies with
anencephaly, described in one as ‘a stillborn anencephalic monster’. See Townsend, Obstetrics for Students,
p. 432.
390
124
information as to why their infants had died. After her own baby was stillborn after a very
long labour, Iris was not permitted to see her baby, and was told little as to why her baby
had died, until she was seen by a nurse who was the sister of a friend. In Iris’ opinion, she
was only told that her daughter had died because of a knot in the umbilical cord because of
this connection, otherwise she believes, she would have been told little.
You just sort of don’t jump up and down in those days, because nobody did jump up
and down. You just took these authorities, like hospital and doctors, as though they
knew best and you didn’t demand anything, like people would do today, if anything
happened. So meekly you go back to your room without your baby and your
husband– and I remember Brian, of course, he was rung up to come – they didn’t
have husbands with wives in those days either, through the delivery, and he came,
evidently rushed down, and all I remember … I was being pushed back to the
room, along the passage, and I saw him … I always remembered seeing him looking
so alarmed, no one made it easy, you couldn’t come to your wife till they got back
to the room. 392
Similarly, after Ivy’s son was delivered, she accepted that she would not be told any
possible reasons for her child’s death because in those days ‘I wouldn’t ask questions, I
wouldn’t answer back or anything’. 393
Percy Rogers, an obstetrician during this period recalled with vivid horror his first day as a
medical student at the RWH Melbourne; an incident which gives insight into both the
hierarchy of a hospital and the use of medical knowledge:
I recall going on a ward round with a consultant and there was a full entourage of
the lord, his faithful retainer, his third in command and a rag taggle of students with
bum freezers on. And we were standing around the bed of a woman whose baby had
died. It had died and the cervix had clamped around the neck … And the method of
extracting this was to put weights on the end of the baby’s leg, hang them over the
end of the bed, then adjust the weights and let the cervix dilate up slowly. He
described this in graphic detail standing around the bed – the poor woman sobbing
her heart out. 394
Some women were told that their babies had died because of ‘deformity’; it is likely that
this was meant to reassure women that the loss had been ‘for the best’ whilst also
392
Iris, interview with researcher.
Ivy, interview with researcher.
394
Rogers’ account lends weight to the argument that individual doctors often disagreed with the way women
were treated after perinatal loss. The experience, he felt, was ‘brutal … And us standing there unable to
express sympathy with the patient’. Percy Rogers quoted in McCalman, Sex and Suffering, p. 313.
393
125
preventing any further discussion on the issue. Audrey recalled that she was told that her
baby was ‘defective’; a reason which effectively put an end to the conversation: ‘I
remember saying, ‘Why did it happen, doctor?’ And she sort of looked at me and she said,
‘well dear, I can’t tell you this. It’s nature’s way, sometimes, if things aren’t right’. And
they were her words. And I didn’t question her any more’. 395
For those women who were reassured that their babies would not have survived because of
the medical inscription of ‘deformed’, the attitude that the loss was ‘for the best’ was a
reassurance. The idea of giving birth to a ‘deformed’ baby was a horrifying thought for
Margaret, for example, who commented that ‘I’m glad [my baby] wasn’t deformed and my
family saw it, because if it was deformed I would say, ‘I’m glad it died’ ... I think you’ve
got to count your blessings that you didn’t have a deformed baby’. Although Margaret was
not permitted to see her baby’s body, staff allowed her husband to view the baby;
afterwards, Margaret said, he ‘cried, and told me he was a dear little fellow …but he had a
crooked nose, it must have been as he was squashed out’. Although her son was not visibly
‘deformed’, Margaret and her husband took comfort in the fact that if the child had lived,
he may have had physical disabilities which would have prevented a ‘normal’ life:
But this way, it wasn’t deformed in any way, except for the nose twisted, but [my
husband] said to me, ‘it’s better this way, how do we know, having been forced out,
if he didn’t have a weak chest’. Imagine going to school, and he couldn’t play sport,
and they’d say, ‘oh you know, he’s not allowed out’. It made me feel better. I
thought, it must have been God’s will. 396
Medical records also give further insight into the extent of the notion of ‘desirable’ and
‘undesirable’ knowledge. Whilst women were often not told why their babies had died, or
were told that the cause was ‘unknown’, the bodies of many deceased babies underwent
autopsy, although any knowledge gleaned from post-mortem was clearly not intended for
the parents, but for medical use. In 1957, for example, over three hundred stillborn babies
were given post-mortem examinations. 397 Furthermore, women had no legal claim over
their non-viable foetuses; ‘non-viable foetal tissue’ was not considered to be a body or a
395
Audrey, interview with researcher.
Margaret, interview with researcher.
397
RWH Clinical Report 1957, p. 23.
396
126
corpse – it was, in essence, a non-being. The ‘non-viable’ foetal body therefore was
generally considered to be the possession of the hospital, which had the authority to dispose
of the body or use it for scientific or medical purposes without consent of the parents. 398
For women whose babies were considered to be ‘viable’, sometimes the options offered for
burial were equally limiting. Many of the women interviewed for this research were not
given a choice as to how their babies were buried, and some surmised that their infants
were buried anonymously in mass graves. 399 Liz, for example, was a single woman who
had been sent by her parents to Brisbane from Sydney to have her baby; after her baby was
stillborn at twenty four weeks gestation the matron told Liz that ‘they were going to bury
the baby in a paupers’ grave, and I didn’t know I had any rights, and I got a bill for the
burial, which was thirty pounds in those days. 400 Daphne’s baby, on the other hand, was
given a private funeral, but was told by the undertaker that no one should attend, ‘because
babies like that are buried in someone else’s coffin’. In her interview, Daphne said ‘and that
really ate at me, till just recently really’. 401
Gendered expectations of perinatal loss
The exclusion of men from the domain of ‘domesticity’ – of which childbearing and rearing
was an integral part – reinforced the cultural expectation of ‘appropriate’ masculine
responses to grief. Although some men were permitted to be in the room during early
labour, such as Margaret’s husband who rebuked her for continually apologising for
‘making a fuss’, 402 after this initial stage of labour men were customarily banned from the
398
John Archer argues that the foetal body – alive or deceased – was considered valuable fodder for the
‘pioneering’ research work of the medical and scientific communities in the postwar years; the maternal and
foetal body were ‘sites of exploration’, often with disastrous results for both mother and child, such as the
original contraceptive pill testing and the testing of thalidomide. See J. Archer, Bad Medicine: Is the Health
Care System Letting You Down?, East Roseville, NSW: Simon and Schuster, 1995, pp. 22-25.
399
The acceptability of the mass burial was based on the presumption that the foetus was not regarded as a
member of the family; a presumption that was rarely tested by actually asking women if this was the burial
option they desired. Because the foetal body was conceived of in physiological terms the hospital burial was
ostensibly to ‘spare’ women the trauma of organising a funeral but also give insight into the social inscription
of the foetus as not being worthy of a proper burial.
400
Liz, interview with researcher, 18 May 2005. Tapes and transcript in possession of researcher. At Liz’s
request, this is a pseudonym.
401
Daphne, interview with researcher.
402
Margaret recalled that, in the early stages of what would prove to be a long and protracted labour, she kept
‘jumping [up], and saying, oh, sorry! Sorry!’ to the nurse who came periodically to check on her progress.
She continued that she kept ‘making excuses to her, and afterwards my husband saying, “oh, we’re paying for
this” – [because] we had a lovely private room – and saying, “don’t ever go on like that.”’ Margaret,
interview with researcher.
127
delivery room, whether the child was expected to be born alive or not, a practice which
endured well until the 1970s. 403 Pregnancy, childbirth and the early life of a newborn – and
beyond - were largely presumed to be the responsibility of the mother, and whilst some
fathers ‘paced outside the corridor, smoking cigarettes,’ as Audrey observed, 404 others
accepted their exclusion from this domain and returned home or to the pub to wait for the
news, like Barbara’s husband. She recalled that ‘he’d gone home [during labour]. In those
days [husbands] just delivered you to the door and that was it’. 405
In her research into attitudes towards death in nineteenth century Australia, Jalland argues
that men were not expected to feel the loss of a baby as keenly as their wives; this view led
to the exclusion of men from ‘an important part of the process of mourning’ – the sharing
of sympathies and consolations through letter-writing. 406 This idea was perpetuated in the
mid twentieth century; the cultural exclusion of men from the realm of childbirth, both
bodily and psychologically, was driven by the idea that men had no attachment to the
unborn child and served to reinforce the idea that ‘manliness’ in the face of bereavement
was characterised by silent stoicism and a deep-rooted fortitude, coupled with a physical
distancing from the event itself. Most of the husbands of the women interviewed for this
research were given the responsibility of organizing the funeral, and were often requested
to view the deceased baby’s body in order to exonerate the hospital of any responsibility.407
In recalling their experiences of the loss of a baby many of the women interviewed who had
lost babies in the postwar period articulated their experiences through the lens of gendered
expression of grief, expressing the belief that their intensity of loss was far greater than
403
Reiger observes that because maternity wards of the 1950s and 1960s were typically busy and
overcrowded with little privacy, women also faced the stress of separation from their family. She notes that
‘even husbands’ presence was only tolerated in the early stages of labour, after which time they were either
banished to a special waiting room, or advised to go home’. As Reiger argues, women themselves generally
accepted the exclusion of men from the realm of childbirth; one mother, who was herself a nurse, commented
that her experience of childbirth was ‘terrible. I thought it was awful. It’s not a thing I would want my
husband there for, and he would never want to be there, I’m quite certain … I think it’s something that you do
quite on your own because I think it can be quite distressing and unpleasant’. ‘Paula Molloy’ quoted in
Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies, p. 32.
404
Audrey, interview with researcher.
405
Barbara, interview with researcher.
406
Jalland quotes Ellie Le Soeuf’s articulation of this idea in a letter to a bereaved mother. Le Souef wrote
that ‘[y]ou have this terrible lonely heartache into which not even your husband can enter – (only a mother
who has given a precious baby back to God can enter into your heartache)’. Ellie Le Souef quoted in Jalland,
Australian Ways of Death, p. 142.
407
Margaret, interview with researcher; Dorothy, interview with researcher.
128
their respective husbands’ bereavement. For Audrey, the fact that her husband rarely spoke
about the baby to his wife was framed within Audrey’s own expectation that, as the man of
the family, he had to ‘just get on with it’ with the ‘stiff upper lip and all that’.408 Daphne,
who had given birth to a stillborn daughter in 1959, commented that whilst her marriage
was a happy one, her husband ‘was very upset about it, but nothing like I was. Nothing like
I was’. 409 Most of the women interviewed who had lost babies during the postwar years
echoed Audrey and Daphne’s sentiments and strongly believed that, for their respective
husbands, the event could not have been as significant as it had been for them. Daphne
went on to say that ‘I had a wonderful husband, but he didn’t want to call her anything. But
I always did – I called her Barbara Therese, and he said, I don’t want to perpetuate her
memory. And that was difficult, that was difficult for me’. 410 Many women who were
interviewed for this research recalled that, even amongst the intimacy of a husband and
wife relationship, there was little discussion of the baby and what did occur was usually
spoken about in euphemistic terms, and what was articulated was brief. Ivy, for instance,
recalled that she used to remember her son with sadness every time she took the train from
Fremantle to Perth to visit her mother, and as they passed Karrakatta Cemetery, located
adjacent to the train line, her husband would say ‘it’s my baby too, you know’ – [because]
I’d get upset’ - but on the whole, ‘it was if he never existed’. 411
No words to say: avoiding grief in public
The practice of ‘shielding’ women from the experience of perinatal loss was not restricted
to the hospital setting. Some women who lost babies in the postwar period experienced the
active involvement of their relatives or friends in removing any tangible reminders of the
impending arrival before they were discharged from hospital. In the immediate postwar
period, this was often exacerbated by the living situation of many newly married couples
who were forced to live with their parents due to the severe housing shortages. Iris, for
example, returned home to discover that her mother had already dismantled the baby
furniture and removed the layette; in hindsight, she said, she realised that ‘my poor mum,
she thought she was doing the right thing I suppose, and she put everything out of sight’.
408
Audrey, interview with researcher.
Daphne, interview with researcher.
410
Daphne, interview with researcher.
411
Ivy, interview with researcher.
409
129
Iris never felt able to ask her mother where the baby’s furniture had gone, and surmised that
it had been given to charity; it was a source of pain to her, however, that she had to return
home to an empty nursery: ‘once you come home, all you want to find is all the little things
you had for them, to look at them’. 412
Despite the expectation that the expression of grief should remain private some women did
attempt to share their grief with family and friends, but found that their loss was rejected –
reinforcing to them that they had been unwise to share their feelings, and that their grief
should be internalised and remain a private affair. Ivy, for example left the hospital feeling
as though her baby had never existed. She did venture to tell some close friends that she
and her husband had named the child, but was deeply hurt when the couple openly
articulated their opinion that ‘oh they’ve named the baby – that’s a bit stupid!’ After
hearing this callous remark, Ivy determined that she ‘wouldn’t talk about it anymore’ –
acknowledging that this was how she perceived what was expected of her anyway: ‘We
never discussed it. Now, everything is discussed, but then we never discussed anything.
You never asked - well I didn’t’. 413
Jalland suggests that silence after death was, following the two world wars, perhaps also
borne out of ‘a true lack of words to say’, given the decline in religious belief in Australian
society and the customary solace that such faith had traditionally, if not privately, brought
to many people. 414 This idea had begun to take shape some years before the turn of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries and was further defined and reinforced by the impact of
the two world wars. For example, the book Australian Etiquette: or the Rules and Usages
of Best Society in the Australasian Colonies, first published in 1885, extolled the virtues of
controlled sorrow and welcomed the diminishing of ‘elaborate’ mourning rituals as a mark
of a progressive, civilised society. The authors of this tome advised readers to avoid
discussing death and other ‘distasteful’ topics in polite company: ‘Avoid all exhibitions of
temper before others, if you find it impossible to suppress them entirely. All emotions,
whether of grief or joy, should be subdued in public, and only allowed full play in the
412
Iris, interview with researcher. Iris eventually retrieved the clothes from her mother and recalled that she
felt great pleasure in being able to pass the clothing on to a missionary organisation working with mothers in
India; she later received a letter from the recipient of the clothing which she said helped ease some of her
sadness.
413
Ivy, interview with researcher.
414
Jalland, Changing Ways of Death, p.173.
130
privacy of your own apartments … Never introduce unpleasant topics, nor describe
revolting scenes in general company’. 415
Dorothy, for example, remembers that she ‘didn’t talk about it at all. I think we were
embarrassed. I think that was like anything, you don’t know what to say’. 416 Similarly,
Lynette did not talk about her experience of losing her first baby in 1960 because of what
she perceived to be people’s desire to avoid talking about such a painful subject: ‘I think in
those days people just didn't want to trespass on your grief. And people always [felt it was]
difficult, doing that. And I guess if I had broached the subject maybe it would have opened
it up, but I didn't either, and I don't think that I even talked about it with my husband much
- if at all. It was just something that happened, and I had to get over it’. 417
Audrey recalled clearly her mother’s exhortation that she should keep the death of the baby
as a private matter: ‘I remember my mother coming in the door of the hospital room, and
her first words were to me, ‘I hope you’re not going to put it in the paper’ … I’m nearly
seventy, she’s still alive at ninety six – and I remember that’. 418 When her extended family
came to visit her in hospital, Audrey remembers that they were ‘very kind’ but that ‘nobody
talked to me about it … [they] all tiptoed around it’. Upon leaving hospital, Audrey was
greeted with the same sort of attitude towards her loss: ‘You went home, and you got on
with it, and my friends around the district … were supportive, I suppose, but it wasn’t
something – the first time they’d see you, they’d ask, and say, ‘oh I’m sorry’ – but they
didn’t really talk about it, and I didn’t really talk about it. I didn’t talk about it to a lot of
people’. 419
After Barbara was discharged from hospital, she returned to her parents’ home, where she
and her husband were living temporarily while her husband looked for work, and Barbara
found that the silence after the baby’s death was only challenged by her little daughter, who
415
Anon., Australian Etiquette: or the Rules and Usages of Best Society in the Australasian Colonies 1886,
London: J.M. Dent, 1980, pp. 103 & 109.
416
Dorothy, interview with researcher.
417
Lynette, interview with researcher, 30 May 2005. Tapes and transcript in possession of researcher .At
Lynette’s request, this is a pseudonym.
418
Audrey, interview with researcher.
419
Audrey, interview with researcher.
131
was two at the time:
We really didn’t discuss it a lot. It was just something that had happened. The
hardest part was my little 2 year old – ‘where’s the baby, mummy?’ [Because] I’d
been telling her that I was going to bring her back a little baby, and of course I came
home without a little baby. And she kept asking, where’s the baby, which was a bit
hard, especially as she couldn’t understand.420
However, the ‘refusal of death’ and the expectation of a repressed sorrow did not
necessarily mean individuals lacked compassion or the desire to engage with people’s pain
following bereavement; rather, the cultural expectation of ‘spartan control’ largely removed
the language of bereavement from the vocabulary of many Australians in the postwar
period. Iris, for example, remembers being told about her employer’s reaction to her loss:
I went and worked for a man after I got married, for a really short time - eight
months - because I was having a baby, and he didn’t see me again, I didn’t go to
work once I was pregnant, you’d say you were and would leave, but the girls in the
office, I got to know them when I was working there, and they were all waiting for
the date in the paper – this is what one little lass told me, much later – and she said
‘I grabbed the paper, on what might have been the date after, and it was in there,’
because of course I’d had it right on the date, on the Monday I think, and she said, ‘I
saw it, and oh! Stillborn!’ And she was so upset, she raced into work – she told me
all this later – and the boss absolutely went to pieces, and he went home. That’s
what she said to me. He couldn’t understand why, I suppose, and he had to go
home. 421
Long before the formal support group would come into existence, some women would
draw strength, even if it was mainly unspoken, through shared experience, the comfort of
being with those who had ‘been there’. Like the women described by Joy Damousi in her
research into wartime bereavement, 422 a collective identity was sometimes formed between
bereaved mothers: Mrs Mead, for example, remembers feeling ‘at home’ with some of her
mother’s friends who had suffered similar losses:
There were women in my mother’s circle, who had had the same experience, and I
can remember they were the sort of people … that I was always comfortable with.
[Because] I didn’t have to pretend … and if mum had friends there – they used to
play cards on Saturday afternoon, when the men went to golf … I always felt
comfortable with them. It was only vocalised once, and then after that I felt at ease
with them. 423
420
Barbara, interview with researcher.
Iris, interview with researcher.
422
Damousi observes that women waiting for news of their husbands, brothers or lovers, fighting overseas in
the Great War, bonded as part of their identification as ‘potential mourners’. See Damousi, Labour of Loss,
pp. 21–25.
423
Mrs Mead, interview with researcher.
421
132
Iris also recalled that she received letters from women who had also lost babies in infancy
or at birth, and she found the idea of a shared experience to be a comfort. For Iris, though,
her solace lay principally in her Christian faith, and during the interview she spoke several
times of the supportive relationship she and her husband shared, although she echoed the
sentiment that she felt isolated and alone amongst her wider family and community. She
recalled that:
We just staggered along together, and neighbours were very supportive, and you
just slowly accept that it happened, and just hope that another time it won’t … Brian
and I began to query a lot of things, ‘why?’, get a bit bitter, ‘why me?’ … all this
type of attitude, but you do feel sorry for yourself. And because I’m a believer in
God, in Christ, I made it a matter of prayer, took it in prayer, to help me to try and
not be so nasty, bitter and nasty. So that helped a lot, we got a better attitude. But
nobody really wanted to talk about it in those days … They all sort of wanted to not
think it ever happened, like girlfriends who had their children, they didn’t know
what to do. 424
‘Moving on’: having another baby
The expectation that another child would resolve any feelings of sadness was particularly
strong in the postwar years. McCalman observes that infertility was a hard burden to bear in
the years of the so-called ‘baby boom’ after the end of the Second World War. 425
Furthermore, the cumulative loss of many young men’s lives reinforced the naturalised
assumption of women-as-mothers; as Philippa Mein-Smith observes, the widespread grief
after the two world wars ‘furrowed landscapes … as death renewed the importance of birth
and life – and hence put the spotlight on mothers and babies’. 426 As I argue in the previous
chapter, to ‘fail’ to fulfil one’s femininity by remaining childless was to risk social stigma;
under such pressure to become a mother, some women whose babies died internalised the
attitude that the best prescription to grief following perinatal loss was to repress the
experience and to ‘try again’ in the quest to attain the status of mother.
Having more children signified the bereaved mother’s willingness to reassume and resume
her ‘rightful’ and ‘natural’ role as mother and to wallow in grief was regarded as selfish and
424
Iris, interview with researcher.
McCalman, Sex and Suffering, p. 309.
426
Mein-Smith, ‘Maternity and Eugenics’, p. 148.
425
133
self-indulgent. Caught between the two taboos of death and sex, women who bore a
deceased or sickly baby bore a particular burden: that is, not only were they denied any
form of expressive sorrow, but their loss itself was invalidated. As ‘failed’ mothers – a
theme which is discussed in more detail in Chapter Two – women were expected to repress
their grief and ‘get on with it’. In postwar Australia, the public demonstration of one’s
stoicism following the death of a baby often entailed the heavy responsibility of producing
another (live) child as soon as possible in order to avoid the stigma of having ‘failed’ to
fulfil one’s ‘rightful’ role as a woman. Because the unborn child was also viewed as
essentially unknowable and replaceable, the possibility of subsequent pregnancies was
regarded as assisting women ‘achieve’ the true fulfillment of their femininity. Mrs Mead,
whose baby was stillborn at term just after the end of World War II, articulated this
prescription for loss after a stillbirth, in her interview, recalling that ‘I was very anxious to
have another [baby] straight away, [because] people said to me, there’s only one cure for
this, and that’s to have another baby straight away. Women said that [to me]’. 427
Lynette received a letter from her mother after her first daughter was stillborn; the letter is
full of sadness and warmth as her mother wrote of her ‘grief, and disappointment over the
loss of our little girl’ She continued to write that ‘I was waiting to welcome her joyfully,
and looking forward to the end of the year, to see her for myself’. Lynette was encouraged
to take heart because ‘you are young, and there is plenty of time for you to have another
little daughter to take her place … All the grieving in the world won’t do any good, as I
know you realise without me telling’. 428
Iris recalls that her community did not regard her as a mother until her next baby was born
alive: to be viewed as a mother, she remarked, ‘you had to have your baby [alive]’. Indeed,
whilst she was still in the hospital recovering after the delivery of her first child, she
remembers her doctor – who was not actually present at the birth - ‘bouncing in … and her
first greeting was a big grin, I can still remember, and she said, ‘oh have another baby!’
And I felt like saying, no, I’d like that one’.429
427
Mrs Mead, interview with researcher.
Lynette, private letter from her mother. Copy held by researcher.
429
Iris, interview with researcher.
428
134
For Margaret, having another baby did ease the sadness she felt after her son was stillborn.
In her interview, she recalled that she fell pregnant shortly after her first baby died and was
delighted to ‘become a mother’. The contrast between Margaret’s first labour and her
second is striking:
Her birth was so easy, and I couldn’t believe it, when [the doctor] came in, he was
saying, ‘good girl!’ I think they gave me a mask, no chloroform, no heavy stuff. I
knew everything that was going on, and then … all of a sudden, I wanted to push,
naturally! This was like a most beautiful feeling, this beautiful feeling. And they
said, ‘look, there’s your baby!’ And I looked down and this little dark head was
there … And I didn’t feel a thing, and I was so happy! I said, ‘I could help
everybody in the world have a baby!’ And she was so beautiful, and when my
husband came in, all I could say to him was, ‘thankyou! Thankyou for giving me
this!’ And that was it, she was the most beautiful joy that I’ve ever had. 430
Conclusion
Many women who lost babies in the postwar period were considerably restricted in the
ways they could mourn a perinatal loss. Australia – along with most of the Western world –
had experienced a cultural shift in attitudes towards grief and bereavement after the
atrocities of the two world wars; individual grief and the public expression of sorrow
became seen as self-indulgent in the light of the massive loss of young lives. In its stead,
stoic forbearance became the culturally acceptable response to grief and loss. Within this
context many women who suffered some form of perinatal loss were expected to repress
their grief and to ‘get on’ with their lives as wives and mothers to subsequent children,
despite the heartbreak they were often suffering in private. The medical discourse of
perinatal loss reinforced and intersected with the expectation of ‘spartan control’; because
the medicalisation of childbirth had seen a shift away from birth and death at home, for
many years the dominant medical inscriptions of perinatal death governed the way that
women were treated within the clinical setting.
As I mention in the previous chapter, medical inscriptions of the unborn child held that
stillbirth and neonatal death were incomparable to the death of a living child; rather, they
were the more abstract ‘nonfulfilment of a wish fantasy’. Because stillborn children were
viewed as essentially ‘unknowable’ and therefore replaceable, many in the medical
profession and the wider community believed that having a live baby would restore a
430
Margaret, interview with researcher.
135
woman’s health by fulfilling this ‘imagined’ child. Many women who suffered the loss of a
pregnancy or a baby through miscarriage or perinatal death were not expected to grieve for
the child and it was assumed that withholding the deceased infant from the mother was the
best possible measure to ensure a speedy resolution to a rather distasteful affair. The radical
shift in attitudes towards grief, women’s healthcare and women’s bodies which occurred in
the 1970s and early 1980s in Australia wrought significant challenge to the dominant
understandings of perinatal loss; these challenges had considerable impact not only for
women delivering live babies but for those whose pregnancies ended in stillbirth or
neonatal death.
136
CHAPTER FOUR
Emerging change: the impact of theories of grief and loss on constructions of perinatal
death in the l970s and 1980s
In describing her early experience as a midwife at KEMH, Belinda Jennings recalled the
unspoken rules for midwives caring for a patient whose baby had died: ‘It was seen to be a
midwife’s responsibility to separate a baby from the mother, to protect the mother and their
family from what was basically a sad event, but something that they would get over as soon
as they walked out the door’. 431 In previous chapters, I have argued that this attitude was
prevalent amongst the medical fraternity and the wider community, and that many women
whose pregnancies ended in miscarriage or perinatal death were expected to resume their
lives and to repress any grief they may have felt after the event.
However, the late 1960s and 1970s were a period of great social upheaval in Australia and
other Western nations; this social change prompted a shift in attitudes towards grief and
loss and drove the concerns of the consumer health movement and second wave feminism.
These wider shifts in social attitudes carried over into bereavement and loss, health care
and women’s bodies, and hence wrought a challenge to the dominant construction of
perinatal death, which have been discussed in previous chapters. Recalling this impact of
these changing attitudes on the management of perinatal death in the hospital context,
Belinda recalled that:
I think the literature started to hit us, we as midwives, started to learn more about it
… Certainly with experience [also] comes some exposure to the degree of
emotional response that parents had. Not all midwives allowed that exposure to
impact on them personally, but I think with lots and lots of experience I think that
you can’t deny the impact it has on you as a person. 432
In this chapter, I discuss emerging ideas of grief and loss and consider the impact of these
ideas which, coupled with the growing dissatisfaction towards the medical management of
pregnancy and childbirth in the 1970s and early 1980s, gradually enlarged understandings
of pregnancy loss and baby death within the hospital setting. The practice of rendering
431
Belinda Jennings, interview with researcher, 18 November 2004. Tapes and transcript in possession of
researcher.
432
Jennings, interview with researcher.
137
stillbirth and neonatal death as invisible was increasingly challenged during this period,
initially inspired by research which legitimised a more complex range of responses to grief
and loss. Supporting this challenge to the medical management of childbirth was a growing
dissatisfaction amongst members of the midwifery profession, coupled with the burgeoning
‘consumer rights’ movement. Growing from this social change was the construction of
perinatal loss as a potentially traumatic experience, and some professionals working with
bereaved women began to explore other possibilities in caring for women whose babies had
died. In this chapter I consider some of these ways in which some social workers and
midwives sought to change the way they cared for women who had suffered a miscarriage
or perinatal death at two major maternity hospitals in Australia, KEMH in Perth and the
RWH in Melbourne.
Grief as healing and appropriate: emerging theories of grief and loss
In 1972, Kaye was delivered of her first child, a girl, who was stillborn at twenty five
weeks gestation. Remembering her experience, Kaye recalled that although some of the
staff treated her kindly and gently, she felt that her child’s existence, and by extension her
own experience, were ‘trivialised’. During her stay in hospital, Kaye had requested to see
the baby’s body ‘out of curiosity’: ‘it was our first child, and naturally I was interested to
see what an offspring of ours would look like’. This request was refused, and she was also
told that there would also be no need to hold a funeral because of her baby’s prematurity:
The baby was a bit small for twenty five weeks gestation, but the nurses and doctor
said she was perfectly formed. I asked to see the body… [but] I was told that it
would be too upsetting because she was "black and blue" and that it was best not to
see her. I would have loved to see and hold her. I think having not seen her made it
harder because I couldn't visualise what I was grieving over. I felt quite emotional
and upset and asked if we needed to hold a funeral. I was told that because the baby
hadn't reached twenty eight weeks gestation that a funeral wouldn't be necessary.
That upset me because I felt not being able to see the baby or have a funeral
somehow trivialised her existence, as if she just hadn't ‘mattered’. I guess if we had
insisted, the body would have been released, but we were given the impression that
we should just let the matter drop. 433
As I have argued in previous chapters, Kaye’s experience was not extraordinary. For
several decades, many women who suffered the ending of a pregnancy or the death of a
433
Kaye, personal correspondence with the researcher, 27 July 2005. Letter in possession of researcher.
138
baby were most likely to be faced with silence, both within the hospital and amongst their
families and friends. The dominant construction of pregnancy loss and baby death held that
this experience would have little lasting impact on a woman; indeed, no writing existed in
Australian medical and psychological literature specifically on the subject on the potential
impact of perinatal death. The ideas of psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch, for example, still
carried influence, and stillbirth and neonatal death were constructed as incomparable to the
death of a living child; rather, were the more abstract ‘nonfulfilment of a wish fantasy’.434
Many women who suffered the loss of a pregnancy or a baby through miscarriage or
perinatal death were not expected to grieve for their child, and it was assumed that
withholding the deceased infant from the mother was the best possible measure to ensure a
speedy resolution to a rather distasteful affair.
The late 1960s however had seen a growing recognition that perhaps the stoic response of
former generations was not necessarily beneficial; the expression of grief, it was argued,
could be healing and appropriate. In the international arena, the Swiss-American
psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross had published a seminal work on the stages of grief
exhibited by terminally ill cancer patients, which had received wide acclaim. 435 British
psychologist John Bowlby had also postulated the influential attachment theory, which
explored the nature of human affectional bonds, particularly the mother-infant bond, and
what possible psychological sequelae could occur if these bonds were broken. 436 These
seminal theories, however, were largely concerned with the death of older children and
adults; although revelatory by nature, at no point were miscarriage, stillbirth and neonatal
death mentioned as potentially traumatic events.
In 1970 the head of obstetrics and gynaecology at KEMH, Patrick Giles, became interested
in the possible emotional impact of perinatal death, which he suspected would show
similarities to the psychosomatic reactions often seen after the death of an older child or an
adult. Stillbirth and perinatal death, Giles concluded, were major life events that would
434
Deutsch’s ideas were still being cited until at least the 1990s; Irving Leon, for example, referenced her
construction of pregnancy as the ‘self-aggrandizement’ of the woman’s subconscious. See I. Leon, When a
Baby Dies, Psychotherapy for pregnancy and newborn loss, New Haven, London: Yale University Press,
1990, pp. 18 & 24.
435
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying, New York: Macmillan, 1970.
436
For more discussion of both Kübler-Ross and Bowlby and the development of popular ideas of grief and
loss in the twentieth century, see Beverley Raphael, ‘Grief and Loss in Australian Society’, in A. Kellehear
(ed.) Death and Dying in Australia, South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 116–130.
139
almost certainly have a profound effect on a woman, physically, mentally and emotionally.
He argued that ‘besides feeling empty, sad and physically exhausted, the woman who has
lost a baby in the perinatal period may feel that she is to blame, that she is a failure, and that
it may recur in future pregnancies’. 437 However, although Giles noted that these women’s
grief reactions were similar to those of a recently bereaved widow, he was understated in
his conclusions, arguing that the grief reactions of the bereaved mothers were similar but
not as severe as those of the widows, and made no mention of the likely reasons behind a
woman’s feelings of responsibility for the death of her baby. 438
Nonetheless, Giles’ relatively small study with its cautious findings challenged the
prevailing understanding of pregnancy loss. For the first time in twentieth-century
Australia, the idea emerged that perinatal death could potentially be a highly stressful event
in the life of a woman. In making this claim, Giles argued for greater understanding on the
part of the physician and stressed that the doctor had the ability to play a crucial role in
helping the mother reach a resolution of her grief and to once again reach a state of
psychological wellbeing. 439 In an article discussing his research, Giles suggested that
instead of sedating the mother to avoid confrontation as was customary, the doctor should,
in the first instance, tell the parents immediately that their baby had died and then, when
results of the post mortem came to light, provide a ‘simple, rational explanation of the
cause of the death [to] relieve fear, misconception and guilt’. Giles echoed the traditional
sentiments that the hope of future pregnancies would ease any sadness: ‘When the postmortem report and results of any special investigations are available, the prognosis for a
future pregnancy should be discussed factually. The patient should be left in no doubt as to
when she may start another pregnancy if she wishes’. 440
In the same year, American physicians Marshall Klaus, John Kennell and Harold Slyter
began to take an interest in the bereavement patterns of parents who had lost a child in the
early neonatal period. Klaus et al concluded that bereavement following neonatal death
437
Giles, ‘Reactions of Women to Perinatal Death’, p. 209.
Giles, ‘Reactions of Women to Perinatal Death’, pp. 208-210
439
Giles, ‘Reactions of Women to Perinatal Death’, p. 209.
440
Giles, ‘Reactions of Women to Perinatal Death’, p. 210.
438
140
showed similarities to possible grief reactions following the death of an adult loved one. 441
A later study in 1976 led Klaus and Kennell to suggest that attachment most likely began
before birth, usually when the child ‘quickened’ in utero – not after birth, an idea which had
long driven the appeal to detachment in the clinical setting and which lay behind the view
that the unborn child was essentially replaceable. In a radical step, the authors suggested
that, because many women had begun to give their foetuses ‘human attributes’ prior to
birth, perhaps allowing mothers to hold their dying or dead babies would not have the
disastrous consequences that most supposed would occur, and may actually help a woman
resolve her grief, rather than heighten it. 442
Several years later in the early 1980s a clinical psychologist in Western Australia undertook
research which produced a radically different construction of perinatal death. Margaret
Nicol, along with Dr Jeffrey Tompkin, a neonatal expert at KEMH, sought to explore the
possible extent of maternal grief following the death of a baby either in utero or shortly
after birth. Adopting Madison and Walker’s 1967 general health questionnaire - used to
assess the wellbeing of recent widows - into the Mother-Infant questionnaire, Nicol and a
small team of KEMH staff interviewed 110 women who had experienced some form of
perinatal loss in various hospitals around the Perth metropolitan area in the three years
preceding the study. 443 Based on these interviews, Nicol came to the conclusion that ‘the
pattern of health deterioration in bereaved mothers is very similar to the two major studies
on the effects of bereavement in women after the death of their husband. It may therefore
be concluded that the loss of a baby can have as severe effects on the mental and physical
health of a woman as the loss of a husband’. 444
In her influential book Loss of a Baby: Understanding Maternal Grief, Nicol argued that
441
J. Kennell, M. Klaus and H. Slyter, ‘The Mourning Responses of Parents to the Death of a Newborn
Infant’, New England Journal of Medicine, no. 283, pp. 344-49. See also J.R. Wolff, B.E. Nielson and P.
Schiller, The Emotional Reaction to a Stillbirth, American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, September
1970, no. 108, pp. 73-77.
442
Kennell and Klaus postulated that the length of pregnancy was directly related to the length of
bereavement if a loss occurred. Miscarriage, then, was downplayed as an important experience in some
women’s lives, with most writers not even mentioning this form of pregnancy loss. The authors cited
anecdotal evidence to support this idea: ‘One mother commented [to me] “if I had to lose any of my children,
it would be better to lose one I hadn’t become attached to. If anything was to have happened to her, I would
have preferred it in the first three months.”’ See J. Kennell and M. Klaus, Maternal Infant Bonding, St Louis:
Mosby, 1976, p. 210.
443
Nicol, Loss of a Baby, pp. 13-15.
444
Nicol, Loss of a Baby, p. 15.
141
miscarriage and perinatal loss were extremely complex life events – not, as was previously
thought, a ‘sad event’ that could be resolved by simply having another child. She argued
that many women faced multiple ‘losses’ following such an experience, including the death
of their own dreams and hopes for that particular child, and their own preparations for
impending motherhood which had been cruelly interrupted. Relationships with the baby’s
father, Nicol argued, were often complicated following loss. However, she was at pains to
point out that, for many women, their grief was often intensely focused towards the loss of
the individual baby, even though society was reluctant to acknowledge a baby that was
‘unknown’: ‘to others, this baby may be only an unknown child. To the mother, her baby is
deeply known and loved. The mother has many links to the baby’s past and through the
future. She often intuitively knows her baby well, through all the memories and daydreams
she has had of her child’. 445
Nicol’s study was a watershed in many ways, not least for the construction of the unborn
child as potentially holding many meanings for the mother. 446 Significantly, she also
refuted the idea that attachment began only when foetal movement is felt. Whilst previous
writers made distinction between perinatal loss as a significant life event and miscarriage as
a potentially distressing event, Nicol argued that it was unwise indeed to treat women who
had miscarried merely as gynaecological patients, and deplored the inadequacy of medical
terms in fully explaining the meaning that that pregnancy may have held for the mother:
The loss of a baby up to the twelfth week of pregnancy is termed a ‘spontaneous
abortion’. Neither the terms ‘spontaneous abortion’ nor ‘miscarriage’ convey the
reality that a mother has lost a baby … Emotionally the first trimester seems to be
the period when the mother begins to experience the baby as an integral part of
herself. For this reason, if the baby dies during this term, the woman may feel that
she has lost a part of her own self. Grieving over the loss of one’s self can be as
painful as grieving for the loss of the real baby inside the mother. 447
Nicol’s research and conclusions were fundamentally radical in challenging the dominant
construction of perinatal death and its potential impact on women’s health. For decades
445
Nicol, Loss of a Baby, p. 9.
Some writers continued to view the loss of a baby in abstract terms, as the shattering of dreams or the loss
of ‘what could have been’. For example, British doctors Lewis and Page claimed that stillborn babies are
‘idealised’ in the mother’s imagination and are individually indistinguishable whilst in utero: ‘If the mother
has little or no experience of her newborn, it will only have been really known to her as a foetus. And like
identical twins until you know them, one foetus is much like another’. See E. Lewis and A. Page, ‘Failure to
Mourn a Stillbirth: An Overlooked Catastrophe’, British Journal of Medical Psychology, no. 51, 1978, p. 240.
447
Nicol, Loss of a Baby, p. 61.
446
142
women had been deprived of their baby’s body, protected or constrained in their mourning,
and the babies constructed as essentially ‘unknowable beings’ held in scant regard by many
in the hospital and community. 448
‘Full of feminist zeal’: the professionalising of allied health and challenges to the
management of perinatal death
Simultaneous to the emerging ideas of prenatal attachment and the potential grief response
after miscarriage or perinatal death was a more general cultural shift within the community
against the positioning of the medical profession as authority in women’s health; in the
decades to follow, this challenge would serve to transform the way that perinatal loss was
managed and understood even within the hospital. As Reiger has argued, the late 1950s saw
the emergence of a social climate that increasingly grew ‘conducive to what we now call
‘consumer rights’ ’, particularly in the sphere of women organising themselves to ‘assert
their desire for more control over birth and lactation’. 449 The evolution of ‘activist mothers’
who lobbied for greater control over their pregnant and lactating bodies resulted in the
formation of the Association for the Advancement of Painless Childbirth [AAPC] in 1961,
which evolved to become the Childbirth Education Association [CEA] in 1965. The 1970s
would prove to be fertile years for the CEA, fuelled by the newly elected Whitlam Labor
government coming to power in late 1972 450 and what Reiger describes as the feminist and
consumer movements’ ‘wider mood for social critique’. 451
448
The suggestions for change still could astound even those who promulgated them. Eminent British
paediatrician, Hugh Jolly, spoke passionately on an ABC radio programme in 1977 about the issue of
stillbirth, concerned that many women were attended by unsympathetic staff, who either wilfully or through
well-meaning ignorance, came across as ‘callous’. Dr Jolly claimed that ‘the Western world in general has
failed to study the needs of … parents [of stillborn babies]’, and recounted several incidences of shocking
coldness, such as the man who was customarily banned from the labour ward only to walk past the sluice and
find his dead baby ‘lying amongst the dirty tea cups’. His astonishment at the depth of grief after loss,
however, was evident as he recalled that ‘what really did amaze me was that in many instances the loss of a
baby many years previously was still so acute that the mother burst into tears when telling me of the event.
Clearly, she had not been able to work through her grief and the baby was still unmourned’. See Dr Hugh
Jolly, ‘Loss of a Baby: Transcript from ABC Radio Programme “Guest of Honour”’, Australian Nursing
Journal [ANJ], vol. 7, no. 4, 1977, p. 40.
449
Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies, p. 37.
450
For a more detailed analysis of the social and political changes wrought by the reformist Whitlam Labor
government – the first Labor government since 1949 – see J. Faulkner and S. MacIntyre, True Believers: The
Story of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2001; R. McMullin, The Light on
the Hill: The Australian Labor Party, 1891-1991, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991.
451
Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies, p. 65.
143
By the 1970s the conservative trust in the medical profession’s authority that so marked
many prior decades was being questioned, particularly with regard to the surveillance and
supervision of women’s bodies during pregnancy and childbirth. The growing homebirth
movement was testament to this dissatisfaction, as more and more women demanded that
their needs and desires in labour and childbirth be considered. Women began to choose
homebirth in order to ‘reclaim’ control over their bodies; to demand that they be able to
give birth to their children without routine use of analgesia and other interventions such as
episiotomy; and for the opportunity to be close to their child immediately after birth and for
their partner to be able to play a significant role in the birth – features which were
not likely to be a part of the experience of giving birth before this period.
Behind this challenge to conservative ideas of the treatment of labour and childbirth was a
growing dissatisfaction amongst members of the midwifery profession. Many midwives
had begun to resent their unenviable status compared to that of the obstetrician and by the
mid 1970s had begun to openly deplore this and to call for a strengthening of the profession
as a whole. In an impassioned plea to her colleagues in 1979, Jane Shoebridge, for
example, claimed that the midwifery profession was ‘transfixed by bureaucracy and
between
occupation
boundaries
dominated
from
above
by
obstetricians
and
gynaecologists’. 452 By the 1980s, many midwives, it seemed, were no longer content to
occupy the lowly role bestowed on them by the medical profession. As I argue in previous
chapters, nurses and midwives had been positioned as completely subservient to
obstetricians and gynaecologists since the medicalisation of childbirth in the early twentieth
century. Australian registered nurses Patty Brandner and Mary Bayer noted that nurses and
midwives were treated as second – class citizens in the medical world and had no agency in
terms of decision making: ‘medicine says ‘frog’ and nursing jumps’. 453 Liz, a bereaved
mother who also worked as a midwife in the 1970s, recalls that a woman in her position
would never dare challenge the obstetrician, nor act above his head; even although she
might privately disagree with their actions:
I’ve seen [stillbirths] happen … I remember delivering a baby, and thinking, oh, it
doesn’t look too good. And that was a girl that I knew … and she’s saying to me,
‘Liz, what’s wrong, what’s wrong’. ‘Ohhh, it’s not up to me … the doctor’s just
452
Jane Shoebridge, ‘Questioning Current Attitudes in Nursing and Midwifery’, ANJ, vol. 9, no. 3, 1979, p.
47.
453
Mary Bayer & Patty Brandner, ‘Feminism and Nursing’, ANJ, vol. 4, no. 8, 1978, p. 33.
144
over there examining the baby, he’ll be over soon’ – and then the coward wouldn’t
say anything to her. I mean, it was obvious [the baby had died]. 454
Shoebridge was one midwife who petitioned those in her profession to challenge the
absolute faith in medical science and technology and to return to what she perceived to be
their original vocation – ‘patient-focused’ care rather than clinical management motivated
by scientific understandings of the body. Instead of acting as the subservient assistant to the
aloof medico, Shoebridge argued that midwives should carefully consider the psychosocial
needs of mother and baby, aiming to care for women and their babies in a holistic manner:
Do midwives feel deprived of the role they know they are trained to do? They are
trained to give advice to clients on pregnancy, to monitor the normal physiological
process of pregnancy and to refer complications, to help support women in labour
and their families, to help women deliver their babies and to guide the mother, baby
and family through the puerperium and indeed, if needed, beyond it. 455
This shift from institution-based care to patient–focused care was doubtless driven in part
by ideals of feminism. In seeking to care for pregnant women in what was understood to be
a more holistic approach, midwives and other allied-health professionals, such as social
workers, challenged the masculinist medical discourse which constructed the body in
purely physiological terms, and they sought to raise awareness of the fact that women, as
important consumers of hospital services, were not being served well. 456 Bayer and
Brandner urged nurses to think of their fellow nursing colleagues and their female patients
as part of the ‘sisterhood’ and encouraged the feminist ideal of co-operation: ‘[Feminists’]
game is, ‘give your sister a hand’’. 457 Writing in the early 1980s, social workers influenced
by second-wave feminism echoed these sentiments, arguing that women patients’ needs
were not being met and that hospital services pertaining to women were often delivered
insensitively and with little regard for the individual patient. Other social workers and
midwives wrote of ways in which feminist theory could contribute to the psychosocial care
454
Liz, interview with researcher.
Shoebridge, ‘Questioning Current Attitudes’, p. 47.
456
See for example Janet George, ‘Women, Health Policy and Social Work: Dilemmas of Theory and
Practice’, in H. Marchant and B. Wearing (eds) Gender Reclaimed: Women in Social Work, Sydney: Hale &
Iremonger, c1986, p. 172.
457
Bayer & Brandner, ‘Feminism and Nursing’, p. 33.
455
145
of women in the health care system, focusing particularly on the need to educate women as
to the ways in which they could support each other. 458
In an effort to unite Australian midwives, the National Body of Midwives was formed in
July 1978. Perhaps responding to the call of Bayer and Brandner four years earlier to
‘interact directly with the patriarchal system, engage it in dialogue or combat, teach it,
change it’ 459 there were efforts to educate nurses and midwives of the need to treat all
patients with compassion and dignity – to treat the ‘whole person’, not just the physical
condition. Nursing education in the past had emphasised an aloof approach to patients and
had placed little, if any, emphasis on individuality, but the late 1970s and early 1980s
marked a new trend in nursing and midwifery care. Filling a ‘most necessary gap in the
educative process within [the community]’, the late 1970s heralded a new course at
Gippsland Institute of Advanced Education, headed by well-respected Melbourne
undertaker Des Tobin, which aimed to educate health professionals as to ‘the necessary
background and functional understanding of the social and psychological aspects of death,
dying and bereavement in Australia today’. 460 At the Second National Midwives’ Congress
held in Melbourne in early 1981, Lady Cowen, wife of the incumbent Governor – General,
noted the recent changes in midwifery care and urged attendees to fully accept a ‘more
caring and less authoritarian approach to midwifery – one which [takes] account of
Australia’s diversity’. 461
Almost immediately after the national body was formed, some midwives began to take an
interest in the emerging ideas of grief and loss – for instance, study days and seminars were
held at both national and state levels to help educate those who were involved in the care of
dying patients, including babies. The ‘Death and Dying Workshop’ at Monash University
in September 1980, was intended for ‘professional staff and others whose work involves
458
See, for example S. Speedy, ‘Feminism and the Profession of Nursing’, Australian Journal of Advanced
Nursing [AJAN], vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 20-27; Deborah Saltman, Women and Health: An Introduction to Issues,
Sydney: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991; Dorothy Broom, Unfinished Business: Social Justice for Women
in Australia, Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1984, p. 54; H. Marchant and B. Wearing, ‘The Gender
Dimension of Social Work Education, Past Present and Future’, in Edna Chamberlain (ed.) Change and
Continuity in Australian Social Work, Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1988; H. Marchant and B. Wearing
(eds) Gender Reclaimed: Women in Social Work, Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, c1986, passim.
459
Bayer & Brandner, ‘Feminism and Nursing’, p. 33.
460
Des Tobin, quoted in an advertisement for the course in ANJ, vol. 7, no. 8, 1978, p. 6.
461
Lady Cowen, ‘Report of Second National Midwives Congress, Melbourne February 1981’, ANJ, vol. 10,
no. 9, 1981, p. 13.
146
them with the dying and bereaved and those coping with loss’, and speakers included Des
Tobin and Patricia Harrison, a lecturer in obstetrics and gynaecology at University of
Melbourne. 462 Similarly, the Midwives Annual City Seminar for 1981 focused solely on
perinatal death and the midwife’s role and involvement in this event. 463
At the RWH in Melbourne and KEMH in Perth, some social workers and midwives, along
with a few obstetricians, spearheaded the push to change the way that women were treated
when they came to hospital to give birth. Coupled with the emerging literature on the
psychosocial needs of pregnant women, as well as the embracing of feminism, was the fact
that the late 1970s and early 1980s heralded a major shift in community attitudes towards
exnuptial birth. In the decades prior to the 1970s, most social workers were preoccupied
with adoption issues, but as single motherhood became more socially acceptable and
financially viable, social workers were able to turn their focus to other needs within the
hospital. 464 Although allied health professionals were no doubt affected by theorists of grief
and loss, 465 many were keen to find ways to actually implement theory and a crucial part of
this became listening to parents themselves. This was of course a radical step, moving from
the authoritative voice of the medical profession, who held themselves responsible for
disseminating medical knowledge and information, towards a parent–focused approach that
462
Advertisement for one-day workshop on ‘Death and Dying’ on the 15th September 1980 at Monash
University, ANJ, vol. 10, no. 2, 1980, p. 80.
463
Change also occurred with staff educating each other within the hospital itself and through nursing journals
such as the ANJ. Experienced neonatal midwives also encouraged other midwives to treat each patient with
respect and dignity, stressing the importance of treating the family as a whole, in order to obtain the best
possible outcome for a tiny, often sick, baby in the nursery. For example, Kaye Eddy outlined several ‘daily
responsibilities’ that were essential duties for the busy neonatal intensive care nurse: ‘Our daily responsibility
should include such questions as, has mother telephoned or visited? If not, we should ask why! If parents have
not seen their babe, have we sent a photo? Has doctor spoken to parents regarding any change of condition? Is
mother wishing to breastfeed her babe and has she been instructed on how to express her milk? Have we
involved the social worker with any family problems? If at all possible has mother been brought to visit and
encouraged to touch or hold her baby even if he or she is attached to numerous bags and tubes?’ See Kaye
Eddy, ‘Aspects of Neonatal Nursing’, ANJ, vol. 7, no. 1, July 1977,
p. 32.
464
McCalman, Sex and Suffering, p. 342.
465
Libby Lloyd, interview with 17 November 2004; Robert Anderson, interview with researcher, 16
November 2004. Tapes and transcripts of both interviews in possession of researcher.
147
sought to value the needs and desires of the patient, and privileged patients’ dignity. 466
Libby Lloyd, who started her career at KEMH in 1977, recalls that ‘the main thing I think
we were interested in [during] those days at King Edward in the late seventies, early
eighties was how to learn from parents and how to support parents supporting each other.
We were more interested in that than the theory per se’. 467
This was a revelation in terms of constructions of pregnancy loss. For perhaps the first
time, health professionals sought the wisdom of bereaved parents in seeking to understand
what parents felt they wanted and needed after the death of their baby. Other writers, such
as Peter Barr, an obstetrician, and his wife, social worker Deborah de Wilde, echoed the
importance of recognising the individual nature of grief saying that ‘each person
experiences of expresses his or her grief differently according to a number of different
factors including past childhood and adolescent experiences and the meaning and
significance attached to the person who died’.468
Changing practice: the special care nursery and parent support groups
In the area of perinatal death, most early practical change grew out of the intensive care
nursery, and was later extended to the care of women whose babies were stillborn or
miscarried. The work of prominent American physicians Klaus, Slyter and Kennell had
opened the door for women to be granted contact with their dying or critically ill newborns
and it was increasingly understood that this could produce beneficial results rather than
irrevocably harm the woman, as had been believed for many years.469 For example at
KEMH half of the tiny department - two social workers out of a complete staff of four 466
In a general sense, the notion of ‘patient rights’ was garnering support in hospitals such as RWH in
Melbourne. McCalman, for example, recounts the story of an immigrant mother whose baby was in the
neonatal intensive care unit; the mother ‘lashed out’ at a nurse who was subsequently badly beaten in the
attack. After the mother was declared to be ‘psychotic’ she was transferred to a psychiatric hospital, where a
psychiatrist, with the help of a translator, found that the mother was ‘perfectly sane’; she had believed that
staff had taken her baby away from her and, understandably, had reacted violently. From this point onwards,
nursing staff increasingly exerted their energies into better ways to care for staff from different cultural
backgrounds. See McCalman, Sex and Suffering, p. 332.
467
Lloyd, interview with researcher.
468
Peter Barr and Deborah de Wilde, Stillbirth and newborn death: Death and life are the same mysteries,
Camperdown, NSW, 1987, p. 46.
469
Responding to Klaus and Kennell’s groundbreaking research, psychologists advocated that mothers be
allowed to hold their infants, as recognition of the bond that had formed prenatally and to help complete the
grieving process. See for example Thomas A. Helmrath. & Elaine M. Steinitz, ‘Death of an Infant: Parental
Grieving and the Failure of Social Support’, Journal of Family Practice, vol. 6, no. 4, 1978, p. 790.
148
was responsible for psychosocial care in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit [NICU] in the
late 1970s. Although Libby Lloyd recalls that most of the nursing staff in NICU were
receptive to any change in the care of patients and their family, in the late 1970s and early
1980s social workers were often responsible for addressing any psychosocial issues that
arose. Although developing into the multi-professional model that would emerge only a
decade or so later, Lloyd recollects that the early days of bereavement support in the NICU
was a very hefty responsibility of the social work department:
If I think about the nursery, social work was probably the more
prominent resource in terms of bereavement support. The nurses were
obviously involved around the deaths and in basic support for the
parents but weren’t as prominent or confident as they became … The
paediatricians were of course central from the parents’ point of view, in
the process of decision making, giving news, making agonising
decisions, and the obstetricians similarly, but the obstetricians were
always a bit more in the background. I think if they had private patients,
they would follow them up but the public patients, there was
an expectation that GPs would follow them up and that happened in a
very variable way, I think. And certainly delivery midwives were
certainly always very engaged in the whole process, but it was only for
the time that they had business with it. So I think there became … I
certainly noticed when I came back a decade later … that [in] the
special care nursery, the nurses were much more involved with the
managing of the dying, as it were, so whereas in the late 70s, I would
have been present for every death, in working hours anyway, you know,
orchestrating it a little bit if you like, as in, go to a quiet room, sit with
the people, help the relatives, what are we going to do with the children,
with grandma, bring cups of tea, tissues, all that sort of stuff. 470
Lloyd also recalls that, many years before these actions were formalised into policy, she
and two other staff members in the hospital – the midwife in charge of delivery ward and
the head nurse of the special nursery – would have ‘conversations’ to plan for a more
cohesive programme to help support parents; 471 however a significant agent for change at
this time were the parents themselves. Recent trends in the community had meant that
hospital care was gradually growing more patient–focused and listening to parents’ needs
was a significant step towards changing ways of supporting women who had lost a baby. 472
The manifestation of listening to parents, at KEMH at least, coupled with the enthusiasm of
470
Lloyd, interview with researcher.
Lloyd, interview with researcher.
472
For discussions on this topic, see for example, D. Milliken, ‘Changes in the Neonatal Nurse’s Role,’ ANJ,
vol. 8, no. 4, 1978, pp. 30-33 & 40.
471
149
some staff for the ideals of a supportive ‘sisterhood’, was the birth of several support
groups. At KEMH in 1980, recalled Libby Lloyd:
One of the things that I did was to establish a self-help group called
PIPA - Preterm Infant Parents’ Association - and after a little while of
those gatherings, we made a video of people talking about their
experiences and so on, [and] there came a parent who said, ‘well I had a
prem., but it died and I need help now for its dying’, and then another
who said ‘I had a prem., but it was to do with IVF’, so we started
Concern for the Infertile, and then we started off SANDS. So in one
glorious year there were three of these groups running. 473
All but Support After Neonatal Death [SANDS] faded over time, but, according to Lloyd, it
had become obvious to social workers at the hospital that women would most likely need
support after the death of a baby - and that women could draw great support from each
other. 474 In a wider sense, the birth of the support group for bereaved parents grew out of a
more general trend towards an acceptance of grief; culturally, the medical profession had
begun to lose its grip on the management of birth and death. Alternative services developed
out of a broader cultural shift of women agitating for more sensitive and ‘appropriate’ care.
Feminist health workers in the 1970s and 1980s decried the medical model of health
services that positioned women as dependent upon the medical practitioner who was the
sole means of a ‘cure’. Feminist sociologist Dorothy Broom, for example, claimed that
doctors were placed by the profession and society in general as ‘important actors’ in
women’s lives; although pregnancy and childbirth were such significant life events for
many Australian women, Broom noted that women played correspondingly minor roles in
the obstetrical arena. 475
Reflecting on this era, Wendy Weeks noted that the women’s movement was instrumental
in exposing the medical profession’s lack of awareness, or interest, in women’s
experiences, which was combined with the prevailing medical view that effective care
meant divorcing oneself from the patient, ‘not noticing that their race, ethnicity, gender and
personal experience must have an enormous impact on what they see and hear, how they
think, what they consider evidence and what are the range of possible solutions they might
473
Lloyd, interview with researcher.
Lloyd, interview with researcher.
475
Broom, Unfinished Business, p. 54.
474
150
propose’. 476 The feminist movement had already begun to promote the vitality of
supportive relationships between women and the 1970s had seen the establishment of the
first women’s refuge centres, rape crisis centres and women’s referral centres in
Australia. 477 Within this environment, some health professionals had begun to realise that
healthy and useful partnerships could be formed with parents who had suffered the loss of a
baby, and worked to form relationships that would help address their needs better and
promote a what was perceived to be healthier grieving process. 478
For example, SANDS (WA) had an inauspicious beginning in 1979 at KEMH, with the
fledgling group’s first meeting convened by Libby Lloyd, who had herself recently suffered
a miscarriage, and held in the office of the part time psychiatrist who fortuitously happened
to be away that particular day. Although the meeting was not without its problems – Lloyd
remembers that the psychiatrist was none too pleased that his office was used by a ‘bunch
of women’ without his explicit permission – the concept was well received and, according
to Lloyd the women who attended found this first informal meeting a great
encouragement. 479 It was in fact a meeting rooted quite deeply in the particular cultural and
social changes that were occurring both outside the microcosm of the hospital – a time
when more women were demanding that their needs and desires be heard – and within the
clinical setting, with many social workers embracing the feminist ideal of ‘women
validating other women’s experience’ and recognising the significance of supportive
relationships amongst women. 480 Lloyd, attending the meeting as part-participant and partsocial worker, said that the ten or so women who met that day ‘just as women shared our
experiences. It was a very strong time of the women’s movement, I was full of feminist zeal
and all the rest of it’. 481 On the face of it an informal meeting of ten or so women in a small
isolated city in Australia is hardly extraordinary; in the light of years of silence surrounding
miscarriage and perinatal death, this small gathering gives insight into the reinscribing of
476
Wendy Weeks, Women Working Together: Lessons From Feminist Women’s Services, Melbourne:
Longman Cheshire, 1994, p. 63.
477
Weeks, Women Working Together, pp. 63-65. See also Murray, More than a Refuge, passim.
478
For more on the development of parent-focused or patient-focused care see Barbara Downe-Wamboldt &
Mary-Lou Ellerton, ‘The Parent Connection: Self-help for Families of Chronically Ill Children’, ANJ, vol. 13,
no. 11, 1984, pp. 50-2; A. Katz, ‘Self-help Organisations and Volunteer Participation in Social Welfare’,
Social Work, vol 15, 1970, pp. 51-60; D. Robinson, ‘The Self-help Component of Primary Health Care’,
Social Science and Medicine, vol. 14A, 1980, pp. 415 – 421.
479
Lloyd, interview with researcher.
480
See for example Marchant and Wearing (eds.) Gender Reclaimed, p. 59.
481
Lloyd, interview with researcher.
151
the foetal body and a significant challenge to the construction of pregnancy loss which
underscored the practice of ‘protection’.
After this first informal event a public meeting was held and the SANDS (WA) Committee
was formed, consisting mainly of parents but still with welcome involvement from health
professionals and those involved in caring for bereaved parents. 482 Alongside the research
that Margaret Nicol was undertaking at KEMH at the same time, SANDS (WA) would
prove to have a great influence on the way hospital practice changed to meet the needs of
parents who had suffered the loss of a baby. Volunteers, mostly bereaved parents, acted at
the grassroots level to help promote better understanding of the impact of perinatal death on
a family. 483 For example, social workers from KEMH and bereaved parents spoke at many
seminars from the mid 1980s, to audiences consisting of high school early education
students, social work students, nursing and midwifery students, and, astonishingly, to final
year medical students and experienced paediatricians and neonatal nurses. 484
This was astonishing simply because, for decades, the medical profession had positioned
itself as the authority on matters concerning pregnancy and childbirth, and the birth of the
parents’ support group signified both the relinquishing of some of this control to the
bereaved parents themselves and a reinscribing of foetus as valuable and irreplaceable
child. Not only did this offer bereaved parents a sense of agency that they had previously
482
In a report of the activities of SANDS (WA) at KEMH, the comments of the Charge Sister of the Labour
Ward were recorded: ‘I would like a regular commitment from SANDS to participate in our In-Service
Education’. See ‘Evaluation of SANDS Teaching Programmes’, c1987. Unpublished document held in
KEMH Social Work archives. See also SANDS (WA) ‘Submission to the Centre for Women’s Health
funding’, c1996. Unpublished document held in KEMH Social Work archives.
483
At a meeting of the SANDS Advisory Council in March 1987, the Chairperson Jane Gillon spoke of the
reciprocal relationship between SANDS and KEMH; the minutes record that the Advisory Council, which
was composed of obstetricians, nursing and midwifery staff alongside members of the SANDS (WA)
Committee, was established with the express purpose of extending the activities of SANDS in the hospital:
‘SANDS has grown in the past few years, as has our recognition in Health Care (SANDS very aware that we
could be felt as a threat to people in the Health Care area). The Advisory Council provides recognition for us
in the eyes of other professionals. It is also hoped that through the Advisory Council we will have access if
problems arise. It gives the group someone to turn to; also, if there is any way SANDS could be of assistance
to Advisory Council members, the channels are open’. See SANDS Advisory Council, Minutes, 31 March
1987. Unpublished document held in KEMH Social Work archives.
484
For example over the course of a three month period in 1987, SANDS (WA) volunteers spoke to various
groups including KEMH social work students; St John of God Hospital nursing staff; LaSalle College Year
11 Early Childhood students; Churchlands campus Western Australian College of Advanced Education
nursing students; Curtin University postgraduate midwives; Bentley Hospital nursing staff; Franciscan Group
Lesmurdie, WA. See SANDS (WA) newsletters, September-November 1987. Unpublished documents held in
KEMH Social Work archives.
152
been denied, it was a radical about-face for many in the medical profession. Most of the
twentieth century was characterised by a widely accepted belief that medicine held the
answers for society’s ills, particularly in the areas of maternity, which had become
pathologised with the medicalisation of childbirth. Even those obstetricians and doctors
who had begun to accept the early ideas of the psychological impact of stillbirth and
neonatal death in the 1970s had characteristically assumed any responsibility for parental
grief by believing that they would be able to ‘fix’ this tragedy, by helping the woman
deliver a live child. 485
Practical change
Although support groups such as SANDS still valued the input of supportive health
professionals they were predicated on the value of the experience of the bereaved parents
themselves. Parents also sat on committees in various hospitals that were formed during the
1980s, such as the Perinatal Death Multidisciplinary Committee [PDMC] at Royal
Women’s Hospital in Melbourne, 486 and their opinion and experience was generally held in
high regard – a significant step from previous decades where the medical profession’s
understandings of perinatal death were given sole recognition. The PDMC was formed at
the RWH in Melbourne initially as a temporary means of investigating ways to better
support parents after infant death, and consisted of representatives from the social work
department, obstetrics, paediatrics, gynaecology, nursing and administration. It would
prove to be a more long-lasting committee than was originally thought, as the challenges to
complete medical authority exposed bereaved parents’ needs. 487
485
Writing in 1970, Giles had come to the conclusion that the obstetrician remained the major player in the
drama of a stillbirth, with his primary role being to reassure the woman as to the prognosis of any future
pregnancy. See Giles, ‘Reactions of Women to Perinatal Death’, pp. 208-210. British obstetrician Emanuel
Lewis echoed this sentiment, noting that although a stillbirth presented a ‘challenge’ to the obstetrician, their
role was to then to deliver the woman of a (subsequent) live child, despite the practitioner’s own fears, citing
the example of a woman who was encouraged to stay in a particular hospital to give birth: ‘In encouraging her
to stay the obstetricians were able to help her bear the anxiety about the pregnancy by demonstrating that they
themselves could tolerate it’. See Lewis, ‘The Abhorrence of Stillbirth’, p. 324
486
See Marilyn Kenny, memorandum to members of the Perinatal Death Multidisciplinary Committee
[PDMC], 12 January 1987. Unpublished document held in RWH Archives.
487
For example, social workers at RWH wrote to the founder of the Stillbirth Association in the UK, Hazel
Wood - herself a bereaved mother - requesting information to ‘[improve] our care for the mothers of stillborn
babies’. See Bethia Stevenson, letter to Hazel Wood, November 1978. Unpublished document held in RWH
Archives.
153
The primary aim of the various SANDS groups around the country was, of course, to
provide understanding and support for women and their families who had experienced a
loss of some kind. 488 Initially SANDS (WA), at least, was principally concerned with
stillbirth and neonatal death, but increasingly found that women who had had miscarriages
felt that their losses were invalidated, having found little support and understanding both
within the hospital and amongst their relatives and friends. Pregnancy loss under twenty
weeks was usually dealt with by gynaecology, rather than obstetrics, and whilst many
midwives were becoming increasingly familiar and accepting of changes to hospital
practice, nursing staff in gynaecology wards and theatre were often not familiar with recent
understandings of pregnancy loss and tended to still view miscarriage in a somewhat
offhand manner. 489
Maureen, for example, whose fourth pregnancy ended in miscarriage just after twelve
weeks gestation in 1984, remembers her experience in hospital in terms of a ‘procedure’ –
that is, the routine procedure of dilation and curettage or ‘D&C’ – and she returned home
the next day. Upon returning to daily life, she felt that most people responded dismissively
to her experience, or avoided talking about it entirely. Still, it stayed in her memory as a
difficult time, because she had already inscribed her twelve-week foetus as a baby:
I found it quite hard, cause what a lot of people say to you … when you have three
children [is] ‘why are you worried about losing one?’ Because miscarriages are
fairly common, and people don’t sort of understand, I suppose, that that was still a
baby that you wanted, even though you had three. So I found that quite hard – and
people would say, ‘oh you’ll be fine, you’ve got three children’ … but I think it
probably took me a good six months to get over it and come to terms with the fact…
another thing that people would always say as well was ‘it wasn’t meant to be’. 490
Although Maureen was not told the sex of her baby and did not harbour any prolonged
desire to know what had happened to the foetus after the D&C, other women at this time
were starting to push for the right to find out the sex of their miscarried baby and for the
488
Branches of SANDS groups were formed in all states and territories of Australia in the late 1970s,
however by the end of the twentieth century SANDS groups only remained in Victoria, Queensland and South
Australia. In other states and both territories, SANDS had become part of SIDS and Kids, an amalgamation of
the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome support group and SANDS. Libby Lloyd recalled that the decision to
merge the two groups was a pragmatic one; SANDS urgently required funding which the SIDS group could
provide. It was, she said, a marriage of ‘the men in suits at one organisation and boxes of tissues at another’.
Lloyd, interview with researcher.
489
This view was expressed by Jennings, who specialises in the area of perinatal death. Jennings, interview
with researcher.
490
Maureen, interview with researcher, 16 May 2005. Tapes and transcript in possession of researcher.
154
chance to bury the so-called ‘non-viable foetal material’ with dignity and a degree of
ceremony. 491 Legally, such foetuses belonged to the hospital and parents had no right of
ownership over foetal remains, and no death certificate was issued until the pregnancy had
reached twenty weeks gestation or four hundred grammes in weight. 492 Without a death
certificate, then, cemeteries were legally unable to accept miscarried babies for burial. It
was the opinion of the Crown Solicitor of Victoria in 1982 that, in accordance with the
Victoria Registration of Births, Deaths and Marriages Act 1959, ‘non-viable foetal tissue’
could not be buried in cemeteries because it was not a body or a corpse – it was, in essence,
a non-being. Pointing out that ‘viable’ foetuses should be disposed of ‘any way which does
not constitute a nuisance or an affront to public decency’, he did concede that parents of
foetuses under twenty weeks gestation could negotiate with the hospital to bury this
material in a similar manner to a foetus over twenty weeks gestation. The final authority lay
with the hospital however, as the Crown Solicitor confirmed the supervisory role of the
doctors – ‘parents have no enforceable rights to possession’- and he recommended that
hospitals thoroughly investigate parents’ psychological state before deciding to release the
foetal remains. 493
The Crown Solicitor’s comments brought into sharp relief the contrast between the legal
status of a miscarried foetus and the inscribing of the foetal body as unknowable and many
parents’ own inscriptions of their deceased foetuses. SANDS (Victoria) had been concerned
with the nature of hospital burials since its formation and, together with the social workers
at RWH, had begun an extensive campaign to completely overhaul the accepted practice of
hospital-organised burials, as well as the issue of disposal of ‘non-viable’ foetuses. 494 In the
past, miscarried babies were usually disposed of in the hospital incinerator and babies of a
491
See Marilyn Kenny, memorandum to members of PMDC, 12 January 1987.
The Minutes of the SANDS Advisory Council meeting on the 31st March 1987 at KEMH note that this
was increasingly becoming a concern of many parents. The Chairperson, Jane Gillon, remarked that some
women whose babies fell under the twenty week gestational classification had requested a funeral, but as
Committee member, Anne Donaldson noted ‘there would currently be an ‘ownership’ problem, as under
twenty weeks, the baby is the property of the hospital!’ See SANDS Advisory Council, Minutes, 31 March
1987.
493
The Crown Solicitor’s opinion was expressed within a letter from H.V. Feehan, Secretary, Hospitals
Division, Health Department of Victoria, to the Chief Executive Officer of RWH Melbourne, Dr Yeatman, on
31st October 1982. Mr Feehan was responding to an earlier letter from Dr Yeatman, dated 15 November 1982,
in which he raised the issue of burial of ‘non-viable’ foetuses, after several requests from RWH patients.
Unpublished documents held in RWH Archives.
494
Marilyn Kenny, ‘RWH Management Course Task Administrative Project, Hospital Burials for babies
dying in the perinatal period – alternatives’. No date (circa 1980s). Unpublished document held in RWH
Archives.
492
155
‘viable’ gestation were either buried through private arrangements or, more commonly,
through a hospital-arranged burial. 495 At RWH at least, which as the major teaching
hospital in Victoria dealt with most perinatal deaths, over 100 babies per year were interred
through this method; miscarried foetuses were also transferred to RWH from smaller
hospitals for hospital burial. The burial process was described in a manual for social
workers in 1982:
Babies awaiting a hospital funeral are left in mortuary refrigeration in
the pathology department. When a sufficient number have accumulated
(usually ten) the Mortuary Attendant contacts the funeral director who
usually comes within a day or two to collect the caskets. The caskets are
very plain, wooden containers made by the hospital carpenters. Each
baby has an individual container and these are sealed. In a hospital
burial the baby is buried in a common grave usually containing some
hundreds of bodies. There is no religious service with this type of burial.
The burial is done quietly and with dignity by the undertakers and the
cemetery attendants with the caskets being handed down into the
grave. 496
Prior to the mid 1980s, many involved with the care of bereaved parents genuinely believed
hospital burial to be a viable choice, reasoning that the cost of a private burial was often
prohibitive to many families. An extract of the discussion paper of the Mortuary and
Cemeteries Administration Committees Review of Cemetery Legislation in Victoria stated
that ‘many stillbirths are buried in groups in public graves, either due to the parents’ wish
for this cheap form of disposal, or as a result of their ignorance of the other options’. 497
Many hospital staff also assumed that hospital burials would be beneficial to the parents,
believing that by removing them from funeral arrangements, their distress would be
minimised. Libby Lloyd remembered with some embarrassment offering this service to
parents in the 1980s, believing at the time that it was a reasonable option, even though she
495
The Secretary of the Hospitals Division, Health Department of Victoria, Mr Feehan, stated his opinion to
the CEO of RWH that ‘the public generally accept disposal through the hospital incinerator’. H.V. Feehan,
Letter to Dr Yeatman, 31 October 1983. Unpublished document held in RWH Archives.
496
The manual reminded staff that parents were not to be encouraged to attend the burial and that no markers
or memorialisation of any sort was allowed at the cemetery. See Social Work Department, RWH Melbourne,
‘Procedure Statement: Baby Death and the Social Work Department’, 1982.
497
Social Work Department, RWH Melbourne, ‘Memorialisation of stillbirths buried in public graves, Royal
Women’s Hospital Extracts of Discussion Paper: Extracts from Mortuary and Cemeteries Administration
Committee Review of Cemetery Legislation – Discussion Paper’, November 1986. Unpublished document
held in RWH Archives.
156
recalls that the grave for hospital burials was ‘essentially a giant grave … [filled] in
gradually’ without ceremony or individualisation. 498
In reality, however, with the emerging ideas of prenatal attachment came the understanding
that the choice of burial was not as simple as disposing of the foetal body. Within the
construction of perinatal loss as a significant experience in women’s lives, the funeral was
viewed as part of the complex process of resolution of grief, and it was argued that the
opportunity to play an active role in the funeral arrangements would help parents in dealing
with their loss as well as gain some sense of agency in an otherwise hopeless situation. 499
Some health professionals also feared that the great number of bad debts each year for
hospital burials would leave parents with a sense of unresolved guilt and could even
prevent them from returning to the hospital for subsequent deliveries. 500 For some women,
the sense of economic disenfranchisement and lack of viable choice did lead to a great deal
of guilt. As young parents in Sydney in 1976, Nancye and her husband had chosen the
hospital burial, which had been strongly presented to them as the best option on both
economic grounds and by virtue of their doctor’s opinion that their baby was essentially
‘unknown’. After several weeks, Nancye had rung the cemetery to find out where her baby
was buried only to be told words to the effect of ‘you can’t ask where the baby is buried,
it’s not something we can tell you’. After some persistence, she was then told that her child
was buried with six other babies; she said ‘boy, that bit of news really broke my heart’. 501
Some staff who felt it important to listen to the expectations of parents found that many felt
rushed and ill-informed by other staff members and overbearing family members,
misguidedly hoping to suppress the reality of the event. 502 In a memorandum to other
members of the PMDC, Marilyn Kenny noted that, whilst RWH hospital regulations
498
Lloyd, interview with researcher.
The minutes of the Advisory Council meeting on the 19 April 1988 note the Council’s concern that the
high cost of private burials restricted the choice of burial for some parents: ‘As some parents don’t have a
choice purely because they can’t afford most options, [Council member] Robyn Shine suggested that in
addition to producing a leaflet [on funeral/burial alternatives] we need to set about lobbying for some changes
to the present system; the Cemetery Board should be presented with information from the point of view of
resolution of grief’. See SANDS Advisory Council, Minutes, 19 April 1988. Unpublished document in
KEMH Social Work archives.
500
Kenny, ‘RWH Management Course Task Administrative Project, Hospital Burials’.
501
Nancye, personal correspondence researcher, 12 May 2005. Email in possession of researcher.
502
Bethia Stevenson, memorandum to Assistant Director of Medical Services, Dr Flower, 10 April 1980.
Unpublished document held in RWH Archives.
499
157
required written consent for hospital disposal, consent was often not obtained in smaller
hospitals. Approximately ten percent of RWH hospital burials were babies from other
Melbourne hospitals, and Kenny observed that case records made reference to ‘distressed
parents in labour wards making certain statements, taken as sufficient authority or taking
lack of parents making other arrangements of speaking of them, as permission’. 503
Many parents also complained about the lack of individuality of a hospital burial, which
was increasingly becoming at odds with other practices designed to help parents bond with
their deceased infants. 504 At RWH grieving parents were given just one week to advise the
hospital of their decision for burial, and if the mortuary had not received this advice then
the infant was disposed of by hospital burial. The difference in funeral expenses was
enormous and gives great insight as to why so many parents chose such an arrangement. A
burial arranged through RWH would cost parents $65 to $80 in 1984, compared to over
$450 which would cover the undertaker’s fee for a service and burial in a separate small
gravesite, and would allow for a small memorial such as a headstone. 505 A hospital burial
also meant that family members were usually unable to attend the funeral and publicly
mourn the child, and growing awareness of cultural differences in the practice of mourning
contributed to community pressure to change the availability and access to reasonablypriced burials. 506
Social workers during this period argued that cost, not a lack of desire to publicly
memorialise their child, was the real reason behind most parents choosing a hospital burial
503
Furthermore, Marilyn Kenny noted that smaller hospitals often did not send accurate records to RWH: ‘It
[is] difficult/impossible to obtain names, addresses and telephone numbers of parents. Medical records do not
appear to have access to any of this information. It is wondered whether parents can or are therefore informed
after the burial has taken place and if an account is issued. There can be no reason for treating these parents
more or less favourably than RWH patients in the matter of notification and account’. See Marilyn Kenny,
memorandum to PDMC, 12 January 1987.
504
For example, a bereaved father whose baby had died at RWH after being born prematurely wrote to the
Assistant Medical Director in 1980 that, in his opinion, the hospital-arranged burial ‘detracts from the dignity
of human life and relegates the baby to a non-entity status. On both religious and humanitarian grounds it is a
shocking indictment of the value that your hospital places on human life’. Excerpt from letter from Mr A. to
Dr C. Flower, 13 February 1980. Unpublished document held in RWH Archives.
505
Australian Funeral Directors’ Association set this fee for hospital arranged burials in 1984. See Kenny,
‘RWH Management Course Task Administrative Project, Hospital Burials’.
506
Many parents were increasingly dissatisfied with communal burials. For example in September 1985
SANDS (Victoria) made a submission about this issue to the Mortuary Industry and Cemeteries
Administration Committee, which was, according to Marilyn Kenny, ‘extremely interested and concerned to
hear of the problems with hospital burials’. See Kenny, ‘Hospital burials for babies dying in the perinatal
period – alternatives’.
158
and feared that this economic division would only serve to further marginalise bereaved
parents and enforce their feelings of isolation and powerlessness. 507 In some hospitals
special committees were formed which recognised the need to help parents individualise
their child’s memory. In the early 1980s social workers around the country visited major
cemeteries and met with members of cemetery boards to discuss ways to rectify this
situation. 508 Tours of several cemeteries in Melbourne led social workers at RWH to
overwhelmingly reject communal burials, believing that the shared grave was a poor option
for parents, both in terms of memorialisation – it was usually prohibited by the cemetery
board – aesthetics, and lack of parental involvement. 509 Communal graves were often left
open until full, and were situated in the least attractive part of the cemetery with little
maintenance, undoubtedly making the gravesite a difficult place for parents and family to
visit. 510 In Victoria, there had already been a government inquiry into cemeteries and
crematoria, which had raised doubts as to the existing practice of hospital burials, and the
board of directors at Springvale Necropolis, for example, were keen to provide a more
personalised service for parents, although, as social workers at RWH noted,
507
Kenny, ‘RWH Management Course Task Project, Hospital Burials’.
Social workers in Melbourne visited Melbourne General Cemetery in Carlton, Fawkner Cemetery and
Springvale Necropolis. See Bethia Stevenson, ‘Inspection of proposed infant burial sites at Springvale
Necropolis: Report’, 7 March 1984. Unpublished document held in RWH archives. Social workers from
KEMH in Perth met with cemetery board members at Karrakatta Cemetery to raise concerns held by the
department and SANDS as to the nature of communal burials. Lloyd, interview with researcher.
509
Dr Lambert wrote to RWH social workers in 1985 that ‘you will undoubtedly be interested to know that
the organisation, Family Involvement Funerals, has decided to cease providing a service for baby funerals
until further notice. The reasons for this are of particular relevance to this Hospital. The first is that the Firm
has had a number of problems with such funerals, particularly from in laws and especially in the area of
viewing of the baby’. See R. Lambert, Deputy Director of Medical Services RWH, memorandum to Bethia
Stevenson, 30 August 1985. Unpublished document held in RWH archives.
510
Marilyn Kenny was given the task of assessing the current system of hospital-arranged burials in
communal gravesites, the results of which she discussed in the report ‘Hospital Burials for babies dying in the
perinatal period – alternatives’. Oral history testimonies of two former employees of the Karrakatta Cemetery
in Perth give insight into the nature of the mass burial. Bill Manners, a gravedigger in the postwar period,
recalled that ‘the stillborn babies’ [grave], of course, would be just a hole in the ground virtually. The size of
the grave would never vary. The area was eight foot by four foot’. See William (Bill) Manners, Interview with
Gail O’Hanlon, 10th May – 10th June 1993, OH 2549/1 Battye Library. Victor Carpene, the Head Gardener at
Karrakatta from 1963 to 1989, recounted his memories of the burial of stillborn babies during this period:
‘When a stillborn came down to the cemetery … it was placed underneath a hedge adjacent to the office. The
[paperwork] pertaining to that particular stillborn was submitted to the office, and the grave was allocated. It
was then picked up by the truck driver … and buried in a community grave, a stillborn grave, with quite a
number of other stillborns … There was a steel ladder getting down to the bottom of the grave. The truck
driver would take the stillborn casket, put it down at the bottom of the grave, get out and then cover it over
with a couple of foot of soil. This would happen time and time again until such times there might be about
twenty, thirty stillborn babies in the one grave’. See Victor (Vic) Carpene, interview with Gail O’Hanlon, 29th
October and 12th November 1993, OH 2549/3, Battye Library.
508
159
individualisation and financial accessibility were often factors that worked against each
other. 511
It was to be some years before these competing variables could be resolved and
personalised funeral options became more readily accessible; in the meantime, at least at
RWH and KEMH, social workers had begun to hold services of remembrance for stillborn
babies in the respective hospitals’ chapels, which gave parents the opportunity to
memorialise their baby before a hospital burial. The inaugural chaplain at KEMH, the
Reverend Robert Anderson, found upon his appointment to the role in 1987 that ‘service
for babies’ at KEMH was a quiet, informal way of validating the experience of pregnancy
loss:
They would have the baby in the chapel with the parents, if the parents wanted that,
they would have time with the baby, the parents would do what they wanted to do.
They may have brought someone in [from the church] to take the service or not, but
often I think I observed that it was the social workers who were doing things that
created memory and space and so on. 512
The shift towards creating ‘memory and space’ for stillborn infants was a significant shift
in the construction of the impact of perinatal loss; this quiet informal practice would be
further refined and extended towards the end of the twentieth century.
Conclusion
Despite the entrenched appeal to stoicism and silence which had characterised the
experience of perinatal death for much of the twentieth century, the cultural shifts of the
1970s and 1980s underscored a reinscribing of the foetal body and the experience of
perinatal loss - a period which would herald a more widespread acceptance of the
psychosocial significance of stillbirth and neonatal death and lead to the refining of policies
and practices concerned with the care of bereaved parents. The work of Margaret Nicol,
amongst others, was grounded within the more general cultural shift away from the
traditionally authoritative role of the medical profession in women’s health; a shift that, in
the decades to follow, would significantly change the way that perinatal loss was managed
and understood within the hospital. However, as I argue in the next chapter, whilst these
511
512
Stevenson, ‘Inspection of proposed infant burial sites at Springvale Necropolis’.
Anderson, interview with researcher.
160
localised changes did pave the way toward the more complex construction of perinatal
death as a life event that could potentially have great psychosocial significance for
bereaved parents, the taboos surrounding perinatal death were well entrenched and change
in actual practice and hospital policy was minimal during this period, and it would be some
years before the efforts of midwives and social workers bore fruit in the hospital setting.
161
CHAPTER FIVE
‘I consider as much has been done as can be done’: opposition and resistance to
emerging understandings of perinatal loss in the 1970s and 1980s
In a letter recounting her memories of the stillbirth of her first child at small hospital in
Hobart, Tasmania in 1983, Sally noted that, when she requested a funeral for her child, she
was informed by her father-in-law that he had taken responsibility for the burial, ostensibly
so that Sally and her husband ‘wouldn’t have to worry’. She was then told that the baby had
been put in with a stranger’s coffin and cremated; her father-in-law had been reassured that
‘that was the way stillbirths were dealt with’.513
As I argue in the previous chapter, the 1970s would see an emergence of international and
local research that would prove pivotal in challenging accepted constructions of pregnancy
loss and baby death. In Australia, the 1970s and 1980s would mark a paradigm shift in the
way that psychologists and later, some of the medical fraternity, viewed the impact of
perinatal death on a woman and her family. However, although understandings of
pregnancy loss and baby death during this period became more complex and. despite some
health workers rejection the practice of ‘shielding’ women from the experience of losing a
baby, change in hospitals was slow and localised and some shifts in practice were often met
with resistance and opposition. As McCalman shows, hospitals are sites of complex
relationships and change in policy or tradition is often a gradual process. 514
In this chapter I argue that this period was still discernible by the silence and avoidance
reminiscent of earlier years despite the changing attitudes amongst some staff caring for
women after pregnancy loss or baby death. Furthermore, it was still widely believed
amongst the medical profession that the deceased baby was the product of a ‘failed’
pregnancy’. This attitude led to some deceased or dying babies being treated with a certain
disregard and perpetuated the idea that women would naturally feel shame and guilt at
having ‘failed as women’. Women’s narratives of loss during these years give insight into
513
Sally, personal correspondence with researcher 31 May 2005. Email in possession of researcher. At Sally’s
request, this is a pseudonym.
514
McCalman, Sex and Suffering, passim.
162
the gradual and ad hoc process of changing an entrenched tradition of shielding women
from their deceased infants. The fairly lonely voices of some of those involved in caring for
bereaved women were not heeded for many years, and it would be some years before the
efforts of social workers and midwives would bear fruit within the hospital environment.
Continuing the practice of aloofness and distance
Sally’s experience described previously gives insight into the gradual nature of changing
the accepted management of perinatal death. The emerging ideas of the 1970s and 1980s
were in such opposition to the accepted construction of perinatal death and its management
within the hospital setting that it would take some years for any changes in practice to
become widely accepted within the medical fraternity. Reiger and McCalman both observe
that second-wave feminism and the consumer health movement had wrought significant
change in the ways pregnant women were treated in the hospital; for example, it was now
increasingly common to see husbands in the labour room and for babies to be ‘roomed-in’
with their mothers, instead of being taken immediately to a separate nursery. 515
However, notwithstanding the progress and success of childbirth reformers – who, as
Reiger argues, were not without their own detractors 516 - the incidence of perinatal loss was
515
Reiger notes that the admission of fathers into labour wards was a ‘prime objective of the childbirth
organisations: like dispensing with routine ‘prepping’ it was of symbolic as well as of practical importance’.
Furthermore, she observes, ‘[f]rom a later vantage point, it is hard to recognise just what a challenge it
presented’. See Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies, p. 215. See also See McCalman, Sex and Suffering, pp. 329350.
516
Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies, pp. 212-214. Not surprisingly, many obstetricians were quick to voice
their concerns over the burgeoning home birth movement, warning ominously that the rate of stillbirths would
surely rise if home births were allowed to continue. Some members of the nursing profession were also
reluctant to embrace the move to less intervention in childbirth. Writing for the ANJ, Australian nurse Patricia
Whaley found the home birth phenomenon ‘inexplicable’. Upon observing two homebirths she was
‘impressed’ - albeit surprised - that the mothers were well–educated and widely read on the subject, but
concluded that ‘many [women] turn to homebirths after reading the literature which is flooding the
bookshelves at this time, much of which is slanted to appeal to the emotions, not to hard headed practicality’.
However, both Whaley and Professor Norman Beischer conceded that the homebirth movement could be a
learning experience for the medical profession. Although still resistant to many women’s demands for greater
psychosocial care during pregnancy and labour, Beischer proclaimed in 1978 that ‘it is relatively easy for us
to satisfy most of the new requirements without lowering the standard of patient care’. In the early 1980s
many hospitals reached a compromise which certainly heralded a significant change in the way the birth
experience was treated in a clinical setting. For instance, the Alternative Birth Centre was opened at KEMH in
1980, which aimed to give women and their families greater control in labour and birth, whilst maintaining a
degree of supervision over the mother and baby’s health during childbirth. See Patricia Whaley, ‘Two Home
Births’, ANJ, vol. 8, no. 1, 1978, p. 44; Norman A. Beischer, ‘Projected Developments in Midwifery’, ANJ,
vol. 8, no. 2, 1978, p. 55.
163
often still treated in accordance with practices of years past. Despite the increasing debate
within medical and nursing journals as to the psychological effects of perinatal death, the
level of empathy and compassion showed to women during this period depended largely on
the individual staff member’s awareness of and response to the emerging trends both
overseas and at home. The recollections of some Australian women’s experiences of
perinatal death in the 1970s and 1980s are indicative of the persistence of a general
misunderstanding and ignorance towards the complexities of meanings of perinatal death;
sources from the social work departments of RWH and KEMH also give insight into the
opposition some staff faced as they worked to implement changes which better reflected
current theories of grief after perinatal loss.
As I discussed in Chapter Three, nursing and medicine had long advocated an aloof
approach towards patients and warned against ‘emotional involvement’, which in reality
could translate into abrupt care that dealt only with the physical condition of the patient.
Judith Harrison, an Australian registered nurse, lamented in the ANJ that many nurses’
avoidance of ‘difficult’ patients often reflected a general lack of empathy in many hospitals.
The word ‘care’, she noted, was derived from the Greek word kara ‘which means “to
lament, to grieve, to experience sorrow, to cry out with”. In nursing, the word has lost much
of its meaning’. Harrison argued that ‘nurses frequently do not respond to people, just to
their condition. They often do not care about the person … their concern rests with the
patient’s illness and the expected outcome … Empathy is sadly lacking and understanding
and acceptance is all too infrequent’. 517
Although some women were treated with care and compassion during this period,
resistance to changing understandings of perinatal death was strong, and at times, vocal.
Despite the growing number of studies which viewed the death of a baby as a complex and
significant event, perinatal death was still constructed in medical discourse as ‘basically a
sad event’, and inscriptions of the foetal body held that the unborn child was essentially
‘unknowable’. Like women in decades past, many women interviewed for this research
who lost babies in the 1970s and early 1980s felt that their experiences were invalidated
and their babies denied recognition, even if their lives were short or solely in utero.
517
Judith Harrison, ‘Caring in Nursing: Are We Being Sidetracked?’ ANJ, vol. 9, no. 11, June 1980, p. 43.
164
Attitudes of some health professionals ranged from contempt, to indifference to a clumsy,
awkward sorrow. In letters and interviews many women recounted hurtful or gauche
comments made by people misinformed as to the reinscribing of perinatal loss and perhaps
too confronted by the enormity of the woman’s grief to appreciate the complexity of the
experience.
For example, Nancye’s doctor attempted to placate her after the death of her daughter, her
third child, by saying words to the effect of ‘you’ll be able to get on with your life now,
Nancye, you won’t be tied down with three children’. 518 Other women felt that their grief
was minimised – both within the hospital and their communities - by an avoidance of the
subject: for example, in recalling her discharge from the hospital, and the ensuing grief and
pain she felt over the death of her first child, Robin commented that ‘nobody said anything
… nobody warned me of what would happen – I didn’t know that [I would] feel that
depressed’. 519 Pam, whose first baby died ten minutes after delivery, recalled that
‘whenever I tried to sit and talk to my mother and other relatives [or] friends, they would
inevitably change the subject - it was as though they didn't want to know but as the years
went by, I came to realise that maybe they were embarrassed’. 520
Julie, who suffered multiple losses including a miscarriage, stillborn twins and the death of
an infant daughter, articulated her belief that the prevailing view amongst her friends at the
time was that a foetus was ‘purely considered as this lump of cells, it wasn't a baby until it
had gone full term’. 521 As I mentioned previously, Nancye was told by her doctor not to
have a ‘proper’ burial and ‘don’t pay all that money out for a baby you didn’t even
know’. 522 The use of language in the clinical setting often reflected this prevailing view;
some doctors did not consider the impact that referring to the unborn child as a ‘foetus’
could likely have on the mother. Although not all women would have regarded their
foetuses as a ‘baby’, in interviews some women articulated great dissatisfaction with how
518
Nancye, personal correspondence with researcher.
Robin, interview with researcher, 11 August 2005. Tapes and transcript in possession of researcher.
520
Pam, personal correspondence with researcher.
521
Julie, interview with researcher, 31 May 2005. Tapes and transcript in possession of researcher.
522
Nancye, personal correspondence with researcher.
519
165
their babies were described by medical staff at the time. 523 For example, Coralie’s baby
was stillborn at a late gestation in a small town in the north of Western Australia in 1974.
Not only did her doctor request that her husband leave while he examined Coralie, but he
repeatedly referred to what she believed to be her precious ‘baby’ as ‘the foetus’: ‘He then
informed me that the foetus was dead and would be stillborn. What a way to tell me, I felt
like he was talking gibberish, but I guess there is no easy way to tell that sort of news. But
I hated my baby being referred to as a foetus’. 524
Women who delivered a stillborn baby in the 1970s and early 1980s were still regarded as
anomalies in an environment which was geared towards the production of live babies.
Some staff in busy maternity wards still felt that their time was better spent caring for
women who were delivering live babies and paid little attention to the cases of miscarriage
and stillbirth. Alice Lovell observed of the British context in the early 1980s that ‘maternity
units are geared to the production of live babies. When this goes wrong, there is the …
problem of what do with the maternity patient – is she a patient?’ 525 It can be assumed that
this was often the case in Australian hospitals. For example, after the stillbirth of her
daughter Kaye was aware that her baby had died before labour started, and remembers
feeling that she did not quite ‘fit’ as a maternity patient: ‘One nurse … made a few
heartless comments during labour. I'm sure she was busy but made a comment to another
nurse that it was a ‘waste of time’ bringing a crib into the delivery suite as it wouldn't be
needed. I didn't need to hear this - it was the reality of the situation but a little tactless I
felt’. 526
In a similar vein, Jennifer’s memory of her miscarriage evokes the lonely isolation that
some women suffered while experiencing a miscarriage. After the tiny body was delivered
and whisked away in a bedpan, Jennifer spent a miserable day recovering in hospital with
little attention from staff and with no visitors. She recalled that ‘I lay in my bed all day,
523
Medical terminology used to describe pregnancy loss was also reflected in the way data was collected by
government agencies. SANDS (WA) members, for example, expressed great dissatisfaction over the wording
of the 1986 Census. Under the question ‘For each female, how many babies has she ever had?’ the Census
form explicitly excluded stillbirths, requesting that census participants ‘do not include stillbirths’. See
SANDS (WA) newsletter, March-May 1988. Unpublished document held in KEMH Social Work archives.
524
Coralie, personal correspondence with researcher.
525
Alice Lovell, ‘Some questions of identity: late miscarriage, stillbirth and perinatal loss’, Social Science and
Medicine, vol. 17, no. 11, 1983, p. 757.
526
Kaye, personal correspondence with researcher.
166
nobody came to visit, cause my husband was at work and probably my mum was working
and my dad definitely would have been, and none of my friends knew I was there, so I was
really really sad all that day’. 527 Upon returning home she was expected to ‘press it down’
and found that none of her friends mentioned the incident and there was no follow up from
either the hospital or her local doctor.
Apparently some staff felt hesitant or ill-equipped to deal with bereaved parents and were
unable to properly deal with the psychosocial needs of patients when for years the
physiological health of the patient had been their only concern. With such avoidance and
little awareness amongst staff of the emotional impact of perinatal loss, it was often left to
the least skilled staff to deal with women who were delivering a miscarried or stillborn
child. According to Belinda Jennings, ‘the least experienced midwife was given these
women to look after, regardless of their own experience, training, what they wanted to do,
didn’t want to do. So [the women] were actually neglected in their care, because it was
thought that [the inexperienced midwife] couldn’t do any damage, because the baby was
already dead’. 528
This often meant that women were attended to by staff that were simply out of their depth
when faced with such a confronting and challenging situation. Some were simply
inexperienced in dealing with stillbirth and neonatal death – despite its relative regularity,
some doctors, particularly in country hospitals, would have rarely had to deal with such an
event. For example, Marie’s first baby was born prematurely in a country town in NSW in
1973. She was attended by her local general practitioner, who had refused Marie’s
husband’s request that his wife be referred to a specialist. When Marie went into early
labour the doctor put her on an alcohol drip which rendered her unconscious for the entire
birth and left her feeling sick and dazed; as she said, ‘the whole experience was quite
bizarre’. The doctor seemed unable to cope with the situation, and as Marie recalls, seemed
‘staggered’ by what was happening: ‘He couldn’t function – my husband actually had to
work out how much of the alcohol to put in the drip’. Marie delivered her daughter, who
was not expected to live and, was according to her husband’s recollection, left to succumb
527
Jennifer, interview with researcher, 24 May 2005. Tapes and transcript in possession of researcher. At
Jennifer’s request, this is a pseudonym.
528
Jennings, interview with researcher.
167
alone in a humidicrib. She lived for an hour, yet Marie had only seen a glimpse of her
straight after delivery. Despite his awkwardness the doctor still clearly felt sorrow for the
couple: ‘He obviously felt, well I think he felt guilty [because] he came out and said, ‘I’m
sorry for what has happened,’ and he put his arm around me and gave me a hug’. Other
staff caring for Marie were, she said, ‘gentle, but they sort of just went about doing their
own business – they never said a lot’. The doctor also insisted on naming the baby, because
Marie was in too ‘dazed’ a state to complete the required forms. 529
Often women were met with different responses from individual staff members. Julie
experienced more empathetic, skilled care from her doctor, who was greatly respected in
the small Wheatbelt farming community – ‘we always felt very secure’, she recalled - but
was treated callously by the midwife, who Julie said ‘gave me a really hard time – I found
out later her nickname was “the witch.”’ Although in her mid twenties at the time, Julie felt
that she was treated like a disobedient child by this particular nurse, who refused to believe
that Julie was having labour contractions and accused her of ‘looking for attention’ from
the nursing staff. Eventually after she complained that the pains were getting much worse,
the nurse, apparently intending to frighten Julie, scolded her saying ‘well that's it. It's the
coldest night of the year, and I'm going to get [the] doctor down now just to see how you're
behaving and how you're carrying on’. When the doctor arrived Julie’s cervix was dilated
enough that the doctor could see one baby’s head already emerging. The nurse’s attitude
changed rather quickly, Julie remembered in the interview: ‘from then on she turned into
this smolchy [sic] nice… she was so slimy, it was awful, [because] it was all in front of the
doctor, [she was] probably really worried that I was going to say something’. 530
Particularly in busy general hospitals in rural areas, few staff were aware of the challenges
to the dominant construction of perinatal loss and continued to operate under the custom of
that particular hospital which had become entrenched over the course of several decades.
As a young woman in a small town in Far North Queensland in 1974, Vicki’s first
pregnancy was attended to by a young and inexperienced general practitioner. She
529
Marie, interview with researcher, 19 May 2005. Tapes and transcript in possession of researcher. At
Marie’s request, this is a pseudonym.
530
Julie, interview with researcher. Echoing the sentiments of many other women, Julie acknowledged that
the matron’s performance for the doctor was quite unnecessary – as a young woman in the 1970s, she would
never have seriously considered complaining about her mistreatment.
168
recollects that the experience of being pregnant was ‘a bit like falling in love all over again.
I had all sorts of dreams and plans and hopes for this baby I was carrying’, but her hopes
were dashed when her baby was stillborn a week before term. After a protracted and
agonising labour the child was delivered into ‘total stillness and silence’ before the young
trainee nurse, thoroughly unprepared for the ordeal, burst into tears and ran out of the room.
Vicki remembers that ‘after a minute or so the doctor spoke – ‘it isn’t alive’. The baby was
hastily wrapped in a sheet by the midwife without Vicki even catching a glimpse of her
child.
It was at this moment I realised that I had no idea if I had had a boy or a girl. I said
to the doctor, ‘is it a boy or a girl?’ He looked at me absolutely flabbergasted and
said, ‘To tell you the truth, I didn’t notice. I was too busy looking for other things’.
He then despatched the midwife to find out. She returned to the room with her
hands on her hips, walked up to me and barked “FEMALE!” … She then squeezed
my hand and said possibly the most ludicrous words I have ever heard - ‘never mind
dear, there’ll be others’. 531
The midwife’s words were understandably ‘ludicrous’ to a young woman who was lying in
bed ‘utterly exhausted and devastated’ and who remembers desperately hoping for some
emotional support – her husband had been long banned from the delivery room and was
away from the hospital – but these sentiments were echoed many times by many midwives.
Julie, for example, recalled the indifference of the nurse who ‘came in, sort of lifted the
paper on the bedpan and said, “oh well! There's plenty more where they came from!” And I
think I burst into tears and she just shrugged her shoulders and walked off, and that was
it’. 532
After the delivery of her baby, Robin was returned to the postnatal ward; she was ‘totally
sedated’ with a mixture of Valium and sleeping pills and wheeled up to gynaecology – a
trip she remembers as being heartbreaking, ‘all the little baby noises…that was horrible’. It
was upon waking in the morning once the heavy sedation had worn off that Robin began to
realise the enormity of what had happened, but instead of answers to her queries was sent
home without any advice for postnatal care. Once home, Robin discovered to her great
shock that her milk had come in ‘with a vengeance’, and when she rang her doctor for
advice he not only refused to give her any medication to dry up the milk but also neglected
531
532
Vicki, personal correspondence with researcher, June 8 2005. Letter in possession of researcher.
Julie, interview with researcher.
169
to tell her to bind her breasts or to stop expressing milk to ease the situation. It was a
traumatising realisation, said Robin: ‘I [was] standing in the shower with this milk spurting
– and that’s when it hit me. I thought, what a waste. I’ve got all this milk, and no baby’. 533
Janice also experienced this kind of avoidance in 1970, when her second child was stillborn
at 6 months. In her memory of the experience, the hospital staff ignored her repeated
questions – she only found out the baby’s sex by surreptitiously reading the nurse’s notes –
and she was sent home bruised and with infected stitches. When Janice’s milk came in, her
mother rang her doctor to ask for some medication to dry it up but, she recalled, ‘he seemed
to forget the baby had died, and asked me why I wasn’t feeding the baby’. 534 Coralie, too,
was seemingly forgotten by the doctor who had delivered her baby. Upon returning for her
six week check up, he asked Coralie where the baby was and if everything was going
well. 535
Melanie’s baby was stillborn at twenty four weeks gestation at a hospital in Perth, and after
the baby was delivered there was no mention made of the incident again. Although she
recalled that she had initially felt ambivalent about this pregnancy – her second child was
only several weeks old when she fell pregnant again – by the time she was seventeen weeks
pregnant, Melanie had well and truly accepted her pregnancy and had begun to prepare for
the baby’s impending arrival. At twenty four weeks gestation, however Melanie began to
bleed at home, haemorrhaging massively, before delivering the stillborn baby in hospital.
Although she was attended by her obstetrician throughout the whole labour, he had told
Melanie words to the effect that ‘there’s no way that this baby will survive and no way that
you can have it. You’ve just got to go through this’. Because of the huge amount of blood
loss the whole experience was more akin to a medical emergency than a labour, and
Melanie does not remember the baby actually being delivered. She surmises that the baby
was most likely swept up with all the soiled linen; at any rate, she never saw the child. She
said that ‘in amongst all the haemorrhaging, the baby was born. But it all got taken away
with all the blood, and the blood clots, and I actually didn’t even know that it had
happened’. 536
533
Robin, interview with researcher.
Janice, personal correspondence with researcher, 23 May 2005. Email in possession of researcher.
535
Coralie, personal correspondence with researcher.
536
Melanie, interview with researcher, 24 May 2005. tapes and transcript in possession of researcher.
534
170
Melanie left the hospital the next day, despite having experienced a life–threatening loss of
blood, and remembers that none of the medical staff or her family mentioned the baby. She
recalled that it was as if the incident had never happened, although she acknowledges that,
brought up in a family that typically responded to tragedy with stoic silence, she herself did
not ask about any details such as the baby’s sex. Her obstetrician did not volunteer any
information to Melanie about the baby, even though she later returned to him when
pregnant with her next child. It was fifteen years before Melanie found out the sex of the
deceased baby, although she never was able to find out what had happened to the baby’s
body. She surmised that it was likely that, after being removed as part of the hospital waste,
the baby was disposed of in the hospital incinerator. 537
Continuing the practice of protection
This period was also still marked by the hospital acting as ‘protector’, with many mothers
still shielded from their dead babies and denied the opportunity to have an active
participation in their child’s burial. Coralie, for instance, was not permitted to see or hold
her baby because attending staff felt that it would be ‘too upsetting’. Her husband and
parents, however, were given permission to see the baby if they had wished, although they
declined because they felt it would be ‘unfair’ to Coralie. 538 With regard to Coralie’s
experience, it is also useful to briefly consider how the literature at this time was primarily
preoccupied with women’s response to grief following perinatal loss and how emerging
theories of grief and loss were still structured around assumptions of sex role
stereotypes. 539 The early studies of grief responses to perinatal death were focused
primarily on women’s experience; indeed, attachment theory held that the maternal-infant
attachment was the primary bond and it was widely assumed that men were unlikely to
537
Melanie, interview with researcher.
Coralie, personal correspondence with researcher.
539
See for example M. Clarke and A.J. Williams, ‘Depression in Women After Perinatal Death’, Lancet, vol.
8122, no. 28, 1979, pp. 916-917; P.M. Seitz and L.H. Warrick, ‘Perinatal Death: The Grieving Mother’,
American Journal of Nursing, vol. 74, no. 11, 1974, pp. 2028-2030; L.G. Peppers and R.J. Knapp, ‘Maternal
Reactions to Involuntary Fetal/infant Death’, Psychiatry, vol. 43, 1980, pp. 155-159; Margaret T. Nicol,
Jeffrey R. Tompkins, Norman A. Campbell and Geoffrey J. Syme, ‘Maternal Grieving Response After
Perinatal Death’, MJA, vol. 144, March 1986, p. 289.
538
171
form attachments to their unborn babies. 540 Interestingly, many of the husbands of women
involved in the oral history project had been offered the chance to see their deceased infant,
suggesting that men were assumed to rely less on emotion and more on rationality, whereas
women were usually not allowed to see their infants on the presumption that they would be
‘too upset’. 541
Although some women had been allowed to view their babies after the emergence of
research which suggested that it may be beneficial, 542 the suggestion that mothers should be
allowed to hold their deceased infants proved to be a complex issue. Whilst Robin, for
example, was left alone with her deceased son for nearly an hour after delivery, where she
‘marveled in his perfection,’ 543 most women were still not given the opportunity to hold
their babies during this period. When Lena’s twin daughters were delivered prematurely in
1988 in a private hospital in Perth, she had a strong feeling of being avoided by staff.
Having known since she was eighteen weeks pregnant that one twin would not survive
birth, Lena remembers arriving at theatre on the gurney and thinking that: ‘“This is it, this
is time to face this.” Because while I was pregnant with [the deceased twin] I knew that I
could keep her alive, and I knew that things would be okay, and then all of a sudden …
“okay, now I’ve got to face this.” I remember thinking that, and it was pretty scary stuff’. 544
The postnatal period was complicated by the surviving twin’s prematurity and the necessity
for her to spend several weeks in the special care nursery, and Lena said that staff ‘didn’t
really know how to deal with me’. 545 Although staff had dressed the baby in readiness for
540
Peter Barr and Deborah de Wilde, whilst overwhelmingly supportive of the emerging changes in the care
of bereaved parents, argued that ‘grief usually lasts longer in mothers than in fathers. Many mothers grieve for
a year or longer after the death of their baby whereas most fathers have recovered within three months. The
mother suffers the double loss: the death of the child within her which she experiences as a part of herself and
the death of her son or daughter’. See Barr and de Wilde, Stillbirth and Newborn Death, p. 46.
541
Until the late 1980s, the responsibility for arranging the funeral, if it was privately arranged, and dealing
with any paperwork fell to the husband; perhaps most likely a double edged sword that gave men some sense
of control over the situation whilst forcing them into the masculine role of protector of the vulnerable woman
and precluding them from any kind of emotional response, at least publicly. In a situation similar to many
other men, the burden of organising a funeral in a tiny mining town in North West Australia fell to Coralie’s
husband, who was faced with the prospect of having to drive the tiny coffin 40 kilometres to the next town
where the only available minister lived. Supportive friends of the family offered to relieve him of this task,
but he was still faced with attending the funeral without his wife, whom the doctors would not discharge from
hospital, having decided that the funeral would be too difficult emotionally for Coralie to attend. Coralie,
personal correspondence with researcher.
542
As a result of Margaret Nicol’s research at KEMH, some staff at the hospital advocated this move in an
article in the MJA. See Nicol et al, ‘Maternal Grieving Response’, p. 289.
543
Robin, interview with researcher.
544
Lena, interview with researcher, 2 June 2005. Tapes and transcript in possession of researcher.
545
Lena, interview with researcher.
172
the family to view the body and to prepare for the funeral – which Lena did not attend perhaps they privately agreed with many of Lena’s acquaintances who felt that she should
be glad that she had had one baby survive, or perhaps the stark intersection of birth and
death was too overwhelming. In any case, Lena was not encouraged to see the deceased
twin and she recollects that no mention was made of her after the delivery. 546
Particularly if their baby was ‘deformed’ in any way, women were usually not offered the
chance to view the body. Nicol argued in The Loss of a Baby that this was borne not only
out of the perceived need to ‘protect’ women but was also because of the persistent idea
that touching a dead body was ‘repugnant. She observed that ‘in our society, there is a
taboo about touching a dead person and yet, it is one of the most natural acts we can do’. 547
Culturally, the death of a baby was a baffling and mysterious death; as I argue in Chapter
Three, it certainly fell outside the socially acceptable concept of a ‘good death’ and
perhaps, particularly for many obstetricians and midwives – so used to dealing with life –
was too difficult to confront.
Furthermore, ‘deformity’ was sometimes still offered as the sole reason for a perinatal loss
with the implicit reassurance that a perinatal death had been ‘for the best’. For example,
Robin’s obstetrician told the couple that the baby had most certainly been ‘deformed,’
which had led to his death. Although Robin was skeptical – as I mentioned earlier, she had
seen the baby, and to her eyes he had looked perfectly formed – she did not question her
doctor. Robin implicitly trusted this man, who was, in her words, ‘such a busy and
important doctor … a real stalwart of the community’. 548 Despite his dismissive attitude
and her own misgivings, Robin chose to return to this specialist with her next child, yet felt
she did not receive the ‘high priority’ care she had been promised. When she began to
display the same symptoms, at exactly the same point in her pregnancy with her first child,
Robin’s doctor ordered her two weeks bed rest. Robin’s misgivings eventually took
precedence over her culturally–acceptable submission to her doctor’s authority, and she
went straight from her clinic appointment to the emergency department of KEMH Perth.
546
Lena, interview with researcher.
Nicol, Loss of a Baby, p. 88.
548
Robin, interview with researcher. Other women involved in the oral history project expressed a similar
view. For example, Coralie, whose baby was stillborn in 1973, expressed that ‘of course, thirty two years ago
one did just what the doctor told you to do and that was it, I certainly wouldn’t take all that now and no one
should’. Coralie, personal correspondence with the researcher.
547
173
There, she was to realise the full extent of her doctor’s neglectful care, when she
inadvertently was able to read her baby’s autopsy report – the results of which had
previously not been made known to her or her husband.
Even over twenty years later, Robin marvelled at the coincidence which led to her being
able to view this post mortem report: ‘I don’t know how this happened, but I’m sitting in
admissions, and they plonked down my admissions file, and it flipped open to the autopsy
report of the baby … And I’m looking, and of course, being the curious person that I am, I
decided to read it’. 549 The autopsy had revealed that there was nothing congenitally or
chromosomally ‘abnormal’ about the baby, except for the fact that by a certain gestation,
Robin’s body was unable to support further foetal growth; the baby therefore had died
because of ‘placental insufficiency’. For her first baby, that point was thirty five weeks
gestation, the exact point she was at with her next pregnancy as she sat in the admissions
area of the hospital. It was at this point that Robin began to feel that she had been deceived
by her doctor. She recalled feeling that:
Here I am, thirty five weeks pregnant again, obviously – I now know what could be
happening [because] I’m looking here and thinking, two and two doesn’t make five
here, because I shouldn’t be sitting here in this position, the doctor telling me to lie
on my side for two weeks. I don’t want this baby to starve to death again. 550
Despite this, the hospital and the obstetrician still decided to wait until the morning to
deliver the baby. Remembering their experience with their first baby – who had died in the
short space of time it took to prepare Robin for a caesarean section – it was only through
her husband’s persistence that their baby, a daughter, was delivered that evening. Looking
back, Robin believes that perhaps the doctor had kept the results of the autopsy to himself
to ‘cover himself’ and to plant seeds of justification for the baby’s death in the couple’s
minds. Although she felt that she had been treated ‘appallingly’ and had nearly ‘run the
same track twice’ she still outwardly maintained the cultural faith in the medical profession,
and at the time was never openly critical about her treatment. As a young woman in the late
1970s and early 1980s, Robin was fairly typical in her trust in the medical profession; as
she said, ‘I honestly believe I was naïve, I was easily led, and I take some of the blame for
that, because I was so confident [because] … he’d delivered 18 000 babies by then, he said
549
550
Robin, interview with researcher.
Robin, interview with researcher.
174
he knew what he was doing. So I was totally confident that he knew what he was doing’.
She did, however, change doctors for her next two children and, in her perception, received
excellent, compassionate care from an obstetrician who took her obstetrical history very
seriously and acted accordingly. 551
Robin’s experience is significant in many regards, not least because her obstetrician felt
that because her baby had been ‘deformed’, the sense of loss would be minimal. In the
British context, Lovell argued that many health care professionals still clung to a deeprooted ideology as to ‘what constituted a baby and what babies “ought to be like’’’ – noting
that some doctors referred to stillborns as ‘bad babies’. A miscarried or stillborn baby was
not regarded as a ‘proper’ baby, therefore did not warrant ‘proper’ care. 552 The object of
greatest distaste in this system of classification was the ‘deformed’ child; although by the
mid 1980s, for many health care professionals, in Australia and internationally, the idea of
holding a well-formed stillborn child was gaining acceptance, many mothers were still
shielded from ‘deformed’ infants. 553 Sally, whose baby’s deformities had been detected via
ultrasound, was told that she might be able to hold her child provided it was not ‘too
deformed’. The doctor and matron, however, took Sally’s choice away from her after the
birth by deciding that the child was, indeed, ‘too deformed’ for her to view.554 ‘Grossly
deformed’ babies, such as those affected by anencephaly and hydrocephaly, were still
referred to as ‘monsters’ in textbooks and clinical notes, 555 and it was not an uncommon
opinion amongst the medical profession that such ‘creatures’ should never have been
conceived: one junior doctor in Lovell’s study held the view that ‘monsters [are] disgusting.
They should be destroyed, wiped off the face of the earth,’ whilst a nurse told the parents of
a hydrocephalic stillborn baby that it would be better not to see the baby because it was ‘an
ugly little thing’. 556
551
Robin, interview with researcher.
Lovell, ‘Some questions of identity’, p. 756.
553
This issue had been raised in 1980 by social workers at RWH, who noted that ‘some patients in the
hospital have experienced bad reactions from staff with stillbirths and in particular physically deformed
babies … following delivery of children with gross physical abnormalities there was a tendency of some staff
not to talk to the mother until the paediatrician had seen the child and then often the mother was not shown
the stillborn child. This led to the mother imagining unrealistic abnormalities present’. See PDMC, Minutes, 4
March 1980. Unpublished document held in RWH archives.
554
Sally, personal correspondence with researcher.
555
J.W. Williams, J. Pritchard and P. Mac Donald, Williams Obstetrics, New York: Appleton Century Crofts,
c1980, 16th ed., p. 998.
556
Lovell, ‘Some questions of identity’, p. 756.
552
175
There is also evidence that some doctors made decisions as to which babies should be
resuscitated. In many states legislation had changed in 1978, lowering the gestational age
for mandatory reporting of stillbirths from twenty eight weeks gestation to twenty weeks,
yet many hospital staff still based their care on medical distinctions of ‘viability’ and often
babies under twenty eight weeks gestation were accorded less dignity than those babies of
more advanced gestation. These distinctions meant that doctors, and by association, nursing
staff, sometimes vicariously judged which babies would be regarded as human beings and
which would not, resulting in vastly different standards of care. Jennings recalls that:
These little babies were not considered an identity in their own right. I remember
babies being put into kidney dishes – alive babies being put into kidney dishes –
and being put into a pan room to succumb, without any respect for their bodily
function or their bodily being … And that was for babies up to twenty-four, twentyfive weeks gestation. 557
Women’s experiences reflect Jennings’s observation; for example when Nancye asked her
doctor what efforts had been made to save her daughter – who had been born prematurely
but alive - she was told bluntly: ‘nothing. If she was strong enough to fight then she would
[have] lived, if she didn’t then she would die’. After Nancye accused the doctor of treating
her child heartlessly, the doctor justified his actions by telling Nancye that ‘the baby was so
tiny, she may have been blind or mongoloid [sic] … and I couldn’t do that to you, because
you are alone in Sydney with no immediate help’. 558 The terminology used in the clinical
setting continued to use language which reinforced medical inscriptions of ‘non-viability’
on certain foetal bodies. For example, the Midwifery for Student Midwives textbook, written
by staff at RWH, referred several times to late-term stillbirth as ‘foetal wastage’ and
miscarriage as the expulsion of ‘products of conception’. 559 The RWH Clinical Reports
measured infant mortality in terms of ‘perinatal wastage’ and ‘foetal wastage’ whilst
miscarriage was the ‘expulsion of the products of conception’. 560
Thus miscarried or stillborn babies under a certain gestation were sometimes still treated
with a fair amount of indifference, and until the late 1980s parents often had little say as to
557
Jennings, interview with researcher.
Nancye, personal correspondence with researcher.
559
Anon., The Royal Women’s Hospital Melbourne: Midwifery for Student Midwives, Melbourne, Vic., 1975,
p. 101 & 102.
560
See for example RWH Clinical Report 1954, p. vii; RWH Clinical Report 1957, p. 5.
558
176
what happened to the body. Astrid’s second stillborn baby, for example, was flown from
Karratha in the North of Western Australia to KEMH Perth for an autopsy; despite recent
legislation which specified that the next of kin must give consent in order for an autopsy be
performed, 561 she had not been asked permission. Six weeks later, she unexpectedly
received a bill in the mail for services rendered by a funeral home in Perth. The terse epistle
informed Astrid and her husband that if they would require the ashes sent to Karratha, it
would cost a further $270. Otherwise, the ashes would be spread at KEMH. Astrid had had
no idea that her baby would be cremated in Perth, having been given no information at the
time the baby was delivered except that he would be flown down to Perth for testing. At
that point, Astrid recalls, she ‘really lost it, when I got that [letter], because I hadn’t heard
whether he’d been cremated, or anything like that, what the procedure was …’ Despite
going on to have a baby at KEMH, who lived, Astrid has never visited the site reserved for
the scattering of ashes at KEMH because of her continuing guilt borne out of her lack of
control. 562
Hostility
Some members of the medical and nursing professions were openly hostile and rejected
any moves towards a more empathetic approach towards the care of bereaved women. On a
general level, the movement toward less medical intervention and more maternal control
was dismissed by some as a highly risky experiment that could only end in an increase in
maternal and infant mortality. Midwives were cautioned to resist any community pressure
to participate in home birthing, warned that the ‘allure’ of increased status and recognition
would be a poor trade for ‘unacceptable or unwise risks’.563 The tragic case of a Melbourne
woman, Françoise S. was trumpeted as a case in point – adamant that she wanted a ‘natural’
birth, Ms S. laboured for 3 days in 1977 in a deserted spot in a national park, before being
taken to hospital by police where she gave birth to a baby who later died in hospital. The
tabloid newspaper, the Melbourne Sun, gave sensational coverage of this tragedy, with the
561
See Victoria Human Tissue Act 1982, Part V ‘Post-mortem examinations’, Section 28: ‘Authority for PostMortem’. According to Section Five, this only applied to stillborn babies over 20 weeks gestation; tissue
removed from a foetus under twenty weeks gestation was exempt from the Act and therefore did not require
consent. For other states’ respective legislation relating to these issues see Western Australia Human Tissue
and Transplant Act 1982; New South Wales Human Tissue Act 1983; Queensland Transplantation and
Anatomy Act 1979; South AustraliaTransplant and Anatomy Act 1983; Tasmania Human Tissue Act 1985;
Australian Capital Territory Transplantation and Anatomy Act 1978.
562
Astrid, interview with researcher, 3 June 2005. Tapes and transcript in possession of researcher.
563
Lesley Barclay, ‘Report on Overseas Midwifery Practices’, ANJ, vol. 8, no. 7, 1979, pp. 18-22
177
direct implication that the baby died as a direct result of the birth – even though Ms S. had
previously been rejected as a candidate for home birthing by the National Homebirthing
Movement, and had been referred instead to her local hospital because of the potential for
complications. Edith Gosling, a midwife who was called to attend on the mother while she
laboured in the national park, furiously rejected the newspaper’s claims that the homebirth
movement had contributed to the baby’s death, and declared that the media coverage had
been used to ‘promulgate distortions and thus feed the powerful [Australian Medical
Association] anti-homebirth league with [the] ammunition it was seeking to thoroughly
discredit domiciliary midwifery’. 564 The case of Françoise S. was also tinged with blame
and scapegoating, and provided a perfect opportunity for a kind of moral fable for those
women who chose to take their childbirth into their own hands instead of relying on the
established ‘scientific’ wisdom of the medical profession.
Sometimes staff who believed that they should provide care which better reflected current
theories of grief and loss also faced opposition from both medical and ancillary staff.
Having obtained a ‘viewing room’ in the perinatal pathology department and introduced the
practice of small memorial services in the hospital’s chapel, the social workers at RWH
Melbourne found some staff resistant to their efforts. Whilst social workers were concerned
that the procedure of viewing babies after autopsy was an imperfect one, the director of
pathology at RWH, Dr Fortune, strongly disagreed. After the Director of Medical Services,
Dr Cliff Flower, requested an improvement in viewings on the behalf of the pathology
department, Fortune replied in a letter that ‘I cannot think what there is to discuss about
storage of infant bodies …With regard to the aesthetics of the viewing area, I consider as
much has been done as can be done. Do you want an organ to be played quietly in the
background during viewings? – I can recommend someone for the job’. 565
Some parents complained to the hospital that they were treated with insensitivity by some
staff in the hospital. In an intra-department memorandum in 1981, social worker Marilyn
Kenny raised the possibility of providing training for all staff who came into contact with
bereaved parents, such as the birth registrar clerk, noting with some degree of
564
Edith Gosling, ‘Letter to the Editor’, ANJ, no. 6, vol. 8, 1978, pp. 6-8.
See C. Flower, letter to D.W. Fortune, 7 December 1987; D.W. Fortune, letter to C. Flower, 14 December
1987. Unpublished documents held in RWH archives.
565
178
understatement that in the absence of formal protocols many staff ‘could probably benefit
by discussion of how to approach patients after stillbirth’. 566 Social work documents reveal
that it would take great effort to break down entrenched practices; in 1987, for example, a
bereaved mother was with her deceased baby in the viewing room adjacent to the mortuary,
when a hospital porter entered the room without knocking, carrying another deceased baby
in a box. In a memorandum to the Director of Medical Services, senior social worker M.
van Laar wrote that the mother had been distressed and disgusted by being confronted with
the sight of a deceased baby on its way to the mortuary for post-mortem; van Laar noted
that, although she had taken some ‘action on the matter’ she doubted that this would be
sufficient to prevent a recurrence of such an ‘unfortunate incident’. 567
In some hospitals it appears that several staff reacted to efforts to break down the taboos of
infant death with a certain degree of disgusted indignation and insisted that handling dead
babies for reasons other than autopsy or disposal was not in their job description. In 1981
mortuary attendants at RWH Melbourne complained that it was ‘not part of their duties’ to
transport dead infants to the Hall of Worship for memorial services, and on more than one
occasion, the stillborn baby was ill–presented, still wrapped in preserving plastic and laid in
the cradle carelessly, 568 whilst on another separate occasion some years later the wrong
baby was presented for viewing by the parents. 569 Two years later the same battles were
still being fought between departments – for instance, a mortuary worker refused to
transport a stillborn baby to the Hall of Worship for a memorial service and co - workers
threatened to resign if this was added to their list of duties. 570
Social workers and
midwives were thus left to carry out these tasks, even though at this early stage they had not
received specific counselling or training, and hospital memoranda indicates that many staff
in the social work department found these distressing duties – but many were still willing to
perform them in order to better support bereaved parents.571
566
Marilyn Kenny, memorandum to Bethia Stevenson, 13 July 1981. Unpublished document held in RWH
archives.
567
M. van Laar, memorandum to C. Flower, Director of Medical Services, 7 December 1987. Unpublished
document held in RWH archives.
568
Marilyn Kenny, memorandum to Bethia Stevenson, 13 July 1981. Unpublished document held in RWH
archives.
569
See Marilyn Kenny, memorandum to Dr C. Wellington and Dr I. Horacek, 15 May 1990. Unpublished
document held in RWH archives.
570
Kenny, memorandum to Stevenson, 13 July 1981.
571
Kenny, memorandum to Stevenson, 13 July 1981.
179
Despite the hostility evoked by these changes, it is nonetheless significant that during this
period a dialogue had emerged between those involved in the care of bereaved mothers.
Both women’s experiences of loss and the activities of social workers and midwives give
insight into this emerging dialogue between the medical and allied health professions about
the complex nature of such a loss. Certainly not all women experienced indifferent or
callous care. Like Margaret’s doctor, some staff were clumsily well-meaning whilst others
treated bereaved mothers with extreme sensitivity and understanding. Of course, given the
numbers of women affected by such an event, it is highly likely that some women were
cared for staff who themselves had experienced the death of an infant. Although Coralie’s
doctor’s behaviour exemplified the chasm that often existed between medical and parental
understandings of unborn children, other staff caring for Coralie treated her with
remarkable compassion. Unlike many other women who were often left to let the labour
‘run its course’, Coralie was attended to by the hospital matron and a nurse throughout the
entire labour. The nurse stayed on despite her shift ending in order to hold Coralie’s hand
during the labour and when asked why she did this, Coralie recalled that ‘she told me she
had had a stillbirth herself and wanted to be there with me’. 572 Although Kaye, mentioned
earlier, had felt that some of the nurses had been ‘tactless’ during labour she nevertheless
praised her doctor for his commitment to her care, recalling that ‘our daughter was
delivered around 8pm on a Saturday night and my doctor was there at my bedside at 9am
the following morning (Sunday) – I felt this was above and beyond the call of duty. His
sensitivity and understanding was fantastic’. 573
Conclusion
The emerging theories of grief and loss significantly undermined the dominant
understanding of pregnancy loss as a sad, but easily forgotten, event in a woman’s life.
However, although understandings of pregnancy loss and baby death in the 1970s and
1980s became more complex it would be many years before these changes were formalised
and accepted as hospital policy. Medical discourse continued to construct perinatal loss as
an instance of ‘failed pregnancy’ and some deceased or dying babies were treated with a
certain disregard; furthermore, women’s narratives of loss during these years give insight
572
573
Coralie, personal correspondence with researcher.
Kaye, personal correspondence with researcher.
180
into the gradual and ad hoc process of changing an entrenched and widespread tradition of
shielding women from their dead and dying infants. In retrospect, the fairly lonely voices of
some of those involved in caring for bereaved women were not heeded for many years, and
it would be some years before the efforts of social workers and midwives would be
formalised into hospital policy. As I discuss in the next chapter, despite any hostility
towards changing practices in the hospital context, a dialogue between parents, medical
staff, and social workers had begun which displaced the confidence in the practice of
protecting women from their deceased babies. In years to come the small beginnings of the
bereaved parents’ groups would wrought widespread changes to the inscription of perinatal
loss that would, ironically see the hospital become, to an extent, a haven of sorts for those
women who had suffered the loss of a baby.
181
CHAPTER SIX
‘Awakened by angels’: re-inscribing the foetal body in the late twentieth century
In the early 1990s, the inaugural chaplain at KEMH in Perth, the Reverend Robert
Anderson, took possession of the first foetal cremator in Australia. This unique creation
was the culmination of a lengthy design collaboration between Anderson and a firm in
London, an expensive shipping fee and an equally costly customs charge. It was with a
sense of bittersweet satisfaction that Anderson recalled that he was present to oversee the
first cremation of an individual stillborn baby; from this point onwards, Anderson believed
that he was able to answer parents’ queries as to the whereabouts of their baby’s body with
sincerity and credibility. 574 Prior to this significant event, the bodies of deceased ‘non
viable’ foetuses were often cremated as part of hospital waste in the general incinerator,
leaving no distinguishable remains for parents to take home to dispose of as they wished.
These two methods of cremation exemplify the radical shift in the way that the miscarried
and stillborn foetal body was inscribed within the clinical environment, as well as
indicating a wider cultural shift away from the avoidance of grief toward a greater openness
in times of bereavement towards the end of the twentieth century.
In the late 1980s, contemporary attachment and grief theories were increasingly accepted
by healthcare professionals, leading to a greater recognition that women would form bonds
with their infants in the prenatal period and therefore, would potentially grieve intensely
after perinatal loss. This acknowledgement in turn led to a number of changes within the
hospital environment - it became accepted practice within some special care nurseries that
women should be encouraged to hold their critically ill infants, and at KEMH at least,
social workers had begun to hold small ceremonies for miscarried babies in the hospital’s
chapel, although some staff remember that this was sometimes met with disapproval or
outright hostility by other staff members. 575 As I argued in the previous chapter, despite the
emergence of studies which gave insight into the potential significance of perinatal death,
the level of empathy and compassion showed to women in the late 1970s and 1980s
depended largely on the individual staff member’s awareness of and response to the
574
575
Anderson, interview with researcher.
Lloyd, interview with researcher.
182
emerging trends both overseas and at home. By the last decade of the twentieth century,
however, as more women began to occupy positions of influence and power within
hospitals, women’s needs began to take greater priority and pregnancy loss became part of
the discourse of ‘consumer rights’. The growth of so-called ‘consumer agency’ at this time
was borne out of the demand for consumer rights in the health care setting – such as patient
advocacy and access to one’s patient notes and information. This agitation for ‘consumer
agency’ would eventually lead to the formation of specific groups to help support bereaved
parents, as well as foster an appreciation for the value of parents’ opinions within the
clinical setting.
In this chapter I consider the practical impact of the changing construction of perinatal
death discussed in the previous chapter– meanings which moved away from the inscription
of the foetus as ‘unknowable’ toward the reinscription of the deceased baby as ‘knowable’
and thus able to be bonded with - while examining the role of the hospital, and in particular
KEMH in Perth and RWH in Melbourne, in creating a more supportive and protective
environment for bereaved women.
Validating the individual experience
By the 1990s it was progressively more accepted by many health care professionals, and
particularly social workers and midwives, that many parents understood their stillborn baby
or deceased infant to be human: 576 a precious member of the family despite having not
lived outside the womb, or for just a short time, and some hospitals around the country,
including KEMH and RWH, had begun to respond to this knowledge by implementing
routines that were geared towards caring for bereaved women and their families. At
KEMH, for example, in response to the need to educate all staff who came into contact with
bereaved parents, the late 1980s had seen the introduction of the ‘teardrop programme’ at
maternity hospitals in Western Australia. An initiative of SANDS (WA) this involved the
placing of small teardrop shaped stickers on the doors of rooms accommodating bereaved
576
‘RWH Extracts of Discussion Paper: Extracts from Mortuary and Cemeteries Administration Committee’s
Review of Cemetery Legislation – Discussion Paper’, November 1986. Unpublished document held in RWH
archives.
183
women, a move designed to alert all staff from gynaecologists to ward stewards as to the
need for sensitivity and diplomacy. 577
The Grief Kit was also a significant creation at KEMH, developed by SANDS and KEMH
social workers, and which would later be used complete or modified by most major
hospitals around the country. 578 The Grief Kits were designed to help parents create a
tangible record of their baby: a way of honouring the memory of the stillborn or deceased
baby where little tangible evidence existed. 579 Underpinning the kit’s development was the
belief that each stillborn or deceased newborn child was, most often, perceived to be a
valued member of a family and worthy of such validation. The kits also contained several
leaflets on the grieving process and, some time later, physiological issues such as milk
suppression and how to cope with ‘after pains’. 580
For some time nurses and midwives had been taking photographs of deceased babies for the
parents to take home and keep, but the Grief Kit was a more formal and intentional means
for parents to gather mementoes, illustrating the gradual shift away from shielding parents
from their babies. Tiny footprints and handprints were inked onto cards, midwives took
several photos of the baby – dressed often in clothing made by older women, volunteers
who perhaps had suffered such a loss themselves – which were then placed inside a small
album in the kit and there was space for the cot card and identity bracelet. 581 Libby Lloyd,
who was part of the committee that developed the Grief Kit template, remembered that a
key objective was that the kit could form a focus for parents’ memories of their children,
resembling a baby book or newborn photo album:
I was always keen that it was paperback size, that people could put in their handbag,
or put in their bookshelf, or store in an easy way, because it would be something
that they would refer to as years went by and also their children would be able to
577
SANDS (WA) newsletter, Feb-March 1986. Unpublished document held in the KEMH Social Work
archives. The Teardrop Symbol had been adapted from the triangle sticker which had been used in the 1960s
and 1970s to alert staff of the rooms which accommodated women who were relinquishing their babies for
adoption.
578
Lloyd, interview with researcher.
579
For a comprehensive anthropological discussion of the role of ‘making memories’ after pregnancy loss see
Layne, Motherhood Lost, pp. 103-144
580
See SANDS (WA) Advisory Council Meeting, Minutes, 4 March 1993. Unpublished document held in
KEMH Social Work archives.
581
Lloyd, interview with researcher.
184
look at as they grew older and they were able to understand what happened to their
dead sibling. 582
The Grief Kits, and in particular photographs, were still an experimental process; most
midwives had received little or no training on appropriate methods of photographing
deceased babies and sometimes the results were confronting, but it was significant that
many were willing to undertake the task, even when the child’s appearance was rather
overwhelming. 583 For example, Claire’s daughter was stillborn at KEMH in 1991 and the
baby’s tiny body was macerated, having died in utero some time before delivery. Claire
was given a Polaroid photograph of her baby as part of the Grief Kit, taken by a midwife
and, in her interview Claire remembered the picture, which she had long destroyed, as
‘awful. They dressed her up in these clothes and it looked really macabre … like some
Catholic evil christening ceremony gone wrong’. 584 However, Claire was able to return
some time later to take her own photographs, and staff were willing to assist her in this
endeavour to obtain more aesthetically pleasing memories of her daughter: ‘I went back a
few days later and said, ‘I want to see her again’. So they … made her look nice in a
bassinette and everything … cause I thought, I’m not having [the Polaroid photograph] as
my only memento of her’. 585
As time went on more staff became skilled in the complex art of taking photographs of
deceased newborns. Brenda, for example, remembers a nurse who encouraged the parents
to relax and cherish the time with their baby while she took photographs with Brenda’s
camera: ‘she was making us laugh, and brush his hair, and she was just fantastic. And I
have so many photos it’s not funny. And photos of us laughing with him. It was a real [sic]
precious time’. 586
It had also become apparent that there was a need for specialised staff to deal specifically
with bereaved parents, as well as the necessity for the provision of training for those who
582
Lloyd, interview with researcher.
Lloyd, interview with researcher.
584
Claire, interview with researcher, 9 June 2005. Tapes and transcript in possession of researcher.
585
Claire, interview with researcher.
586
Brenda, interview with researcher, 4 April 2005. Tapes and transcript in possession of researcher.
583
185
came into contact with bereaved women and their families during their stay in hospital,
from doctors to hospital orderlies.587 At KEMH, the first hospital chaplain was appointed in
1987 in an agreement between the hospital and the Perth Diocese of the Anglican Church.
The Reverend Robert Anderson started his chaplaincy in December 1987; he had come to
the position assuming that most of his time would be spent counseling patients on the
oncology and gynaecology wards. He was, however, astonished to discover the frequency
of baby death and miscarriage and the depth of grief that many women felt after such a loss,
and in his recollection, he found that his ministry became focused around the care of
bereaved women and their families - although he remembers that he felt it a great challenge
to discover what he could bring to the role:
I didn’t come to the position with an idea of what I wanted to do … The first
dimension was gradually realising almost overwhelmingly the extent of pregnancy
or baby loss. And wondering what did I, as a white male Anglican priest would ever
have to offer in that context. And that was disconcerting in some ways and very
very quickly I realised that I had no resources, and limited knowledge about that. 588
Shortly after his appointment as chaplain Anderson found he was principally occupied in
taking small ceremonies for babies in the chapel – particularly for babies under twenty
weeks gestation, who were still labelled by the hospital as ‘non-viable foetuses’ and who
legally required no formal burial. This caused some censure amongst some other staff
working at the hospital, who had begun to accept the practice of parents viewing so-called
‘viable’ foetuses but who felt that memorial services for miscarried babies was perhaps
going ‘too far’. 589 Libby Lloyd, Belinda Jennings and Anderson all recalled that it was
becoming increasingly clear to those in charge at the hospital that policies needed to be
formalised, and although Anderson stressed in his interview that he was not principally
responsible for such changes, his appointment did act as a catalyst for the formalising of
these changes that individual staff members had been working quietly to achieve for some
years. 590
587
SANDS (WA) conducted a survey in the Labour Ward of KEMH in 1987 to ascertain whether or not staff
felt prepared in dealing with a perinatal death. They found that whilst ‘all staff had sufficient knowledge and
previous experience dealing with stillbirths and neonatal deaths,’ more than seventy percent felt that they
knew ‘what to say to parents, but feel that they lack the skills to communicate effectively with the parents and
families’. According to the evaluation, ‘all staff felt [that] the talks [by SANDS members] were beneficial for
information and ideas’. See ‘Evaluation of SANDS Teaching Programmes’, c1987.
588
Anderson, interview with researcher.
589
Lloyd, interview with researcher.
590
Anderson, interview with researcher.
186
At the heart of these shifts in the care of bereaved women was the concept of holistic care.
Whilst midwives since the mid 1970s had been suggesting that members of the profession
should extend their care to the emotional needs of the patient, the 1990s saw several studies
which affirmed the anecdotal evidence, suggesting that this type of care, with the core value
of the individualised approach, would produce the best outcome for the patient, whether the
pregnancy had ended with a live baby or a stillborn baby. 591 The work of chaplains at both
KEMH and RWH Melbourne was motivated by these values; for example, the chaplain at
RWH, Mary Sila-Mato wrote in a staff manual that chaplaincy at the hospital aimed to
‘liaise within the hospital as well as the wider community’, using skills obtained from
‘training in psychology and human life cycle processes … formal theological study, clinical
pastoral education and rigorous reflection on life experience’ to help ‘guide persons
through the spiritual aspects of crisis in personal and life issues’. Furthermore, Sila-Mato
observed, it was crucial that chaplaincy work recognised the ‘individual diversity’ of
bereaved parents at the hospital. 592
The individualised approach in caring for pregnant women had particular relevance in the
event of pregnancy loss. A crucial part of this paradigm of care was what Belinda Jennings
termed ‘professional friendship’ – the allowing of a relationship to form between midwife
and patient whilst the latter was in hospital – and the concept of ‘continuity of care’ which
ensured that women were cared for by a small team of midwives who had detailed
knowledge of the patient’s history. 593 There was also a growing awareness of the need for
women to be cared for by the more experienced midwives, and at KEMH, for example, it
became important to introduce a student gradually to the more complex obstetrics cases,
both for the sake of the student and importantly, the wellbeing of the mother. 594 It became
less common for the least experienced midwife to be given the most clinically or
psychosocially difficult cases to handle, and although it was to take some years to develop,
the 1990s saw the emergence of the mentor-relationship between student midwife and
591
See for example L.E. Radwin, ‘Knowing the Patient: A Review of Research on an Emerging Concept’,
Journal of Advanced Nursing [JAN], no. 23, 1996, pp. 1142-1146; K. Caelli, J. Downie and A. Letendre,
‘Parents’ Experience of Midwife-Managed Care Following the Loss of a Baby in a Previous Pregnancy’, JAN,
vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 127-136; Victor J. Callan and Judith Murray, ‘The Role of Therapists in Helping Couples
Cope with Stillbirth and Newborn Death’, Family Relations, vol. 38, no. 3, 1989, pp. 248-253.
592
Mary Sila-Mato, ‘Statement of Definition of the Distinctive Role of Chaplaincy at the RWH’, in The Royal
Women’s Hospital Perinatal Death Procedure Manual, Box 454 A1999/09/3.1, RWH Archives.
593
Jennings, interview with researcher.
594
Jennings, interview with researcher.
187
professional which aimed to better educate the novice midwife as to how to adapt their care
in situations of loss. 595
This formalised response to perinatal death greatly altered how women were cared for in
several Western Australian hospitals – and in particular KEMH - in the late twentieth
century. Whilst the experience was still highly traumatic for many women – Michelle, for
example, described the death of her first child as ‘just tremendous sorrow, shocking. The
worst experience … people can go through’ 596 – many bereaved mothers in the 1990s were
increasingly cared for within the confines of the hospital with compassion and empathy
carefully modeled on recommendations by psychologists researching the psychological
impact of perinatal loss. For example, when Christine’s first baby was stillborn near term in
the late 1990s, she experienced the model of ‘continuity of care’ from a small group of
midwives, and she remembers that although the doctors were, in her perception, somewhat
‘aloof’ and uninvolved, several individual midwives in particular were willing to involve
themselves in the personal tragedy that Christine and her partner were experiencing. She
recalled that ‘there was one particular nurse … and she’d come in every day and give me a
kiss and a cuddle, and she’d say, ‘you had any sleep?’ I’d say, no, not real keen on that.
‘That’s alright’ [she’d say] ‘but you need to get some sleep’’. 597
The midwives dressed Christine’s baby son, took photographs and footprints for the Grief
Kit and strongly encouraged Christine to hold her baby over a period of several days, even
though he had multiple congenital disorders and was, in Christine’s words, ‘a pretty sick
baby’. 598 Similarly, Brenda remembers one particular midwife who ‘sat up all night, hour
after hour, [because] I couldn’t sleep, and she just sat there and talked to me’. 599 Her
experience was not isolated; many hospital staff that had direct contact with bereaved
parents went out of their way to show their care and concern. According to Libby Lloyd,
midwives and social workers would often attend funerals held in the hospital chapel and
595
In her interview, Jennings expressed her belief that, prior to the early 1990s, the most inexperienced
midwives were assigned to care for those whose babies had died or been stillborn, because of the belief that
they could do ‘no further harm’. See Jennings, interview with researcher.
596
Michelle, interview with researcher, 3 August 2005. Tapes and transcript in possession of researcher.
597
Christine, interview with researcher, 7 June 2005. Tapes and transcript in possession of researcher.
598
Christine, interview with researcher.
599
Brenda, interview with researcher.
188
would sometimes share with mothers their own stories of loss. 600 In her interview Claire
recalled ‘one nurse coming in the morning after when they’d moved me off the labour
ward, down to this other ward in my own room, and she’d experienced the same thing
herself and she came and gave me a big hug and was crying with me’. 601
Because parents were often keeping their deceased babies in their rooms for longer it was
becoming rarer for mistakes to be made, as described in the previous chapter, such as
presenting the wrong baby for a viewing, but when such did incidents occur through
miscommunication or negligence, some staff went out of their way to alleviate any pain
caused. An incident at RWH in 1990, for example, illustrates the dedication of the social
work department in providing individualised care. Late one afternoon a bereaved father had
complained to social work staff that his son, stillborn at the hospital and later transported to
a private funeral home, had been left by the parents dressed in clothing knitted by the
mother, as they wished the baby to be buried in this outfit. When the father had requested to
see his child at the funeral home one last time, he had discovered that the infant was naked,
much to his distress. It transpired that mortuary workers had undressed the child,
mistakenly assuming that the clothing belonged to the hospital, and sent the clothing to a
central linen service. With the funeral for the baby scheduled for the next morning, several
social workers stayed past normal working hours in order to find the clothes, launder them,
and to take a taxi to the parents’ home in order that the baby could be buried in the special
outfit. 602
Despite some of their colleagues’ reticence, some obstetricians and gynaecologists also
increasingly embraced the notion that bereaved parents should be treated with empathy and
sensitivity, and some doctors confessed that their training had left them unprepared for
caring for a patient whose baby had died. A survey of junior medical officers found that
whilst sixty five percent felt suitably confident to physically examine a patient, only thirty
five percent were sure of their abilities to break bad news, such as poor foetal diagnosis or
600
Lloyd, interview with researcher.
Claire, interview with researcher.
602
Case of Mr B, as reported by Sue Dower, memorandum to the Director of Medical Services, Dr
Wellington, 10 May 1990. Unpublished document held in RWH archives.
601
189
intrauterine death, to a patient. 603 Accordingly, in 1995 the Royal Australian College of
Obstetrics and Gynaecology introduced a unit in behavioural medicine into the programme
for membership into the College. 604 Some hospitals began to educate postgraduate medical
students about the likely impact of perinatal death on the lives of affected women.
Members of SANDS (WA) addressed a group of postgraduate students in February 1990,
for example, with a lecture titled ‘What I would like my doctor to be if I lost my baby’.
This lecture dealt with such revelatory concepts as ‘breaking bad news gently’ and with
empathy in a quiet environment, ensuring that the mother be well supported by a family
member or friend, and stressed that some parents may need information repeated several
times over in language they could understand. 605
For those obstetricians who had been trained in decades past and who had begun to accept
the changing understandings of the possible meanings of perinatal death, it was perhaps
more likely that compassionate care was a lesson learnt after witnessing the tragedy many
times. Although the wider community believed that stillbirths and neonatal deaths rarely
occurred, most practising obstetricians would have still have had contact with bereaved
parents. For example, Michelle’s baby was stillborn at thirty five weeks after an otherwise
uneventful pregnancy. Although she had been a nurse herself, Michelle had had little
professional experience of miscarriage and stillbirth, and was shocked to find that her
obstetrician faced a similar ordeal with other patients ‘at least once a month’. Throughout
Michelle’s labour, the obstetrician was clearly emotionally involved and Michelle found
out some time later that he was visibly affected at work the following day. 606 Some doctors
openly rejected the attitude of aloofness and distance of the past; the Melbourne
obstetrician Norman Morris, for example, was quoted in a front-page article in the
Victorian daily newspaper The Age as confessing that his profession had, in the past,
mishandled incidents of perinatal loss out of professional pride: ‘I think obstetricians have,
until recent times, handled it pretty badly … People come to us expecting a live baby.
When they deliver a dead baby, we as a group feel we've let them down’. Morris went on to
603
Jill Cockburn and William A.W. Walters, ‘Communication between doctors and patients’, Current
Obstetrics/Gynaecology, 1999, vol. 9, p. 36.
604
Cockburn and Walters, ‘Communication between doctors and patients’, p. 36.
605
SANDS address to postgraduate students, ‘What would I like my doctor to be if I lost my baby’, February
1990. Unpublished document held in KEMH Social Work archives.
606
Michelle, interview with researcher.
190
say that Australians in general ‘handled death badly’; in the past, he argued, Australians
were part of a community ‘that denies death’. 607
From shielding to embracing
Within the context of the formalising of hospital policies it was now accepted practice that
women were not only allowed to hold their babies but that they be encouraged to do so. 608
Whereas in the 1980s some women were allowed to briefly hold their babies – often
provided the child was not ‘too deformed’ - by the 1990s the emphasis had largely shifted
to helping women form emotional attachments to their deceased or dying infants, even if
such deformities were present. 609 Women who had delivered stillborn babies were now, at
least in the hospital context, considered to be mothers, and it was now regarded as part of
the hospital’s responsibility to help bereaved women bond with their children. 610 The
‘unknowable’ stillborn baby was now regarded as eminently ‘knowable’ through the
enactment of rituals that were similar to those following a live birth. This often involved
keeping the baby in the mother’s room for at least some of her stay in hospital, measuring
and weighing the child, and bathing, dressing and naming the baby. For all the women
interviewed, the time spent with their baby was a precious time, and they used the
opportunity to cram in what should have been years’ worth of parenting.
Both Christine and Kelly had witnessed their respective sisters’ experience of stillbirth so
607
Norman Morris quoted in Jennifer Alexander, ‘When a Baby Dies’, Age, 9 December 1992, p. 1.
Marilyn Kenny observed that ‘over the last decade there has been marked improvement at the Royal
Women’s Hospital in addressing the needs of bereaved parents. This has come about by encouraging parents
to express their sense of loss and listening to how they perceive we can help them. We have acknowledged
that the death of an infant is an important event for parents and that parents should, if their grieving is to run
its normal course, be encouraged to acknowledge the event in appropriate ways. It is now routine practice in
this hospital for parents to see and hold their stillborn infant, or one who dies in the neonatal period, for
photographs to be taken of the infant with or without parents, by hospital staff; for parents, family and friends
to view the baby dressed, or have the baby dressed in clothes that they provide, and for baptism, memorial,
commemoration and other religious services to be held’. See Kenny, Management Course Task –
Administrative Project, Hospital Burials’.
609
For example, Australian midwife Jane Warland suggested that ‘fear may well be the driving force in
parents deciding not to see their baby, particularly if there is abnormality or maceration involved. Midwives
need to acknowledge the parents’ fear but work through it to produce an acceptance of the baby as a person,
entitled to acknowledgment irrespective of how he looks’. See J. Warland, The Midwife and the Bereaved
Family, Melbourne: AUSMED Publications, 2000, p. 56.
610
See Jennings, interview with researcher; Lloyd, interview with researcher.
608
191
knew what to expect in terms of seeing the deceased infant. 611 Christine’s sister had
delivered a stillborn baby a few years earlier and her insistence that Christine hold the baby
would, ironically, stand Christine in good stead for when her own child was stillborn. She
recalled that she ‘just looked [at the baby]. I was horrified. Absolutely horrified. She said,
“are you going to hold him?” I said, “I can’t”. And she said, “hold him”. So I picked him up
and it just changed everything. My fear, everything, went away. And I remembered from
that experience, how important it was to hold [my son]’. 612
With the introduction of formal policies designed to oversee the management of perinatal
death came the danger that all women were treated the same, and that the unique nature of
the event – which would be influenced be cultural background, relationship status and a
myriad of other variables – would be homogenised. This danger was recognised by staff on
the Advisory Council at KEMH, and formal policies were given a degree of flexibility – a
recognition which gave women agency to decide, within limits, how they wished to be
responded to by staff in the hospital. 613 For example, where Kelly was able to discharge
herself from hospital the day after the delivery, returning to the hospital every day to visit
her deceased daughter, Christine was encouraged by midwives to stay in hospital as long as
she needed before facing her empty house. 614 As a single mother with a limited support
network, Claire was also treated with care appropriate to her particular situation. Although
she was put in a private room, she was fairly close to the nursery and remembers going to
the nursery to see the babies, and having ‘a mini breakdown’. Despite one older nurse
scolding her for being near the babies, another midwife later took her back to the nursery
with the express purpose of allowing Claire to cuddle one of the babies, recognising her
deep need to embrace a baby. 615
Whereas in the past parents’ questions about reasons why their infants had died were
deflected or ignored, deemed as ‘undesirable’ knowledge, some staff began to believe that
parents had every right to have these questions answered satisfactorily and truthfully. The
611
Kelly, interview with researcher, 24 May 2005. Tapes and transcript in possession of researcher; Christine,
interview with researcher.
612
Christine, interview with researcher.
613
See the Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Support (SANDS) Submission to Centre for Women’s Health,
c1996. Unpublished document held in KEMH Social Work archives.
614
Kelly, interview with researcher; Christine, interview with researcher.
615
Claire, interview with researcher.
192
manifestation of a culture of silence from decades past was a fear of procedures such as
autopsy, and it was a matter of concern to many hospital directors that many parents
refused a post mortem, afraid as to what would be done to their child. The various Human
Tissue Acts in respective state legislation meant that autopsies could only be performed on
the deceased with the consent of the next of kin, and many parents chose not to give their
consent. 616 Some perinatal pathologists and social workers felt it was important to
demystify the concept of the autopsy and so the idea of plain language reports was born. 617
Increasingly patients were demanding that they be treated with respect and dignity and
there was a growing expectation amongst the community that the medical profession had a
responsibility to inform patients of their condition in understandable language and terms.
The plain language report was driven largely at KEMH by the conviction that parents
deserved to be informed in an understandable manner as to any reasons – if known – why
their baby had died. Simon Knowles, a perinatal pathologist at KEMH in the 1990s,
believed that autopsy was vital in acknowledging the value of that individual child:
A post-mortem is worthwhile both for the caregivers and for the parents, quite apart
from the amount of medical help it provides. It reinforces the existence of the infant
as an individual in his or her own right and helps to underline the fact that the
medical attendants consider the baby (and the family) sufficiently important to
deserve a full and caring investigation. 618
Parents also began to embrace the funeral service believing it to be an empowering ritual
that would help them properly say farewell to their baby. As discussed in Chapter Four,
some major hospitals had begun to offer more formalised memorial services for babies
under twenty eight weeks gestation, which provided parents with the economically
accessible option of hospital cremation and burial, but also afforded them the dignity of a
memorial service that validated and recognised their child’s existence. For Claire, the
616
The Director of Pathology at RWH strongly opposed what he believed to be social workers unduly
discouraging parents from consenting to autopsy; it was his opinion that, in a misguided attempt to help
parents grieve, many social workers were discouraging parents from consenting to autopsy. See Fortune, letter
to Flower, 14 December 1987.
617
For example the SANDS (Vic.) checklist was circulated in mid 1986, informally through the hospital and
to Dr Flower & Head of Nursing Mrs McArthur and Sr L Wilson. See SANDS (Vic.) Perinatal Death Nursing
Checklist. Unpublished document held in RWH archives. The Minutes of a 1993 SANDS Advisory Council
meeting also recorded that Simon Knowles, perinatal pathologist at KEMH, had attended a public meeting
about perinatal autopsies and noted that there were ‘big issues [of] dignity and empowerment. Relatives upset,
very little control over [coronial] autopsies’. See SANDS (WA) Advisory Council, Minutes, 4 March 1993.
Unpublished document held in KEMH Social Work archives.
618
Simon Knowles, ‘Perinatal Pathology: Working with and for the family – the hospital team’, SANDS
Conference Presentation, 1990. Unpublished document held in KEMH Social Work archives.
193
decision was a significant one; although she had initially wanted to have her daughter
cremated and interred in a cemetery, the cost was prohibitive and the idea of a tiny coffin
was difficult to bear. The memorial garden at KEMH was an attractive option, particularly
the idea that her baby would be interred with other infants – ‘like a little baby heaven’. The
garden also provided a reflective space for those women and their families who chose
hospital cremation. Claire visited the garden each year for several years, just to sit in the
gazebo and reflect on her baby’s death. 619
Many cemeteries around the country had responded to pressure – usually through groups
such as SANDS – and the advice of hospital social workers to provide an area appropriate
for the interment of stillborn children or neonatal deaths. For example, after nearly a decade
of discussion and planning, the Metropolitan Cemetery Board of Western Australia [MCB]
had opened the Infants Butterfly Garden in the early 1990s which was a private area within
Karrakatta Cemetery dedicated to babies dying before birth or shortly afterwards, and
provided for the interment of ashes with a range of memorial options such as butterfly
plaques and wind sculptures symbolising ‘the spirit of the child’. Pinnaroo Valley
Memorial Park, also operated by the MCB, also became a popular choice for bereaved
parents from the 1990s. In a bushland setting, with native wildlife and flora, the park is
particularly serene and beautiful. Michelle and her husband chose to bury their infant son at
Pinnaroo because of the peaceful nature of the park and the fact that other babies and young
children were buried there: ‘he overlooks a lake, and it’s very peaceful. And a lot of babies
are up there. And children. Some of it is upsetting [but]… I go up there when I need some
peace, I find it peaceful’.620
With more parents able to actively participate in their baby’s funeral, it was now more
likely that friends and relatives were able to attend the service and share to some degree in
the couple’s loss. Before her son was interred at Pinnaroo, Michelle and her family held a
funeral service in the chapel of the private hospital where the baby was delivered, to enable
friends from the labour ward to attend. In the past, women were often discouraged or even
disallowed from attending their child’s funeral, for fear that it would unduly ‘upset’ them.
Most women in the 1990s were sufficiently empowered to not only attend the service but to
619
620
Claire, interview with researcher.
Michelle, interview with researcher.
194
make significant decisions regarding the arrangements. Brenda, whose son was also
interred at Pinnaroo, was very sick following delivery and it was some time before she was
well enough to participate in funeral arrangements. However, her husband insisted that
Brenda be present at all meetings as he felt strongly that a meaningful service could only be
organised taking her bond with the baby into account:
[My husband] was really the one that wanted me there too, ‘cause he said, I don’t
know a lot about [the baby] - you see he missed out, I feel so bad for him because
he missed out on so much, but then he really drew on me for information …he liked
certain music, he loved the 4WD, he was going to be a boys boy! (laughs). And [my
husband] was really good, he said to the funeral director that he wasn’t going to
make any decisions without [Brenda], so they didn’t push for anything … They
were good on the day as well. 621
For Christine and her partner, the funeral service was significant in that it enabled them to
actively acknowledge that their baby had been a vital part of their lives even in utero, and
also gave them the opportunity to perform parenting rituals that they would never be able to
enact for that child again. Christine wrote a letter to her son that was then placed with his
ashes: ‘it just told him that he would be looked after by the kangaroos and the ducks [at
Pinnaroo Valley] and that we would come to visit’. 622 At the funeral service, Christine and
her partner chose the words from a song by popular Australian band, Hunters and
Collectors, to symbolise their feelings for their child, which the chaplain from KEMH read:
I dreamed of you at nighttime
And I watched you in your sleep
I met you in high places
I touched your head and touched your feet
So if you disappear out of view
You know I will never say goodbye
And though I try to forget it
You will make me call your name
And I'll shout it to the blue summer sky
And we may never meet again.
So shed your skin and let's get started
And you will throw your arms around me. 623
At an official level the major faiths in Australia prior to 1990 – specifically, Roman
Catholicism and Protestantism – had also treated perinatal death as a taboo event and
several women interviewed had found little comfort from the church following the death of
621
Brenda, interview with researcher.
Christine, interview with researcher.
623
Mark Seymour, ‘Throw Your Arms Around Me’, from ‘Human Frailty’, Hunters and Collectors,
Mushroom Records: 1986.
622
195
their babies. For example, although she was visited in hospital each day by an elderly priest
for a blessing, Lena, whose baby was stillborn in 1988, found the priest to be ‘an old man
really’ who simply could not understand her circumstances. As previously discussed, some
women had also been subject to blame by members of the clergy, such as Liz, who was told
that her babies had died because she had been sexually active before marriage. 624 Both
Roman Catholics and Protestants had been active for several decades in the abortion
debate, 625 and it was accepted in the late 1990s that recognition of the loss of an infant
before birth was corollary to the belief that human life began at conception and was
sanctified and created by God. 626 Similarly, both the Uniting and Lutheran churches
introduced a service specifically for babies dying in utero or shortly after birth, changes that
reflected a more widespread understanding of how pregnancy loss and perinatal death could
potentially devastate a family. 627
Through his work at KEMH Anderson was one who recognised a gaping void in the
Anglican liturgy. 628 The last revision of the Anglican Church’s prayer book was in 1978
and the funeral services did not provide for stillborn children or those dying within a few
weeks of life. This is of course unsurprising, considering that many parents would have
opted for a hospital arranged burial without a religious service; for those rarer instances
where the parents requested a religious service, it is most likely that the individual
clergyman involved adapted the existing funeral services for older children and adults. One
Anglican minister, for example, broke with tradition to add to the existing funeral service a
prayer for those who mourn, asking that God would ‘deal graciously … with those who
mourn, that casting every care on you, they may know the consolation of your love’. 629 The
changes to the liturgy of the major Protestant churches signified a more formal recognition
of the emotional devastation caused by a stillbirth or neonatal death. Although some in the
Anglican tradition rejected the new prayer book in its entirety on principle, on the basis of
624
Liz, interview with researcher.
Since the 1970s, the issue of legal abortion had been fiercely contested in Australia. For more on the
concerns of both the so-called ‘pro-choice’ and ‘pro-life’ groups, see Siedlecky and Wyndham, Populate and
Perish, p. 60; Stephanie Grayston, ‘Changing Attitudes and Services: Abortion in Western Australia, 19701990’, in P. Hetherington and P. Maddern (eds.) Sexuality and Gender in History: Selected Essays, Nedlands,
WA: University of Western Australia Press, 1993, pp. 242-254.
626
See for example Grant, Richard, ‘Remembrance Services: Letter’, AD2000, vol. 13, no. 11, p. 15
627
See Tobin and Griffin, In the Midst of Life, p. 140.
628
Anderson, interview with researcher.
629
Right Reverend Peter Brain, personal correspondence with researcher, 27 October 2005. Letter in
possession of researcher.
625
196
theological revisions and a more ‘inclusive’ liturgy, 630 the provision of a service
specifically for an infant provided a much needed resource for those who came to the
church for support following the death of a baby and it was widely accepted by the Church
as such. 631
The formal funeral service ‘for an infant dying near the time of birth’ in the revised A
Prayer Book for Australians was prepared specifically for the ‘burial or cremation of a
baby who dies in the womb, or is still-born, or who dies shortly after birth’, and constructed
perinatal loss as a unique and complex event, with the introduction to the service noting
that services for babies were usually small affairs but ‘powerfully intimate’.632 The liturgy
for the funeral of a baby was founded on the belief that God had created that child for a
purpose, quoting Psalm 139 as evidence of this:
You created my inmost parts;
You knit me together in my mother’s womb.
You know my soul, and my bones were not hidden from you:
While I was being made in secret,
and woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my limbs when they were still unfinished:
All of them were written in your book. 633
Prayers used in the service urged parents to trust that He had their child safe in His care, for
example the prayer ‘Remembrance of a baby who has died at or before birth’:
Heavenly Father
Your love for all your children is strong and enduring.
We were not able to know [baby] as we hoped.
Yet you knew her/him growing in her/his mother’s womb.
In the midst of our sadness,
We thank you that [baby] is with you now. 634
630
John G. Mason, ‘A prayer book for Australia?’ ACL Online, July 1995.
http://acl.asn.au/old/mason_pbrk.html. Accessed 15 January 2008.
631
Although the Sydney Diocese of the Anglican Church of Australia had rejected the new prayer book on the
basis of its ‘non-Biblical inclusiveness’ and theological revision, most pastors used the funeral service for a
baby when necessary. See Brain, personal correspondence with researcher; Mason, ‘A prayer book for
Australia?’
632
Anglican Church of Australia, A Prayer Book for Australia [APBA], Sydney: Broughton Books, 1995, p.
754.
633
Psalm 139 (New International Version) quoted in Anglican Church of Australia, APBA, p. 754.
634
Prayer ‘Remembrance of a baby who has died at or before birth’ in Anglican Church of Australia, APBA,
p. 758.
197
Filling in the gaps: educating about diverse needs in Western Australia
The disparity between services in the metropolitan area and rural areas was no more
obvious than in the massive state of Western Australia. Although many women were flown
to Perth after ultrasound or other tests detected a potential problem with the pregnancy,
many Western Australian women were still delivering stillborn children or suffering the
death of a newborn in country areas and it had become apparent to some staff at KEMH
that some areas lagged behind their city counterparts in terms of the knowledge and skills
to best manage perinatal death in these areas. To further compound the problem, rural
communities were often unable to comprehend the depth of loss for those women who did
deliver their child in a city hospital, many kilometres away from home. For example,
Brenda and her husband were living in a small south-west town when she became pregnant
with their first child, and as high-profile members of the community, 635 Brenda felt that the
community in general shared in the couple’s excitement and anticipation. However,
because the baby was delivered at KEMH, Brenda returned to her home feeling like she
was ‘in a bubble’. The reason for her absence from the town went generally unmentioned,
although people obviously knew what had happened and Brenda felt like she was on
display when she did venture out in public: ‘[people] wouldn’t go anywhere near me but
they were … about twenty five metres away from [me] just staring’. 636
The Western Australian Rural Pregnancy Loss Team, or the Roadshow, as it was
affectionately known, was formed in the early 1990s, and was funded in part by a grant
from Healthway, a state government agency in Western Australia established in 1991 to
promote and fund health projects 637 for the purpose of travelling to country areas to provide
support and education for local caregivers, as well as to promote local support groups in the
area. 638 The Roadshow’s beginnings were grounded in the findings of Margaret Nicol and
the notion that women suffering some form of perinatal death often had ‘moderate to severe
635
Brenda’s husband was a policeman in this small town at this time. They later requested, and were granted a
transfer on compassionate grounds because Brenda felt that she ‘needed to leave’ such a small community.
Brenda, interview with researcher.
636
Brenda, interview with researcher.
637
For
more
information
on
Healthway
and
its
role
see
http://www.healthway.wa.gov.au/internal.aspx?MenuID=454. Accessed 15th December 2007.
638
Simon Knowles, ‘A Passage Through Grief – the Western Australian Rural Pregnancy Loss Team’, British
Medical Journal, vol. 309, p. 1705.
198
deterioration in their health following the loss,’ 639 which was further compounded by the
isolation and lack of knowledge in rural areas. Particularly in the transient north of the
state, morbidity following pregnancy loss was substantial, and as Knowles observed,
‘largely unrecognised’ within the community. 640 Growing out of the presentation to the
SANDS Conference, the Rural Pregnancy Loss Programme was remarkable in its
multidisciplinary approach to sharing knowledge and marked a more cohesive attitude
between departments at KEMH. Libby Lloyd was part of the project, and remembers it as:
A very comprehensive programme, very well thought through and designed. It
comprised of chaplaincy, social work, midwifery, SANDS and pathology, and we
went to a country town on invitation, that was important, we did sessions for all the
professionals in town, we usually had lunch with the GPs who were too busy to
come to the session, and downloaded some of the information for them, and in the
course of the one day workshop we would at some point break up into our
professional sub groups and have mini workshops there, and in the evening we
would have an open session for the public, to promote SANDS and so on, and … of
course we would leave behind good written material and offer to be ongoing
consultants - so that whole sequence was really designed to strengthen to local
awareness and support networks. 641
Staff working with women in the clinical setting had begun to construct perinatal loss as a
complex experience, and articulated the belief that cultural diversity would lead to a great
variety of needs. Particularly in the major teaching hospitals, there existed a wide range of
cultural backgrounds and it became clear that the management of perinatal death could not
be followed with a ‘checklist’ approach. 642 Lloyd recalls that ‘in the early days a
presumption was that everyone was the same and that meant that everybody was an
educated Caucasian’. 643 However, particularly at major maternity hospitals such as KEMH
and RWH, staff had begun to request training in cultural diversity. 644 For example,
different religions have vastly different requirements in terms of burial, and Lloyd
639
Knowles, ‘A Passage Through Grief’, p. 1705.
Knowles, ‘A Passage Through Grief’, p. 1705.
641
Lloyd, interview with researcher.
642
Lloyd noted that ‘[KEMH] is the state centre, so we certainly get indigenous people, refugee people from a
variety of cultures, any faith you’d like to mention, we have forty different language groups and umpteen
different cultural groups so when you’re setting up professional development these days a very common
request from staff is, tell us all about the different cultural groups, so they’re keen to do the right thing. So
again, you’re still trying to help people practice … mature practitioners in whatever their profession in a way
that is attentive to the individual and not be routine about it, because there’s nothing routine about death’.
Lloyd, interview with researcher.
643
Lloyd, interview with researcher.
644
See Margaret Peters, Deputy Director of Nursing, memorandum to PDMC, 28 October 1983. Unpublished
document held in RWH archives.
640
199
remembers that most staff increasingly ‘bent over backwards’ to accommodate diverse
cultural and religious customs:
Of course there is universals involved in death, but certainly at King Edward my
observation is that people bend over backwards to adapt to individual needs so that
parents who want to take home the dead body, parents who want to show the baby
to people, to have the baby in their room for long periods of time, come back and
see the baby afterwards, have this ritual, that ritual, have the funeral the same day
for Islamic people, anything you like, take the body to some remote area, take the
ashes somewhere, have just their baby’s ashes for the very young ones, not mixed in
with all the other ashes, almost anything, produce some unusual clothing for the
baby to wear, anything you like, we’ll adapt to. 645
Quite separate from the issue of cultural diversity was the breaking down of gender
stereotypes. For many decades men were either absent – by custom, choice or otherwise –
when their partner actually delivered the baby, and the only role they were given to play in
the drama was the strong, decisive partner who would ‘take care’ of all arrangements,
ostensibly to ‘protect’ the woman from the tragedy but often serving to rob her of any sense
of agency in the experience. Whereas any change in the 1970s and 1980s had affirmed the
cultural assumptions of masculine absence in perinatal death by focusing solely on the
woman’s needs and experience, writers in the mid 1990s began to explore the impact of
perinatal death on the father of the child, and what their specific needs were in terms of
postnatal support and care. 646 Of course, not all women experiencing perinatal death were
supported by the baby’s father, but many women were and those interviewed felt keenly for
their partner, aware that of the pressure they were facing to be ‘strong’ for their wives;
Brenda, for example, recalled that her husband ‘would go and cry in the shower, quietly, so
I didn’t have to hear him crying, so he could be strong for me. He didn’t want me to see
that he actually had trouble’. 647
Several Australian studies began to question the role that men were typecast to play when
their wives or partners gave birth to a stillborn child. Simon Knowles, for example, had
argued that the health care system had traditionally imposed upon fathers the role of
645
Lloyd, interview with researcher.
See for example Diane McGreal, Barry J. Evans, Graham D. Burrows, ‘Gender Differences in Coping
Following Loss of a Child Through Miscarriage or Stillbirth: A Pilot Study’, Stress Medicine, vol. 13, no. 3,
1997, pp. 159-165; Brett O’Neill, ‘Stories: A Father’s Grief, Dealing with Stillbirth’, Nursing Forum, vol. 33,
no. 4, pp. 33-37, F.M. Boyle, J.C. Vance, J.M. Najman, M.J. Thearle, ‘The Mental Health Impact of Stillbirth,
Neonatal Death or SIDS: Prevalence and Patterns of Distress’, Social Science & Medicine, vol. 43, no. 8,
1996, pp. 1273-1282.
647
Brenda, interview with researcher.
646
200
‘protector and organiser’. 648 Kate Caelli et al argued that men and women did indeed grieve
differently, particularly that men grieved less intensely and for a shorter duration, but
stressed that men did often grieve the death of their child and also needed support and care
after the event. 649 Miro, for example, remembers that after his son died during labour in
1995 the baby was bathed and dressed by the midwives, after which Miro sat with him in
an armchair, just as father and son: ‘the cricket was on the TV in the room, and I sat with
him close to the bed and watched the match, speaking to him that all I wanted to do was to
be a dad and play cricket with him like other dads do, and I probably said a million other
things too’. 650
Without appropriate care for men, the writers warned, the loss of the baby could be
compounded by marital stress leading to breakdown of the relationship. To prevent this, it
was the responsibility of the nurses and midwives caring for the family to ‘ensure that
patients in this situation are prepared for gender differences in grieving’. 651 Importantly, the
management of perinatal death within the clinical setting became gradually more geared
towards the family rather than focused solely on the woman. SANDS (WA) for example,
sought funding to assist Margaret Nicol to produce three videos which would cover the
issues of grief from the perspective of fathers and siblings, as well as the impact of grief on
any subsequent pregnancy. 652 SANDS (WA) also produced a pamphlet for inclusion in the
Grief Kit that specifically addressed the different grieving patterns of men and women,
designed to ease any tension between the parents.
Gendered expectations of grief after perinatal loss: women’s experiences
Whether or not perinatal death does significantly contribute to marriage breakdown remains
a matter of conjecture but it is clear that the different expectations of men and women
sometimes led to great stress within a relationship. After the death of her son, Brenda
became active in SANDS and remembers many support meetings where women would
share their stories of tension and stress between themselves and their partner which
648
Simon Knowles, ‘A Passage Through Grief’, p. 1708.
Caelli et al, ‘Parents’ Experience of Midwife-managed care’, pp. 127-136.
650
Miro, personal correspondence with researcher, 7 August 2005. Letter in possession of researcher.
651
Caelli et al, ‘Parents’ Experience of Midwife-Managed Care’, pp. 127-136.
652
SANDS (WA) Advisory Council, Minutes, 3 March 1994. Unpublished document held in KEMH Social
Work archives.
649
201
inevitably led to the breakdown of the relationship. 653 Although the information supplied to
parents often naturalised the differences in gender responses to perinatal death, most
women found that this knowledge helped them to understand their partner better. In Kelly’s
experience, her husband was her ‘rock’, but she soon realised that they grieved their
daughter’s death in different ways:
He was really supportive and he was just there. He would just listen, and he would
do a lot in that regard. He explained to me [as] the anniversaries have come and
they’ve obviously had more impact on me each year, where it’s still an impact on
him, but because he didn’t carry her, he didn’t deliver her, he didn’t get to bond
with her in that regard before she was born – he feels a lot but it’s obviously
nowhere near as great as what I feel, in that regard. Which I understand, but at the
time [it was hard]. 654
Some families did experience loving, supportive care after their baby’s death that would
continue long after the immediate shock had worn off, although many soon found people
becoming impatient with the intensity and duration of their grief. Indeed, whilst
acknowledging the support of close friends and relatives, Brenda admitted that ‘I think we
jagged it’. 655 For some women who were not so fortunate, the support group became a kind
of haven where they could share their pain with people who knew, to some degree, what
they were experiencing. 656 The value of such self help groups was their ability to give a
parent ‘permission’ to grieve, particularly when others refused to acknowledge the depth of
the loss. 657
Conclusion
The impact of second wave feminism and the consumer rights’ movements of the 1970s
and early 1980s in Australia reached those caring for bereaved parents within the hospital
environment towards the last fifteen years of the twentieth century. The transformation of
653
Brenda, interview with researcher. Another interviewee commented that her husband used to refer to
SANDS as ‘Death Women’; her participation in SANDS was a source of tension for the couple. Janet,
interview with researcher, 3 August 2005. Tapes and transcript in possession of researcher. At Janet’s request,
this is a pseudonym.
654
Kelly, interview with researcher.
655
Brenda, interview with researcher.
656
Jennifer, interview with researcher.
657
Layne notes that the contemporary support group for bereaved parents is ‘fundamentally designed to break
[cultural] silence. Through their meetings they carve out a space in which it is permissible to speak, and with
the claim that pregnancy loss is a legitimate source of grief, they define loss as an acceptable topic of
conversation outside of support-group meetings’. See Layne, Motherhood Lost, pp. 74-75.
202
attitudes towards the likely impact of a perinatal death wrought radical changes in the way
that women, and by extension their families, were treated by health care professionals:
where women were shielded from their deceased infants in the past, the last decade of the
twentieth century was characterised by the belief that women did form attachments with
their unborn baby, and that these attachments should be fostered and respected even if the
pregnancy ended in death. Parent-driven groups, most notably SANDS, worked with health
care professionals to implement ways of encouraging parents to bond with their deceased or
dying infants, such as the Grief Kits at KEMH, and establishing of dedicated spaces for
reflection and memorialisation in cemeteries and hospital grounds around Australia.
Although the construction of perinatal loss as a significant event was challenged towards
the end of the twentieth century - as I argue in the final chapter - the changes in hospital
policy had enormous impact on the way that some Western Australian women were able to
memorialise and publicly express their sorrow for the death of their infants.
203
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘I’d just like to die with a bit of peace’: renegotiating and reinscribing perinatal loss
As she considered the changing ways in caring for women whose babies were stillborn or
who died shortly after birth towards the end of the twentieth century, Libby Lloyd observed
that these changes did not only affect those women who suffered a perinatal loss towards
the end of the twentieth century:
We get older women and sometimes their daughters contact the hospital requesting
information about a previous death of a baby or loss of a pregnancy where they
were left in the dark. They didn’t see the baby, didn’t hear what sex it was, didn’t
have any ritual, weren’t told where it ended up, and so often later in their life,
they’re starting to revisit those painful little nooks and crannies of their life and
wanting to get some closure by way of at least information about what happened. 658
As I have explored in more detail in previous chapters, women who lost a baby in the postWorld War II period were most likely never able to see or hold their infant, and many were
not told even basic information such as the child’s sex or any possible explanation for what
had contributed to the infant’s death. Oral history suggests that very few women left
hospital knowing how and where their infant was buried, having had little or no input into
these important decisions. It was, as British obstetrician Stanford Bourne observed in the
late 1960s, as if the event had never existed at all, a ‘non-event’. 659
However, the greater openness towards death and the shift away from the inscription of the
foetus as replaceable and unknowable had seen dramatic changes in how many women
were cared for within the clinical setting: for some women, the contemporary public
interest in stillbirth and its increased visibility within the community led to their memories
being reshaped and recast within a different framework. The public repression of stillbirth
and neonatal death was re-framed, to a degree, within a culture of greater openness towards
death and bereavement by the late 1990s. 660 The expectation of ‘spartan control’ which had
characterised the interview years was displaced by the construction of grief as a liminal and
658
Lloyd, interview with researcher.
Bourne, ‘The Psychological Effects of Stillbirth on the Doctor’, pp. 103-112.
660
Jalland argues that the cultural shift away from ‘emotional and expressive dying and grieving’ was
challenged in the late twentieth century: ‘death and bereavement [have] again become topics of intense public
concern and discussion, stimulated by the AIDS epidemic, by debates about euthanasia, and by reaction
against the medicalisation of death’. See Jalland, ‘A Private and Secular Grief’.
659
204
highly individual experience; instead of the repression of expressive grief was, as Damousi
notes, the encouraging of a ‘more open and frank expression of grief’. 661 In the late
twentieth century the cultural avoidance of grief and loss has gradually been recast to an
emphasis on the ‘need to grieve’ particularly for older Australians who were once
encouraged to repress their painful experiences with stoicism and to ‘move on’ from a
bereavement.
In this chapter, then, I consider some of the ways in which a group of older women
renegotiated their often traumatic and repressed memories of babies who had died within
the context of a culture dominated by silence and avoidance; experiences which were
reinterpreted within the contemporary context of greater acknowledgement of perinatal
death. In doing so I further explore the impact of the radical changes to the clinical
management of perinatal death, discussed in Chapter Six, which would affect not only
those women experiencing the death of a baby towards the end of the century, but also
opened a space for some older women to revisit and re-negotiate their experiences of a
long-ago perinatal loss. I also explore the ways in which some older women have
remembered their past experiences as interpreted through changing cultural context. Whilst
some women welcomed the opportunities wrought by changing understandings of perinatal
death, other older women continued to express their memories of perinatal loss with an
appeal to the ‘spartan control’ of the postwar period; their personal narratives give insight
into the complexity of memory and the diversity of meanings given to perinatal loss by
individual women.
Raising awareness: community interest in perinatal loss
Towards the end of the twentieth century the work of support groups such as SANDS had
played a significant role in re-inscribing understandings of the foetal body and perinatal
death within the community, with some sectors of the popular media in particular beginning
to demonstrate a willingness to explore the issue of emotional impact after a stillbirth or
661
The model of a ‘grieving process’ or series of ‘stages’, proposed initially by Kubler-Ross, was challenged
towards the end of the twentieth century. Damousi argues that ‘interviews with war widows reflect what
Littlewood characterises as ‘wave after wave of violently contradictory impulses’’. Over time, continues
Damousi, there is a ‘reviewing process’ of the event which precipitated the grief response, ‘where the
meaning of each memory is dissected and considered’. See Damousi, Living with the Aftermath, pp. 166-167.
205
neonatal death. 662 Major metropolitan newspapers began to run stories about the activities
of parent support groups in the late 1990s that would have been considered in poor taste
and morbid only ten years previously; 663 similarly, letters to the editor from bereaved
parents were significant in their unheard-of openness and honesty about the personal cost of
perinatal death. Susan Pain, for example, whose son died in utero only hours before birth,
wrote a moving and frank letter to the editor of the Victorian daily newspaper, The Age
following the paper’s reporting of funding cuts that threatened the survival of the Victorian
branch of SANDS. In this letter Mrs Pain wrote of the emotional turmoil she and her
husband went through after her baby’s death, paying tribute to SANDS for ‘allowing [her]
to remember while helping [her] to move on’. 664
Although testimonies from women involved in the oral history project of this thesis suggest
that the contemporary support group held limited appeal for many older women, its role in
the latter years of the twentieth century was not limited to the support of women who had
recently lost a baby or experienced a miscarriage. 665 By raising public awareness of many
women’s desire for the validation and memorialisation of their baby, the work of the
support group helped to directly and indirectly open up previously forbidden ways for
many older women to recast their memories of a long-ago perinatal loss. 666
For some women, the renewed public interest in stillbirth and its increased visibility within
the community led to their memories being reshaped and recast within a different
662
Linda Callaghan, ‘What do you tell a mum who has lost her baby?’, Subiaco Post, 31 January 1998,
p. 11.
663
See for example Alexander, ‘When a baby dies’, p. 1; Jane Cafarella, ‘A Long Journey Without Arrival’,
Age, 10 January 1996, p. 16.
664
Susan Pain, Letter to Editor, Age, 7 July 1994, p. 12.
665
Victoria Button, ‘Grief, And How To Come To Terms With It’, Age, 16 September 1995, p. 8. In this
article, the incumbent Patron of SANDS (Vic.) and former Prime Minister’s first wife, Hazel Hawke, was
quoted as describing the four days' life of her son, Robert James, in August 1963 as a ‘conspiracy of denial’.
She commented that ‘it was as if I had never borne and lost this child … It was just not spoken of or
acknowledged in any way [and] I never saw the child’.
666
For example, at Rookwood Cemetery in Sydney in 1999, a memorial service was held to recognise the
lives of stillborn babies who had died in the past; journalist Evie Gelastapoulous wrote that ‘they cried not
only for lives lost, but for lives never realised. Parents who lost children before, during or just after birth
gathered at Rookwood Cemetery yesterday for a memorial service which acknowledged those unrealised
lives’. See E. Gelastapoulous, ‘Tears for lives which never had a chance’, Daily Telegraph, 19 March 1999, p.
21.
669
Audrey, interview with researcher.
670
Inglis argues that the cultural trend towards cremation in the interwar years, as opposed to burial,
‘recognised and encouraged, as funeral directors were doing, a modern distaste for the physical facts of
mortality and a modern aversion to the darkness of mourning’. See Inglis, ‘Passing Away’, p. 246.
206
framework. The public memory of repression was re-framed, to a degree, within a culture
of openness and a greater discussion of the issues surrounding perinatal loss was culturally
acceptable by the late 1990s. Audrey, for example, began to revisit her past experience of
loss when she heard a news bulletin revealing improper use of the bodies of stillborn babies
in the 1950s and 1960s; 667 prompted by this challenge to her idealised perception of her
baby being buried peacefully, she sought to resettle and resolve her memory of stillbirth by
searching for the baby’s gravesite and beginning to refer to her stillborn son in
conversation. 668
The need to find the actual burial site was shared by many older women. Whilst cremation
had gained popularity in the minimalistic middle decades of the twentieth century, 669 a
return to more elaborate and public bereavement rituals, especially those associated with
the graveside, took on new importance towards the end of the century. As I argued in
Chapters Four and Six, the importance of the gravesite had been increasingly adopted in
contemporary memorial services for stillborn babies with several hospitals organising
memorial gardens for the interment of ashes, and hospital disposal rapidly lost favour for its
perceived devaluing of the infant as an individual human being. Rituals which reinscribed
the deceased infant as an individual worthy of recognition were gradually reclaimed by
older women who, like many of their contemporary counterparts, felt that the individual
gravesite or memorial plaque appropriately signified their child’s individual value. For
these older bereaved mothers the opportunity to locate their baby’s grave was constructed
as a significant act and would finally reassure them of their baby’s existence.
Lynette, for example, had had no role in the burial of her stillborn daughter in 1962; in her
interview Lynette surmised that the baby had ‘just been taken away’ and disposed of by the
hospital. As the years passed, she had often wondered where her baby had been buried, but
had been preoccupied with, as she said, ‘three kids, I was on my own, I had a career, I was
really really busy’. It was over forty years later before Lynette was able to begin searching
667
It was revealed in 2001 that the bodies of stillborn babies had been sent to the United States of America for
nuclear tests, whilst other reports exposed the activities of several Australian hospitals which had kept body
parts and bodies of stillborn babies from the 1950s and 1960s for testing, without parental consent or
knowledge. For the newspaper coverage of this, see for example Mark Steene, ‘Body parts: doctors defend
practice, we did it all for science’, Adelaide Advertiser, 28 June 2001, p. 1; Susie O’Brien, Colin James and
Rebecca Holmes, ‘Corridors of Shame’, Adelaide Advertiser, 27 June 2001, p. 1.
207
for her child’s grave. She recalled that ‘it was when [the children] were off my hands, and I
thought, well now I'm going to find out what I can about the child. It's not nice to think it's
just been thrown in a pit with two thousand other little darlings. It's not nice at all’. 670
Lynette traveled from her home in Perth to Melbourne, where she discovered that her baby
had been buried in a communal grave; the knowledge of exactly where her baby had been
buried gave her, she recalled, a degree of resolution. That particular gravesite had been
made into a memorial for the many stillborn infants buried there in the 1960s, and some
parents had placed plaques on a slab of granite covering the site. During the interview, she
remarked that she felt that she was ‘ready’ to memorialise her daughter by placing a plaque
at the site: ‘I'm going to do it [now] … I [always] thought, how am I going to word it, what
am I going to say? … And that's why I've been putting it off for so long. But I think I can
do it now, I can word it now. And I will do it, I will go back [to Melbourne]. And that
might be a closure for me’. 671
In popular constructions of perinatal loss, the search for the gravesite was cast as an act of
reunification between mother and child and had the potential to prompt deep emotion from
observers - a realisation that the invisibility of perinatal death, and the passing of many
years, did not render a loss meaningless. In an article in The Age, journalist John Lahey
movingly described one older woman’s search to find the gravesite of her ‘lost child’: No
matter what words you used, nobody could ever depict the anguish of Mrs Veronica Rose,
81, as she stood this week at the gravesite of her baby, David, whom she had never seen.
When David was stillborn 47 years ago, someone at the hospital simply took him away’. 672
Observed by Lahey, Mrs Rose, described as a ‘vivacious woman’, returned to that day in
1947 when her baby son was swiftly removed from her body and her sight:
Not knowing what part of the mass grave held her baby, Mrs Rose walked slowly
over it, studying the ground and murmuring: “Where are you, darling? Where are
you? Where will I find you?”.... Mrs Rose was calling to her lost child, and it was
the most natural act in the world. It was heartbreaking. “Where are you?” When she
was told that David could be anywhere in the site, she scooped some earth into a
little jar because this had as much chance as anything of being a part of him. She
held the jar to her cheek and softly talked to the earth. Everything about this gesture
evoked the word purity. It was a pure act of indescribable love. 673
670
Lynette, interview with researcher.
Lynette, interview with researcher.
672
John Lahey, ‘At Last, The Touch Of The Child She Never Saw’, Age, 11 June 1994, p. 3.
673
Lahey, ‘At Last, The Touch Of The Child She Never Saw’, p. 3.
671
208
Cemetery staff became increasingly accustomed to the numbers of women who were
starting to approach the cemetery with the intention of exploring the possibility of
memorialising their stillborn child who had died many years previously. David McGowan,
who was appointed manager of the West Terrace Cemetery in Adelaide in 1995, soon
became aware of older women seeking to find their deceased babies’ burial site. Initially,
McGowan said that he and his staff responded to such requests by saying ‘we have no idea
– goodbye’; however, as the requests increased he began to believe that ‘the mothers
deserved to know – warts and all’. With the use of burial registers and hospital records,
McGowan was able to satisfy some women’s search for their child’s grave. 674
After forty years, Daphne finally felt able to seek out her daughter’s gravesite and, in her
recollection, she approached the cemetery staff with some trepidation. To her surprise, the
staff at Karrakatta did not greet her with bewilderment, as she had expected, rather, they
treated her with gentle compassion: ‘I went down there [to see] the man at the cemetery and
once again just about cried my way through it. I said, “I’m terribly sorry”, and he said,
“[Daphne], you would have no idea the number of women who have sat in that chair and
cried, just like you’re crying, because they haven’t even realised that the little baby that
they had can be honoured.”’ 675
The nature of specialised infants’ gardens created a socially acceptable space for older
women to finally memorialise their stillborn babies. 676 The more general trend away from
burial to cremation had also led to greater flexibility in terms of the choice of
memorialisation; this proved particularly significant for those women whose babies had
been disposed of in the hospital incinerator or whose baby was buried in a mass grave. For
example, because the Butterfly Garden at Karrakatta Cemetery was designed to give newly
bereaved parents the choice of placing a memorial with or without the actual ashes of the
infant, older women who had no access to their baby’s remains were able to participate in
the contemporary trend of grieving rituals. Amongst the Butterfly Garden are plaques and
stones dedicated to children stillborn only recently, as well as babies born over fifty years
ago.
674
Louisa Hatfield, ‘The Lost Children’, Sydney Morning Herald [SMH], 31 January 1996, p. 11.
Daphne, interview with researcher.
676
See for example Hatfield, ‘The Lost Children’, p. 11; Heather Bird, ‘Love And Loss Come Full Circle’,
SMH, 3 June 1996, p. 15; Gelastapoulous, ‘Tears for lives which never had a chance’, p. 21; Cherie Critchley,
‘The taboo of lost babies’, Herald-Sun, 24 February 1999, p. 19
675
209
Individual diversity and differing degrees of acceptance of the shift towards the culture of
embracing death and bereavement led to some older women choosing to validate their
child’s brief but vital existence in different ways. Registering for a birth certificate, for
example, was understood to be a symbolic act for women whose losses had been
invalidated in the past. Heather Bird, whose twin pregnancy had ended in the over thirty
years ago with the live birth of one daughter, Frances, and the stillbirth of the other twin,
Jessica, wrote in a feature piece in the Sydney Morning Herald [SMH] of her efforts to
register her deceased daughter’s death. Bird recalled that the surviving twin had provided
the motivation for her to do this; her daughter had queried why her own birth certificate
contained the paradox that she was ‘elder born of twins’, but which then stated that her
parents had no deceased children. Initially inspired to give her surviving daughter ‘some
sort of proof that she'd been one of two’, Bird discovered that the birth certificate provided
her with resolution. She wrote in the article ‘today I received a birth certificate for “Jessica
Ann Bird (Stillborn). Female younger of Twins”. I feel that I've completed some sort of
cycle, not only for myself but for Frances’. 677
The SMH also reported in 1996 the story of Jan Stoker of Sydney who sought to locate her
twin daughters’ burial place. Mrs Stoker’s babies had been born prematurely in 1962; like
other women during this period she was not allowed to see her infants and found that her
community responded in silence to her loss. 678 Over forty years after her daughters died,
Mrs Stoker rang SANDS in NSW and discovered that she was able to apply for birth
certificates for her babies. After receiving the certificates, she discovered that her twins had
been buried in a communal grave at the Field of Mars cemetery in Ryde, where she later
placed a plaque in their memory. In the article, Mrs Stoker articulated her motivations for
finding the gravesite in terms of closure: ‘Every time you think about that episode in your
life you go back to the nightmare ... My other kids are growing up, but there was still a part
of my life that wasn't settled.’ 679
677
Bird, ‘Love and Loss Come Full Circle’, p. 15.
Jan Stoker recalled that "everybody had the same attitude: 'Oh well, it is over now, get on with it’. So you
couldn't talk to anyone. "I was absolutely totally neurotic. I used to get up in the middle of the night and walk
around the streets. "I went back to work four weeks after the birth. Some people said it was good, but I wasn't
coping with what had happened, let alone trying to work and be normal with people’. Jan Stoker quoted in
Hatfield, ‘The Lost Children’, p. 11
679
Hatfield, ‘The Lost Children’, p. 11
678
210
Barbara had chosen a hospital burial because of the family’s economic circumstances; her
husband had been on strike for five months and ‘things were a bit tight money-wise’. She
was offered a private funeral but had to refuse: ‘When they asked me what I wanted done
about the baby, I was suppose I was governed mostly by the cost involved, and they said to
me, we can have her buried with all the other little babies. And at the time I thought that
was the way to go’. Like other older women, Barbara recalled that she would often wonder
about her baby’s gravesite, but it was only with older age that she felt it important to
discover where her child had been buried. Although she remarked that she had never placed
importance on visiting graves and did not wish to physically visit her baby’s grave, Barbara
noted that she treasured a piece of paper that confirmed that her baby daughter had been
buried in an unmarked grave in Karrakatta, because it ‘showed that I had had her … it’s the
most precious piece of paper that I have had’. 680
Iris was content to place a plaque in another significant spot with other valued family
members instead of searching for the physical location of her baby’s burial site; in her
interview she recalled that she had grappled with the silence after her daughter’s stillbirth
for a long time, particularly after giving birth to two subsequent children: ‘it was a long
while after, when I really got peace, because you’re all the time, in your mind, groping,
because you haven’t seen her, you don’t know if the next one looked like her, and [my next
child], he’s a redhead, and I wondered if the [first] little one would have been like either
one. But it took a long while’. 681 Forty years after her daughter was stillborn, Iris created a
space of familial significance, placing plaques for her mother and father as well as the
baby. For Iris and her husband, the simple act of engraving their daughter’s name on a
plaque gave legitimacy to that individual child’s existence and provided them with a sense
of having resolved a problematic part of the experience. She recalled that ‘my real peace
was when I did that little plaque, just acknowledging that we’d had a little baby and the
world should know. When I did the plaque, I think I felt I’d done something to publicly
acknowledge her, and from then on I’ve been quite at peace about it all’. 682
680
Barbara, interview with researcher.
Iris, interview with researcher.
682
Iris, interview with researcher.
681
211
‘Reshaping the memory’
Damousi observes that ‘in oral testimonies we make meaning from our experiences, but
that meaning is under constant revision’. 683 Revisiting one’s memories, then, is a complex
process of revisiting, reshaping, forgetting and remembering the past. The popularity of
grief therapy and the insistence from some quarters that repressed memories needed to be
‘released’ were the impetus for some older women to sort through painful memories and to
recast them through the lens of ‘healing’ memories. 684 For example, Denise’s recollection
of her experience of delivering a stillborn child in the early 1970s was recounted in terms of
her discovery of gestalt therapy. A contemporary trend, the routine therapy group, was the
catalyst for Denise to begin to reconstruct her experience and what she saw as years of
buried hurt and resentment towards hospital staff who had insisted that she not name her
son and who placed her back on the antenatal ward with expectant mothers after she
delivered her stillborn baby. Denise then began a conscious effort to transform a highly
negative experience into what she hoped would become a positive memory, which involved
amongst other things, confronting the gynaecologist who told her over twenty years ago to
go and get pregnant again and to learn to ‘put it all behind’ her. To the doctor’s credit,
Denise recalled that ‘he was great, accepted the rightfulness [sic] of my anger and distress
and reassured me and reassured me that such a situation had come to be handled very
differently.
That
was
a
very
important
step
for
me
to
take.’
685
For some women who had felt restricted by the confines of their roles as wives and mothers
in the twenty five years or so after the end of the Second World War, older age provided an
opportunity to revisit and reinterpret their memories of a perinatal loss. Melanie, for
example, noted in her interview that she felt able to be introspective, over twenty five years
later, because she now had the time and the emotional energy after her children had left
home. She claimed that this was a phenomenon not uncommon to women of her age, noting
that grief relating to childbearing, be it abortions, adoptions or stillbirths or otherwise, was
683
Damousi, Living with the Aftermath, p. 3.
See Damousi, Freud in the Antipodes, p. 257; Layne, Motherhood Lost, p. 13. As Layne notes, bereaved
parents’ support groups grew out of a widespread acceptance of the ‘talking cure’ – once treated with
suspicion by the medical community – and psychoanalysis in general towards the end of the twentieth
century.
685
Denise, personal correspondence with researcher, 11 May 2005. Email in possession of researcher.
684
212
a common topic of conversation amongst her friends:
I’ve been stunned with what has happened to me since I turned fifty. I speak to a lot
of my friends who are fifty, and all the things that happened to them – they had
babies that they gave away cause that was very common, you got pregnant and
didn’t keep your baby, and terminations, at fifty it all comes bubbling up, because
you’ve got time. And it’s happened to hundreds and hundreds of thousands of
women. More women than its not happened to, in my generation. Certainly
unplanned pregnancies, terminations, giving babies away – I’ve haven’t got a friend
that it hasn’t happened to. All not dealt with then, couldn’t be dealt with then, life
went on, met partners, got married, but now there’s this, because there’s so many of
us, there’s this really huge issue for women of that age. 686
Melanie’s self-reflection then was part of the wider process amongst her peers of reshaping
a collective memory – a challenge to the public memory of childbearing and motherhood as
a secure and happy time in Australia’s history. As Darian-Smith observes:
It is through memory that we frame our sense of individual, group and national
identities, give meaning to our own life history, and understand our social past. Our
individual memories, however, are constantly supplemented, altered and mediated
by the circulation of representations and articulations of the past that constitutes
collective memory. 687
Ageing and the death of one’s life partner were also the means by which some women were
able to gain an unexpected space for reflection. Psychologist Beverley Raphael argues that
widowhood can result in a drastic reinterpretation of all the meanings of that partnership:
‘All meanings of the marriage, all its memories, will be thrown into relief’. 688 In her study
of the reinterpretation of war widows' memories, Damousi suggests that whilst some
memories of the relationship are sentimentalised and become idealised, other meanings of
the marriage are radically recast and reinterpreted after the death of the husband. 689 The
personal narratives of older women interviewed for this thesis suggests a similar theme:
that is, for bereaved women, the death of a husband – albeit often a much-loved partner –
was the catalyst some older women being able to view their memories of the loss of a baby
through an entirely different and liberating lens. After Audrey’s husband died, she was
already in a position of self-reflection and adjustment to her new role as widow and for the
first time, she said, she felt able to begin to think about properly memorialising her baby.
During the interview, she articulated her belief that, although her marriage had been happy,
686
Melanie, interview with researcher.
Darian-Smith, ‘War Stories’, p. 137.
688
Raphael quoted in Damousi, Living With the Aftermath, p. 169.
689
Damousi, Living With the Aftermath, pp. 164-166.
687
213
it was only upon her husband’s death that she felt able to revisit the memory of her stillborn
son and to begin to identify herself in conversation as a mother of three. 690
Similarly, Daphne recalled that even though her marriage had been happy, it was only after
her husband’s death that she felt able to erect a small plaque in the children’s memorial
garden at Karrakatta Cemetery. Daphne had long avoided mentioning her stillborn
daughter’s name because her husband had not wanted to ‘perpetuate [their daughter’s]
memory’ by treating the child as a member of the family. When her husband died however
Daphne was encouraged by her daughter to explore the possibility of placing a plaque in
memory of the baby in the Butterfly Garden at Karrakatta. She also publicly articulated her
inscription of that child as a valued member of the family when placing the death notice for
her husband in the local newspaper; by including the child by name along with her other
living children. 691 For Daphne, the act of creating an individual memorial to this longdeceased baby served to challenge not only the cultural invalidation of the baby herself but
also the construction of the death of her baby as a ‘failure’. 692
Complex pasts: revisiting memories
Not all women interviewed for this thesis have sought ways to memorialise a long-deceased
infant. Indeed, several older women railed against such ideas in their interviews, suggesting
that the idea that they needed to ‘find’ their baby was an unnecessary gesture and claiming
that the experience had had no lasting impact on their life and expressing distaste at the
contemporary trend towards naming and including miscarried babies as members of the
family. 693 Their reasons for participating in the oral history project, however, give insight
into the varied ways that we tend to constantly reshape and recast our experiences.
Importantly, their willingness to participate in such a project also gives credence to the
argument that changing constructions of perinatal death tacitly provided some older women
with a space to revisit their experiences, even if they did not wholly agree with changing
attitudes towards perinatal death.
690
Audrey, interview with researcher.
Daphne, interview with researcher.
692
Daphne, interview with researcher.
693
Mrs Mead, interview with researcher; Dorothy, interview with researcher.
691
214
Several older women were eager to be part of the project because of their desire to ‘tell it
as it [was]’. Taking their cue from the Birmingham Popular Memory Group, some oral
historians have claimed that the oral history interview is an opportunity for apologies; Jean
Peneff for example argues that ‘most people let themselves off lightly in telling their life
story, so that shameful behaviour is seldom recalled … The life story can be a way of
excusing ourselves in public, an effective means of building an enhanced self image’. 694
Paula Hamilton argues that the oral history interview is ‘contested terrain’ whereby the
subject renegotiates, excuses and redefines an event; the experiences recorded for this
project give insight into the ways in which an individual simultaneously desires to excuse
oneself; contest; and explore one’s memory of the past. 695
Rayma, for example, was adamant in the interview that she preferred to focus on the
positive aspects of her life, such as the fact that she had had a daughter subsequent to her
stillborn twins who would not have been born had the twins survived. She was dismissive
of the repression of her sons’ memories by her family and her community as being hurtful,
saying that ‘it was the accepted thing that it was one of the things that happened,
sometimes, and you just got over it and carried on. Which [I did]’. 696 As the interview
progressed however, Rayma said that she had recently begun to wonder whether or not
there had been autopsies done on the twins, and this had resulted in her contacting the
hospital to try and locate her medical records from this time. 697 Thus, whether consciously
or otherwise, some older women seized the opportunity to participate in a formalised oral
history project that was specifically concerned with their experience of perinatal loss,
seeking to affirm that their responses to the death of their babies had been appropriate and
understandable.
Many of the older women interviewed for this project were born in the interwar period and
grew up in the Depression, marrying and having children shortly after World War II. As I
have argued in Chapter Three, this was a formative period in terms of attitudes towards
grief and loss; Jalland points out that ‘attitudes to death and grieving were moulded not by
694
Jean Peneff quoted in Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson (eds.), The Myths We Live By, New York:
Routledge, 1990, p. 39.
695
Paula Hamilton, ‘The Knife Edge: Debates About Memory and History’, in Darian-Smith and Hamilton
(eds.) Memory and history in Twentieth Century Australia, p. 15.
696
Rayma, interview with researcher.
697
Rayma, interview with researcher.
215
one terrible war, but the cumulative impact of two, during little more than thirty years.
There was a massive overload of death and sorrow in just two generations’. 698 Some of the
interviewees continued to frame their narratives in terms of the widespread response to this
‘overload of death’ – that is, the private nature of grief and the importance of ‘getting on’
with life. Whilst it was increasingly important for some women to seek resolution to their
grief, particularly within an environment of therapy and self-renewal, several older women
whose attitudes towards therapy and counselling were tremendously and subconsciously
shaped by their experiences in the Depression and by war continued to find the idea of
therapy and resolution unnecessary and indulgent.
For example, Mrs Mead did not share other women’s desire to find her baby’s grave, and
avoided the enacting of any rituals that had become so popular in the last two decades of
the twentieth century. She continued to find comfort in the trenchant appeal for the sober
moderation in grief that had so characterised most of the twentieth century, particularly
following the two world wars. Whilst Mrs Mead, whose first baby was stillborn shortly
after the end of World War II, harboured deep regrets about not seeing her baby she was
nevertheless highly skeptical of the rise of counselling after bereavement, which in her
perception was a selfish and self-indulgent trend: ‘in those days, things like counselling,
they were unheard of! We wouldn’t have been bothered anyway … My generation, we had
to rise above our own problems and sort them out ourselves, and we still do. We still do.
None of this talking it over with a psychiatrist or somebody’. 699 Growing up in the context
of the Depression and two World Wars, Mrs Mead was shaped by and continued to accept
the cultural restrictions placed on the expression of grief in Australia in the immediate postwar years. She said in her interview that the whole experience was a ‘tragedy’ for her entire
family, with whom she was living whilst her husband completed his naval posting in
Singapore, but repeatedly used phrases like ‘for the best’ and ‘meant to be’ when
describing the loss of her baby. 700 Similarly, when asked how the experience of losing her
first baby at two days old had affected her, Dorothy reflected that after forty eight years ‘it
hasn’t, actually. We’ve got our faith, and you know, it hasn’t affected us at all’. 701
698
Jalland, Changing Ways of Death, p. 171.
Mrs Mead, interview with researcher.
700
Mrs Mead, interview with researcher.
701
Dorothy, interview with researcher.
699
216
In recalling their experiences, Dorothy and Mrs Mead’s memories highlight the interaction
between their adherence to the context in which their babies died – such as maintaining that
the experience had had little impact on their life, as was culturally acceptable at the time of
their respective losses– and their making sense of the experience in their later years.
Although both women maintained that the experience had had little effect on their lives
over time, they were both, to some degree, in favour of changes that had occurred since
their own babies had died. Although both Mrs Mead and Dorothy neither held nor saw their
respective babies, both articulated a sense of regret, and both were in favour of women
being able to hold their babies. Not holding her son was, according to Mrs Mead, the
‘biggest mistake I’ve made in my life. I should have held him, and let him know that his
mother was there. 702 Whilst Dorothy accepted her exclusion from the organisation of her
son’s burial, she recounted that she was pleased that, fifty years later, her granddaughter
was able to see her own stillborn baby and to have her husband spend the night in the
hospital with her – a vastly different situation to Dorothy’s memory of her own
experience. 703
Although Mrs Mead, for example, had rarely spoken about her baby in the fifty years since
his death, her ability to communicate her sadness in the interview was part of the complex
process of the intertwining of the past and the present. Accordingly, a persistent theme in
the interviews with older women was a vacillation between stoicism and regret – a
simultaneous clinging to the context in which their experiences occurred, and a re-enacting
of the event that allowed for greater personal control. Elizabeth Coleman has argued that
‘between the collection of an oral testimony and the events it purports to describe, many
presents have intervened’. 704 This is strikingly evident in this oral history project, perhaps
because the events being recalled were surrounded by high emotion and were subsequently
invalidated by others. As I discussed in Chapter Three, Audrey complied with her mother’s
request not to put a death notice in the paper for the baby, and outwardly accepted the ways
in which her friends reacted to the baby’s death; in her testimony however, Audrey said that
she ‘still resented’ her mother for not allowing her to place a death notice and recalled her
relief that as an older woman she finally felt able to tell people that she had had three sons,
702
Mrs Mead, interview with researcher.
Dorothy, interview with researcher.
704
Elizabeth Coleman, Narrating our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992, p. 116.
703
217
not two. However, despite the vastly different cultural reactions to stillbirth that have
occurred since Audrey’s baby died and the interview, some of her actions were seemingly
still governed by the context of the past - most notably she felt that asking her mother why
she had forbidden Audrey to put a notice in the paper, despite Audrey’s continuing
resentment about this incident, would be ‘unkind’ : ‘I’ve never asked [her] ... I suppose I
should, but she is ninety six and … [although] she’s got all her faculties it wouldn’t be
kind’. 705
Revisiting the past: a negative experience
Attempts to recast one’s painful memories within a more positive light were at times
problematised by restricted access to medical records or lost records; for example, although
Denise has since named her son, who is now discussed at times by her other children and is
regarded as a sibling; planted a tree in the baby’s memory; and has included the child in her
own funeral plans, she is still to find the baby’s actual burial site. She had attempted to find
the site, thinking in her self-described naïveté that the hospital would have ‘had a nice little
ceremony’ but was told instead that her child was most likely buried in a shoebox in a mass
grave. This knowledge led her to believe that finding the gravesite would be ‘very
difficult’; she wrote that ‘now … I realise I have anger still in relation to this aspect of that
occurrence thirty four years ago’. 706
Cultural restrictions still bound some older women who consciously attempted to
reconstruct their experiences within a more positive light. Although many older women
were becoming gradually more aware of the changes in the way that perinatal death was
managed and the re-inscribing of the foetal body in the hospital context, the taboo of
silence was still so strong in some families that many women approached the possibility of
locating their baby’s grave with some trepidation; still others remained unaware that it was
even a possibility. The same barriers that had prevented women from playing an active role
in the funeral arrangements sometimes still existed, such as overbearing family members
and financial restrictions. Choosing to memorialise a stillborn baby was a decision that
potentially overstepped many boundaries that exist as part of the social expectations of
705
706
Audrey, interview with researcher.
Denise, personal correspondence with researcher.
218
older women. Accordingly, some women found their babies in secret, whilst for others it
remained an unfulfilled desire.
For example, because she had overheard the nuns in the hospital mention that her baby had
drawn breath and therefore required burial rather than hospital disposal, Liz was haunted by
her lack of knowledge as to where her baby was buried and articulated a deep desire to find
out and to gain some sense of closure: ‘As I’m getting older I think … I’d just like to die
with a bit of peace, to find out these things’. The baby had been conceived when Liz was a
young single woman in the 1960s and she had only recently revealed this secret to her
husband, who was not the father of the baby. Because she still considered this experience to
be shameful – her daughter had not been told about her mother’s previous loss, for example
- Liz admitted that it was unlikely that she would ever be able to find out where the baby
was buried, let alone travel interstate to visit the burial site. She commented that ‘often now
I think, I’d just love to go and see [the grave] … I mean, I got a letter, surely there’d be
records. And I could maybe find out. But how would I explain that I’m going to Brisbane,
to find out? I don’t know’. 707
Some women approached the interview with an acknowledged desire to begin to
consciously sort through painful repressed memories, prompted by the increasing public
visibility of perinatal death. Whilst the interview provided the space for the ‘interactive
cycle of recovery and burial’, these women were nonetheless dissimilar to Darian-Smith’s
subjects in her study of wartime memory, who constructed their wartime experiences as an
‘anomalous, adolescent and dateable time … ‘the war’ was a neatly boxed section of their
life stories’. 708 Rather, these oral histories of stillbirth and neonatal death were clearly
unresolved stages of women’s lives that had been carried under the surface for many years
and the interview itself was but one occasion for revisiting an unresolved and painful
experience. Further to this, Peneff’s argument that the personal narrative lends itself to selfcensorship holds only limited weight with these interviewees who were more prone to selfcensuring their behaviours in the past. Rather than using the interview as a space in which
their responses to the death of a baby could be justified and rationalised, several
interviewees maintained that their experience of stillbirth had shaped and defined their
707
708
Liz, interview with researcher.
Darian-Smith, ‘War Stories’, p. 146.
219
behaviour in other areas of their adult life, leaving them - and to a degree, their
relationships with their spouses - emotionally damaged. Several older women claimed that
they themselves had handled their grief badly and that their behaviour had caused
irreparable damage to their families. Although her recollection of the past is necessarily
viewed through the distorted lens of the present, Liz was adamant as to her role in the
negative consequences of her past experiences, saying in her interview that ‘I drink too
much … much too much. And just sometimes I think it blocks out the pain’. 709
Similarly, Robin viewed her memory of the stillbirth of her first baby through a lens of selfblame. Although she had earlier said that she felt that she had been treated ‘appallingly’ by
her obstetrician, she later attributed a ‘wedge’ in her marriage to what she believed was a
poor emotional response on her behalf. After months of hesitation, Robin decided to visit
what she believed was her baby’s grave on the twenty fifth anniversary, consciously
articulating this as a symbolic ritual of reunification by getting dressed up and buying
flowers to place on the grave. Upon arrival at the cemetery however she was shocked to
find out that her baby, at her husband’s request, had been cremated and his ashes scattered
to the wind – a member of the Karrakatta Cemetery staff informed Robin that there was no
actual grave to visit. She had not discussed her intentions with her husband – indeed, the
couple had not discussed the baby since he had died. In her interview she recalled this
incident:
I’m thinking, I don’t believe this. This is where it’s gone terribly, terribly wrong.
That we as a couple – as parents … he made that decision, but hadn’t told me. And
I’m standing there, all dressed up, flowers … and I just went to another grave and
put them on it. And I went home, but I still didn’t tell him what I’d done, and I
thought, it’s actually put a wedge in our relationship. This is something that is a
very important issue that people shouldn’t have – I shouldn’t be doing those things
– it’s too important. 710
Conclusion
A life history is never straightforward or unproblematic; rather, it tells the story of the
constant cycle of reinterpretation of one’s memories, particularly in the case of a traumatic
experience like perinatal death. For some Australian women, the growing contemporary
709
710
Liz, interview with researcher.
Robin, interview with researcher.
220
cultural openness towards perinatal death has provided a space in which they are finally
able to begin a journey of revisiting their experiences of stillbirth and neonatal death. For
many women interviewed as part of this research, this has been a positive process which
has given them some agency in renegotiating or reinscribing their baby’s identity from
unnamed entity to precious offspring. For other women however, the process of
remembering such a painful event as a stillbirth or neonatal death has been complicated by
the cultural context in which their babies died – a context which advocated stoicism and a
suppression of grief over open expression of mourning. Personal narratives of perinatal
death highlight the individuality of lived experience of losing a baby, illustrating the variety
of ‘spaces’ which help different women to be able to revisit their memories of loss from
long ago, and in doing so, illuminate an area of women’s history which has long remained
hidden and silent.
221
CHAPTER EIGHT
The ‘pointless pregnancy’: reinforcing the inscription of ‘defectiveness’ at the end of
the twentieth century
In Chapter Six, I mentioned Brenda’s belief that, in terms of family support after the death
of her first child, she thought that she and her husband had been incredibly fortunate in
terms of their friends’ support after loss: ‘I think we jagged it’. As the interview progressed,
however, she recalled that although her immediate family and a small group of friends had
supported her after her son died, as time went on many around her found it difficult to
comprehend that depth of her grief. 711
[Some] of the family don’t deal with grief, and … he’s not even spoken of now. He
wasn’t spoken of back then and he’s not spoken of now. So I’ve had to go through a
whole range of emotions, dealing with my anger towards them, I even had one of
them say to me, well it’s not like you even knew your child, so I just told that
family member that I wouldn’t be speaking to her for the next six months. I just had
to shut off [because] I wasn’t dealing with it, you know. 712
Although Brenda had been able to hold her son, enact significant mourning rituals whilst in
the hospital, and had felt overwhelmed by the support of her close friends who visited and
spent time holding her baby, she found that her grief became problematic when she
returned home to the country town where she and her husband were living at the time.
Some people … even looked at me like I was a leper … and I felt very much on
display, so I didn’t go to church much. Shopping? I wanted to run through the
shopping centre and yell out, ‘I’ve just had a baby! Just do something. I look like
this, I’ve got all this extra weight [because] I’ve just had a baby and it’s not feeding
off me!’ And unfortunately I had a chest that would put Dolly Parton to disgrace,
[because] they wouldn’t let me express [breastmilk]. 713
The complexity of Brenda’s experience gives insight into the competing constructions of
perinatal death which were evident at the end of the twentieth century. In the previous
chapters I argue that the emerging theories of grief and loss were the motivation for the
formalising of hospital policies which sought to assist women in forming attachments with
711
Layne observes that memory serves a social function; the absence of tangible reminders of a deceased
baby’s existence and the fact that so few knew the one being remembered mean that pregnancy loss ‘poses a
number of challenges in terms of memory…difficulty in finding empathetic listeners and social pressure to
forget, appear to be widely shared by those who suffer trauma’. See Layne, Motherhood Lost, p. 202.
712
Brenda, interview with researcher.
713
Brenda, interview with researcher.
222
their deceased infants; a greater openness towards death and loss in general had also meant
that some older women were able to revisit the memory of a long-ago perinatal loss and to
seek to renegotiate their experiences. These shifts in constructions of perinatal death,
however, were challenged in the late twentieth century by the rise of prenatal testing and
the growing belief that medical science had conquered the incidence of perinatal death.
Therefore, the late twentieth century was host to competing understandings of pregnancy
loss and baby death and at times, contradictory and paradoxical inscriptions on the foetal
body which problematised changes in the clinical management of stillbirth and neonatal
death.
Layne notes that the rise of ‘in utero’ technology towards the end of the twentieth century
has caught women who experience a pregnancy loss in the middle of ‘two contradictory
sets of powerful cultural forces’. According to Layne, the rise of ultrasound imaging and
so-called ‘at home’ pregnancy tests, combined with the strategies of the pro-life movement
to inscribe the foetal body as fully human, have served to ‘move up the time and the pace
with which many … women begin to socially construct the personhood of a wished-for
child’. However, as Layne observes, pregnancy loss remains a deeply entrenched cultural
taboo, exacerbated by the increasing expectation that medical technology can, and should,
combat the death of a baby. 714 She notes that after a perinatal loss ‘the incipient personhood
of the wished-for child is revoked’. 715
In this chapter, then, I consider the impact of these contradictory constructions of perinatal
death and how these constructions have problematised the meanings wrought by the more
open approach to pregnancy loss. I argue that the rise of perinatal medicine as a specialised
discipline served to both reinforce and shift the inscriptions on the foetal body; where
perinatal death, and most particularly miscarriage, were once viewed fatalistically due to
714
Layne notes that reproductive technologies have contributed to changing understandings of perinatal death
at the end of the twentieth century; she argues that ‘the silence surrounding pregnancy loss has resulted in
extensive ignorance concerning the frequency of pregnancy loss … compounded by the media hype
surrounding the advances in reproductive and neonatal technologies’. Furthermore, this faith in science plays
a significant role: ‘A central aspect of this faith stems from our ideas about the nature of science and
technology, namely, that they inevitably, cumulatively, and almost automatically by definition, progress’. See
Layne, Motherhood Lost, pp. 93-94. Likewise, Reiger cites a senior midwifery educator who observes that
young women of childbearing age are used to controlling their bodies through reliable and accessible
contraception, and many expect that childbirth should be ‘regulated [and] standardised’. Margery Priestly
quoted in Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies, p. 230.
715
Layne, Motherhood Lost, pp. 16-17.
223
the ‘mystery’ of development in utero, the last decades of the twentieth century saw the
medical profession shift their attention towards the unborn child, constructing the foetus as
an individual patient within the context of rapid developments in prenatal diagnostic
testing. This shift further entrenched the notion that women’s bodies are merely hosts to the
developing foetus, revitalising ideas of maternal responsibility and the linking of maternal
behaviour to foetal outcome.
‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again!’: understanding pregnancy loss as
failure
The greater openness towards stillbirth and neonatal death in the late twentieth century saw
a shift in the way many women were able to grieve for their deceased babies. However, at
times these ways were problematised by the developments in perinatal medicine towards
the end of the twentieth century, which renewed the construction of pregnancy loss as an
instance of ‘failed production’; 716 the medical scrutiny of the maternal body was renewed,
but with a twist. Where the medical gaze primarily rested on the female body in the past,
advances in the medical ability to view development in utero shifted the focus to the foetal
body. 717 By the latter decades of the century, the causes of perinatal death became a
focused area of research in the scientific community; whilst foetal medicine had been
virtually ignored in favour of neonatology in the 1960s and 1970s, the development of
ultrasound technology and in utero diagnosis saw the prioritising of foetal medicine in
many major research hospitals. Within this context, argue Crouch and Manderson,
obstetricians became increasingly better able to assess ‘foetal outcome’ precisely because
of these advances in medical technology, bringing with it a change in attitude: ‘formerly the
focus was on the mother and delivery, now it is centred on foetal outcome’. 718
716
As I have argued in earlier chapters the medicalisation of childbirth at the turn of the twentieth century
constructed pregnancy as potentially pathological, and perinatal loss was viewed within medical discourse as
‘pregnancy failure’. The pregnant body in medical discourse has been constructed as inherently unstable and
susceptible to disease and abnormality; furthermore, medical terminology explicitly links biology to some
women’s apparent failure to give birth to a healthy child. Medical terminology has cast women’s bodies as
inherently defective: the terms ‘habitual aborter’ and ‘incompetent cervix’ illustrate how the female
physiology is held culpable for perinatal loss, whilst the common usage of ‘pregnancy wastage’ and
‘pregnancy failure’ indicate that medical discourse understood miscarriage and perinatal loss to be instances
of ‘unsuccessful’ reproduction.
717
McCalman, Sex and Suffering, p. 244.
718
Crouch and Manderson, New Motherhood, pp. 31 & 33.
224
The unveiling of what was once deemed to be mysterious – the development of the foetus
in utero – has both strengthened and subtly shifted the categories of successful or failed
pregnancy in the late twentieth century in contemporary Australia. On the one hand, the
acceptability of ultrasound as a ‘routine’ part of antenatal care in the last two decades has
greatly increased expectations of a healthy birth; furthermore, ultrasound technology has
elevated the notion of ‘foetal personhood’, and has been lauded for its ability to help
women form attachments to their unborn babies earlier. However, ultrasound and other
prenatal screening and diagnostic tests have also strengthened notions of achievement, of
manipulating the environment in order to produce a ‘successful outcome’ – or its corollary,
avoiding an ‘unsuccessful’ outcome by way of screening for ‘imperfection’. The rise of
ultrasound and other diagnostic tools has given the medical profession an increased
surveillance over women’s bodies and the products of their wombs during pregnancy and
childbirth. 719
Where antenatal care was hailed in the early twentieth century for its role in dramatically
decreasing the maternal mortality rate through medically-controlled supervision of the
maternal body, prenatal screening has shifted the focus to the foetal body; developments in
foetal medicine and assisted reproductive technologies have become synonymous with
notions of achievement, and are valued for their role in assisting women who would have
otherwise ‘failed’ to achieve a healthy pregnancy and birth. For example, the editorial of
the MJA in 1996 lauded technology for its role in ‘achieving a significant drop in infant
mortality rates’, 720 whilst reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilisation have been
widely understood as a means by which infertile women (including those who have
experienced numerous miscarriages) could ‘achieve pregnancy’. 721
As I have argued previously in the thesis, the foetus has always been inscribed with a
diverse range of meanings; the last decades of the twentieth century however saw the foetus
embedded with values which were simultaneously competing and seemingly paradoxical.
719
See for example K. Salvesen and S. Eik-Nes, ‘The routine fetal examination’, in Asim Kurjak and Frank
Chervenak (eds.) The Fetus as a Patient: Advances in diagnosis and therapy, New York: Partheon Publishing
Group, c1995, p. 87.
720
Editorial, ‘The health of Australia's mothers and babies’, MJA 1996; no. 164, pp. 198-199.
721
See for example Gabor Kovacs and Donna Howlett, ‘If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again: A
successful birth after 37 cycles of assisted reproductive technology over 11 years’, ANZJOG, vol. 44, no. 6,
pp. 580-582.
225
In the previous chapters I have considered the construction of perinatal loss as an event of
great significance for a woman and her family, an inscription of individual value on the
foetal body which would greatly shape how women were allowed to grieve their deceased
babies. However medical constructions of the unborn child have often been at odds with the
meanings that women themselves have inscribed to their babies. The last years of the
twentieth century had seen the medical profession also shift their attention towards the
unborn child, constructing the foetus as an individual patient worthy of medical attention
and scientific research. For example, in the 1980 edition of Williams Obstetrics the authors
enthused ‘who would have dreamed that we could serve the fetus as physician?’ 722
Feminist critics of medical interventions into pregnancy in the late twentieth century have
focused their attentions on the renewed supervision of the maternal body, arguing that the
rise of perinatal medicine privileged the foetus and created expectations on pregnant
women to self-monitor and self-sacrifice for their ‘baby’s sake’. 723 Ironically, however, as
the health of the unborn child became a matter of medical concern, the foetal body itself
became subject to greater scrutiny and was imbued with often contradictory meanings
which were often espoused by the same groups who privileged the foetus over the maternal
body. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the rise of prenatal diagnosis and its
construction as an ‘essential’ part of pregnancy, with particular focus on the expectations of
women after a positive prenatal diagnosis is made, meant that the foetal body was classified
according to levels of viability and perfection. The values upon which prenatal testing is
predicated – that a healthy baby is a ‘successful’ birth - have also, in turn, reinforced the
discourse of maternal responsibility to strive for reproductive perfection.
Renewing the discourse of maternal responsibility
Women are not uninformed and unreflective social actors, and it would be unwise indeed to
assume that pregnant women have always been wholly restricted by the medical discourse
722
Williams et al, Williams Obstetrics, p. vii.
See for example Pollitt, ‘Fetal Rights’, pp. 285-298; Hubbard, ‘The Politics of Fetal-Maternal Conflict’,
pp. 311-324; Rebecca M. Albury, The Politics of Reproduction, St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1999,
pp. 130-155.
723
226
of maternal responsibility and the burden for producing a successful outcome. 724 Neither
have all of those involved in medical management of pregnancy and childbirth always been
in support of the exhortation to pregnant women to take responsibility for the birth of a
healthy baby. For example, the multi-disciplinary authored book A Guide to Effective Care
in Pregnancy and Childbirth critiqued the growing assumption that women were the
primary agents in producing a healthy baby, arguing that ‘with the implied promise that it
will help her have a perfect birth, a perfect baby, and become a perfect mother, a pregnant
woman is exhorted to lead a selfless healthy life, uncontaminated by sex, cigarettes,
alcohol, employment or anxiety. The evidence for most of these exhortations are slight.
Where the evidence is stronger, the flaw has been in the way that research and prescription
fail to take into account the real lives and responsibilities of women’. 725
Nevertheless, towards the end of the twentieth century, both medical and popular sources
have overwhelmingly espoused the view that pregnant women’s lifestyles are intrinsic to a
successful birth. This has been made problematic, as Murphy-Lawless argues, because the
foetal body has become split from the maternal body; with the rise of the ‘foetus as patient’,
obstetrics has cast itself as ‘the advocate for the foetus’ pitted against the selfish
irresponsible mother-to-be. 726 Where the discourse of maternal responsibility in the first
half of the twentieth century was focused around the expectation that ‘responsible’ women
would submit their bodies to the supervision and authoritative knowledge of the medical
profession, women in the late twentieth century and beyond have been cast as the primary
agents in producing a ‘successful’ outcome. The expectation that women should pay heed
724
Women since the 1970s have sought to challenge the medical model of pregnancy and childbirth, seen
most powerfully in the ‘natural birth’ movements discussed in the previous chapter. Reiger’s study of the
childbirth reform movement gives great insight into Australian women’s efforts to change the medical
paradigm of childbirth in the 1970s and beyond. The establishment of the Nursing Mothers Association, for
example, was a powerful example of women challenging the taboo of breastfeeding; the combination of
‘excessive hygiene, regimented feeding and scientific measurement of artificial formulae … shaped by a
context which valued the “modern” and “scientific” had seen breastfeeding rates decline sharply in the
postwar years. The objectives of Nursing Mothers were firmly predicated upon changing popular attitudes
towards breastfeeding and encouraging women to harness the uniqueness of their lactating bodies’. See
Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies, pp. 34, 49-61. See also the chapter ‘Tackling the System from Inside and
Out’, pp. 187-284.
725
Murray Enkin, Marc J.N.C. Keirse, Mary Renfrew and James Neilson, A Guide to Effective Care in
Pregnancy and Childbirth, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 25.
726
Murphy-Lawless, Reading Birth and Death, p. 199.
227
to their medical practitioner is still an ever-present part of pregnancy in Australia; 727 with
medical research increasingly weighted towards the investigation of maternal behaviour
and its impact on foetal wellbeing, coupled with the values of self-responsibility and
individual determination, women have increasingly borne the burden of responsibility for
producing a healthy baby; the prevailing view held that if women tried hard enough, they
would be able to achieve the birth of a live, healthy child. 728
As I have argued in Chapter Two, the notion of maternal responsibility is not original to the
late twentieth century; rather, it was a fundamental premise of the 1904 NSW RCDB. By
the 1950s, as Hubbard argues, mothers were increasingly portrayed as ‘being bad for their
children’. 729 In the latter years of the twentieth century, this portrayal has shifted to the
expectant mother, whose actions during pregnancy have become intrinsic to the health and
safety of the foetus: ‘In the 1950s and 1960s, mothers damaged their children by being too
self-sacrificing … But in the 1970s and 1980s, the smothering mother was replaced by the
selfish mother, the woman out of fulfil herself at the expense of her child’. 730 From the
1980s, pregnant women in the United States have been subject to both medical and legal
surveillance; the pregnant body has been constructed as being pitted against the foetal body,
and women who transgress the role of self-sacrificing mother-to-be have faced criminal
charges, not to mention public condemnation.
731
In the Australian context, whilst there
727
This expectation may seem paradoxical in light of the challenges to the medicalisation of childbirth
discussed in previous chapters; however, as Reiger notes, the model of ‘family or women-centred’ childbirth
did not entirely displace the medical model of childbirth; rather, ‘many of the changes [to childbirth practices]
desired by reformers were co-opted by [medical] professionals, losing much of their force’. Furthermore, the
redefining of the obstetrician’s role as the overseer of the management of “abnormal” and “at risk”
pregnancies – with “normal” straightforward births relinquished somewhat to midwives - served to continue
medical control over pregnancy in the late twentieth century. See Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies, pp. 212 &
220.
728
See for example, Diana Plater, Taking Control: How to Aim For a Successful Pregnancy After
Miscarriage, Stillbirth or Neonatal Loss, Moorebank, NSW: Doubleday, 1997.
729
Hubbard, ‘The Politics of Fetal/Maternal Conflict’, p. 311.
730
Hubbard, ‘The Politics of Fetal/Maternal Conflict’, pp. 311-312.
731
Hubbard cites several cases in the USA where women have been charged with endangering their foetuses:
for example in 1989 Josephine Pelligrini of Massachussetts gave birth in a public hospital to a healthy
newborn, but a routine blood test showed traces of cocaine in her child’s blood. Pelligrini was charged with
‘distributing cocaine to a minor via the umbilical cord and also with possession of an illegal substance’.
Atlhough the charge of distribution was dismissed, the possession charge was upheld and the strong
implication was that Pelligrini had behaved inappropriately during her pregnancy. According to Hubbard,
court-mandated caesarean sections and moves to protect foetuses by barring women from certain employment
which is deemed ‘risky’ for foetal wellbeing indicate the rise of the maternal/foetal conflict, and the popular
understanding that the foetus must be protected from the actions of selfish mothers. See Hubbard, ‘The
Politics of Fetal/Maternal Conflict’, p. 313.
228
have been charges laid in the past for foetal endangerment, those accused have never been
convicted of homicide. 732 However, as legal academics Sheila McLean and Kerry Petersen
observe, although the foetus does not possess ‘rights’ in legal terms, the inscription on the
foetus as an individual patient has become entrenched in both medical and lay
understandings of pregnancy and has been used to justify the supervision over women’s
behaviour during pregnancy. The notion of the foetus as patient is ‘medical fiction’, argue
the authors: ‘Effectively the law adopts a very simple approach to the female/foetal
relationship and says 'there is no debate' because what we have is one person (who happens
to be pregnant) and nobody else’. 733
However, despite this, the idea that women’s behaviour must be controlled in order to
produce a successful outcome has again gained currency in the later twentieth century.734
As medical researchers began to turn their focus to the development of the foetus, women
since the late 1970s have been exhorted to ‘take care of themselves’ during pregnancy in
order to ensure a healthy, successful birth. Although the medical profession has often
sought to reassure individual women that they most likely did not ‘cause’ a miscarriage or
have not ‘failed’ in their quest for motherhood, a variety of medical sources tell a vastly
different story. For example, two pieces published in medical journals vividly illustrate the
idea that a live birth is a success and that to miscarry or produce a stillborn baby is to have
732
Australian legal academic Judith Fordham argued in 1988 that ‘it has not yet been decided whether a
mother can owe a duty of care to her unborn child [however] … theoretically an action in negligence could lie
against the mother [if] injury has occurred, arguably as a result of her omission to seek treatment’.
Furthermore, Fordham suggested that, in terms of maternal responsibility and informed consent, [i]f the
patient is to have an enforceable interest in choice, the patient should also bear the responsibility for those
choices. If a doctor could show the patient was fully informed, he should not be liable for undesirable
outcomes. In the obstetric context, patient choice or refusal of treatment may have undesirable consequences
for the foetus. Without addressing the question of duty owed to the foetus, in principle the patient should bear
the consequences in tort or even criminal law of her decision’. See J. Fordham, Doctors’ Orders or Patient
Choice? The Law, What it is, and What it Could Be, Melbourne: Leo Cussen Institute, 1988, pp. 13 & 56.
Kristin Savell notes that the ‘born alive’ rule does not extend to a foetus which has not drawn breath
independently because legally a foetus is not a human being. See Kristin Savell, ‘The Legal Significance of
Birth’, UNSW Law Journal, vol. 29, no. 2, 2006, 200-206.
733
Kerry Petersen and Sheila McLean, ‘Patient Status: The foetus and the pregnant woman’, Australian
Journal of Human Rights, vol. 6, no. 2, 1996, http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AJHR/1996/6.html.
Accessed 8th December 2007.
734
Expectations of ‘appropriate’ pregnant behaviour are part of the wider disciplinary practices enacted upon
the female body. Sandra Lee Bartky argues that ‘the disciplinary techniques through which the “docile
bodies” of women are constructed aim at a regulation that is perpetual and exhaustive – a regulation of the
body’s size and contours, its appetite, posture, gestures and general comportment in space, and the appearance
of each of its visible parts’. See S. Bartky, ‘Foucault, Femininity and Patriarchal Power’, in Irene Diamond
and Lee Quinby (eds.) Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, Boston, MA.: Northeastern
University Press, 1988, p. 80.
229
failed in the quest for the ultimate feminine fulfillment - motherhood. In an article in 1978
entitled ‘Failure to Mourn a Stillbirth: an overlooked catastrophe’, Emanuel Lewis and
Anne Page observed that the medical profession had in the past contributed to this
catastrophe by neglecting to provide adequate emotional support for women after a
stillbirth or neonatal death; however, they argued that this in itself was not the root cause of
the widespread failure to mourn a perinatal death. Rather, it was the woman’s own
unconscious feelings of guilt and shame at her body’s inability to produce a live child
which led to psychological morbidity: because stillbirth was the puzzling death of
‘someone who did not exist’, the authors claimed that women suffering a miscarriage or
perinatal loss would naturally feel that they had ‘failed as women’. 735
Nearly twenty years later the ANZJOG published a letter to the editor from a long-serving
medical practitioner in Melbourne, Max Jotkowitz, who detailed his professional contact
with a woman who, after four miscarriages, ‘finally succeeded in achieving a much desired
family’. Eight months later, the patient was tragically found dead, having hanged herself in
the living room of her family home. In his letter, Jotkowitz concluded that it was the
woman’s ‘unconscious shame’ over her troubled obstetrical history that had been her
ultimate and tragic undoing, despite her finally ‘achiev[ing] motherhood’. He argued that
‘after all the endeavours on her behalf to achieve a healthy pregnancy this intelligent
Grammar school teacher was found dead by her own hand. Presumably this was due to her
inability to cope mentally with the various gynaecological procedures over many years on
her behalf to achieve motherhood’. 736
Although medical discourse has been an authoritative voice in its focus on maternal factors
and the level of ‘risk’ given to an individual pregnancy, the medical profession has not been
the sole voice in constructing the notion of the self-sacrificing and self-monitoring motherto-be who is thus charged with the responsibility for producing a healthy baby. In Australia,
articles in leading newspapers, preconception and pregnancy handbooks, and, in more
recent times, the internet, have perpetuated the notion that pregnancy should be a time for
735
Lewis and Page, ‘Failure to Mourn a Stillbirth’, p. 237.
Max W. Jotkowitz, ‘Re: Maternal suicide after pregnancies in a rudimentary horn’, Letter to the Editor,
ANZJOG, vol. 45, no. 5, October 2005, p. 465.
736
230
self-control, for the ‘sake of the unborn child’.
737
The image of the self-sacrificing
expectant mother, and her immoral counterpart, the pregnant woman who risks her unborn
child’s health and welfare in order to indulge her selfish habits reflect and have emerged
from medical discourse but are also produced in a cultural and political context which
values self-responsibility, accountability and control; lauds success; and devalues
‘imperfection’. 738
In earlier chapters I argued that women were often not informed about the physiology of
birth and any complications that may arise; within this context, it is tempting to view the
increasing precautions issued to pregnant women in the late twentieth century as merely
progressive and responsible behaviour on the behalf of the medical and scientific
community. To a degree, this is true; however, as Crouch and Manderson argue, the
prescriptions for a normal, healthy birth have cultivated a ‘moral component’ of pregnancy
which has led to an expectation that if women manage their pregnancy appropriately, they
will be rewarded with a healthy baby. 739 The corollary of this expectation is the implication
that women have been to blame if their baby died. In the best-selling Australian edition of
What to Expect when you’re Expecting, the authors of the comprehensive pregnancy advice
manual respond to the question ‘I had the perfect first baby … I can’t shake the fear that I
won’t be so lucky this time’ with the reassurance that ‘your chances of hitting the jackpot
again are excellent. A mother who has had a perfect baby isn’t only likely to win again, her
odds are better than they were before she had a successful pregnancy under her belt’. 740
The strong implication is, of course, that women who have had a previously ‘imperfect’
baby have not ‘won’ but have lost in their quest for the perfect baby; furthermore, this loss
has been caused in some way by their failure to control their pregnancy adequately.
737
Crouch and Manderson argue that ‘once women are pregnant the self surveillance recommended in many
of the popular booklets and pamphlets is extraordinary. They are extolled to “give baby the best start in life”
by planning the pregnancy and adhering to a range of dietary, behavioural and psychological prescriptions in
line with the idea that a “happy and worry free, healthy pregnancy will add to that joy and lay the ground
work for a contented baby.” ’ See Crouch and Manderson, New Motherhood, p. 91.
738
Fore a discussion of the impact of neo-liberalism on contemporary constructions of perinatal loss in the
American context, see Layne, Motherhood Lost, pp. 146-147. For a broader analysis of the rise of neo-liberal
values across a range of spectrums, see for example Dennis Woodward, Australia Unsettled: The Legacy of
Neo-Liberalism, Frenchs Forest, NSW: Pearson Education Australia, c2005.
739
Crouch and Manderson, New Motherhood, p. 91.
740
Arlene Eisenberg, Heidi Eisenberg Murkoff and Sandee Eisenberg Hathaway, What to Expect When
You’re Expecting, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1996, p. 24.
231
For the past thirty years, women have been constantly reminded that they need to manage
their behaviour during pregnancy in order to produce a ‘happy outcome’; to flout these
expectations is to invite deleterious consequences including miscarriage, stillbirth or a
seriously ill baby. ‘Do your best to avoid risks’, intones Dr Miriam Stoppard in a popular
pregnancy-care handbook - and the list of risks is seemingly endless, from leaving
childbirth to ‘too late’;
eating seafood with a high mercury content; failing to take
‘necessary’ prenatal vitamins; to leaving ‘too little’ space between pregnancies and failing
to control one’s emotional equilibrium during pregnancy. The danger of pregnancy loss is
explicitly linked to women’s behaviour. Stoppard, for example, advises the pregnant
woman that ‘you need to eat properly for your baby’s sake. If you don’t, there is a higher
risk you could miscarriage, or have a premature or low birthweight baby who will be more
vulnerable at birth and later in life’. 741 As pregnancy has also been conceptualised as a time
for self-sacrifice, the reward for this sacrifice, argues Stoppard, would be a healthy mother
and healthy baby. 742
An ironic and paradoxical result of the counter-cultural natural birth movement has been
the strengthening of the notion that women can, and should, control their pregnant bodies in
order to produce a desired result.743 Homebirthing advocate Rowena Davies, for example,
asserted that women need only ‘claim responsibility’ for their pregnancies by wresting the
control from ‘the professionals’. To relinquish responsibility, she argued, was to create fear
of one’s body, and fear led to complications in childbirth – the corollary of which is the risk
of perinatal loss. 744 In 1996, Random House published The Natural Way to Better Babies, a
preconception handbook for women who had previously been ‘unsuccessful’ in sustaining a
pregnancy to the birth of a healthy baby. At the crux of the authors’ message was the idea
that, by harnessing their ‘instinctive feminine strength’, women could not only ‘succeed’ in
741
Miriam Stoppard, Conception, Pregnancy and Birth, Ringwood, Vic.: Viking Press, 1993, Rev. ed., p. 138.
Stoppard, Conception, Pregnancy and Birth, p. 170.
743
Landsman argues that the counterculture of the so-called ‘natural birth’ movement has contributed to the
notion that women can, and should, exert control over their bodies in order to produce a healthy baby. See
Landsman, ‘Does God Give Special Kids to Special Parents?’ p. 141. Layne also argues that ‘the fundamental
premise of the women’s-health movement, that women must wrest back control of their bodies from
physicians, especially during pregnancy and birth, reinforces the notion that positive birth outcomes are
something women can control’. See Layne, Motherhood Lost, p. 243.
744
Sally Rowena Davies, Empowerment of Women, Birth: you know how to birth your own baby,
Beaconsfield, WA.: Sally R. Davies, 1992; see also Gabrielle Targett, A Labour of Love: An Australian Guide
to Natural Childbirth, Fremantle, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2006.
742
232
falling pregnant, but would achieve the birth of a healthy, intelligent, and beautiful baby.
Those who did not ‘listen’ to their inner femininity would produce sickly, unattractive and
difficult babies – or worse, a baby who was stillborn or died shortly after birth. The authors
devoted several pages of the book to introducing two cases to demonstrate their view that,
by following the ‘Better Babies’ prescription, women would be ‘rewarded’ with a ‘perfect
baby’. Women who did not manage their pregnancy within the ‘Better Babies’ definition –
for example those who ate a poor diet; were ‘too stressed’; continued to smoke and drink
caffeine; or were in emotional and mental disharmony with themselves and their
environment – ran the risk of miscarrying or producing a stillborn or ‘deformed’ baby. 745
Furthermore, the authors, both self-described counter-cultural ‘natural birth and fertility
experts,’ claimed that ‘certain psychological traits have been noted as being typical of
women who have suffered multiple miscarriages. Whether these are causative, or the result
745
In this long but instructive excerpt, the authors wrote that: ‘Just in case you still have a few doubts [about
the importance of preconception care] we would like to tell you two short stories which better illustrate what
can be achieved with preconception care, and, on the other hand, what you might experience without it. The
first couple, who are in their late 30s, conceive at their first attempt after attending to all of the
recommendations in Better Babies. This mother-to-be suffers a little tiredness during the early weeks of her
pregnancy, but at the end of the first three months she feels like her usual self again. Her pregnancy
progresses without a problem, she gains a modest amount of weight, feels well and looks wonderful … She
goes into labour shortly after her expected date. Her contractions are strong and effective, and throughout her
very short labour she moves and groans instinctively. After her baby is delivered, she has a tiny labial graze,
but an intact perineum. Her newborn’s health is rated at the top of the scale. The placenta is delivered, with
minimal loss of blood. Breastfeeding is quickly and easily established. In the days that follow the new mother
is euphoric. She is confident and at ease in the handling of her new baby. He is particularly handsome, and he
has a large perfectly shaped head, with broad and evenly spaced facial features. His skin glows with good
health. He is alert, but content … As he grows he reaches all his developmental milestones well ahead of his
peers. He suffers from none of the usual ills of infancy. And now we hear of another couple, who also decide
they want to start a family. After trying unsuccessfully for three years to conceive (and after suffering two
early miscarriages), they are referred to a GIFT program. After four unsuccessful attempts they decide not to
try again, but twelve months later the woman discovers to her delight that she is pregnant. During the early
weeks of her pregnancy, this mother-to-be suffers badly from nausea and vomiting. Eventually this stage
passes, but in the following months, she develops haemorrhoids, varicose veins and stretch marks, though she
wears these and her increased skin pigmentation and weird food cravings as a badge of her impending
motherhood. She gains a great deal of weight and towards the end of her pregnancy she is unable to eat a meal
or sleep with any degree of comfort … Her labour begins spontaneously, although it progresses slowly. After
24 hours with very little progress, she is exhausted, demoralised, and agreeable to some help. This speeds
things up, but it also makes her contractions quite unbearable. She has an epidural, an episiotomy and a
forceps delivery in quick succession. Her baby, at birth, is limp and a poor colour and is taken to the neonatal
ward for observation. When he is returned to her she puts him to the breast, but he has an abnormally shaped
palate and does not suckle well … He is a sickly child. His skin is rough and blotchy, his head is rather small,
his features are pinched, he has a pot belly … he still has nappy rash, which frequently becomes infected, has
cradle cap and is miserable when teething … He is clumsy and accident prone. When he starts school he finds
it difficult to sit still, his attention span is short, he is disruptive and is diagnosed as having a learning
problem. He has constant colds and develops glue ear. He continues to wet the bed. We could go on, but let us
leave the stories here, for it is now probably clear that the first story is about a new family who have a “better
baby”, and the second about a family who do not’. See Francesca Naish and Janette Roberts, The Natural Way
to Better Babies, Sydney: Random House, 1996, pp. 9-11.
233
of the experiences, is not clear [including] chronic depression and anxiety, loss of self
esteem, distorted body image, anger, decreased libido and guilt’. 746
In popular understandings of pregnancy, certain behaviours have also been constructed as
particularly irresponsible and destructive to the developing foetus and have been positioned
as especially selfish on the behalf of the expectant woman, who was constructed as inviting
tragedy by pursuing an ‘inappropriate’ pregnant lifestyle. In the mid 1980s studies into the
effect of nicotine on the developing foetus took on a new urgency as researchers discovered
that smoking during pregnancy would have a harmful impact on the developing foetus and
could lead to miscarriage, perinatal death or, for those babies who survived, a lifetime of
ongoing health problems. 747 Popular understandings of the impact of smoking whilst
pregnant were overwhelmingly framed by the idea that expectant women should behave
selflessly for the good of their unborn baby. Headlines in major Australian newspapers
explicitly constructed women who continued to smoke during pregnancy as transgressing
‘appropriate’ maternal behaviour. ‘We need to put kids first’ proclaimed an article by
journalist Sally Morrell in the Sunday Herald-Sun; she argued that selfish parents began
inflicting harm in the womb and progressed throughout childhood. 748 The editor of an
article by Rada Rouse in the NSW daily tabloid, Daily Telegraph, chose the more explicit
and unambiguous headline ‘Smoking mums kill their babies’. 749
As the results of medical research into the impact of smoking on the foetus became
disseminated to the public, women who chose to ignore or flout cultural expectations of
‘appropriate’ behaviour, such as abstaining from smoking during pregnancy, were not only
constructed as ‘selfish’, but were also branded as immoral. After the release of a study into
nicotine and foetal health in May 1999, the incumbent Australian Medical Association
President, David Brand, was quoted in the South Australian newspaper The Advertiser as
saying that women who continued to ignore scientific research into the impact of smoking
on prenatal health were ‘morally reprehensible’. 750 Shaun Brenneke, a doctor at RWH in
Melbourne, was quoted in an article in the Herald Sun on this issue; he laid the
responsibility for 23,000 baby deaths in Australia squarely at the foot of ‘smoking
746
Naish and Roberts, The Natural Way to Better Babies, p. 152.
Susan Vale, ‘How Smoking Puts The Unborn Child At Risk’, Age, 2 June 1993, p. 13.
748
Sally Morrell, ‘We Need to Put Kids First’, Sunday Herald-Sun, 28 May 1999, p. 19.
749
Rada Rouse, ‘Smoking Mums Kill Their Babies’, Daily Telegraph, 5 June 1997, p. 21.
750
Lorna Knowles, ‘Moral Issue’, Advertiser, 26 May 1999, p. 9.
747
234
mothers’. The journalist, Helen Carter, added that many women who continued to smoke
during pregnancy ‘often do not do enough to fight the addiction for the sake of their
babies’. 751 Pregnant women who did cease smoking were lauded in other newspaper reports
for their sense of ‘responsibility’ and appropriate display of selflessness towards their
unborn children. 752
Towards the end of the twentieth century, there were calls for women whose babies died as
a result of ‘preventable’ causes, such as smoking or drug use, to be held criminally liable
for their infants’ deaths. Journalist Sally Morrell reported that ‘selfish, indulgent’ women
‘just won’t stop hurting their unborn babies if it gets in the way of their wants’. She added
that one ‘would have to be downright dumb’ to not know that smoking can harm a
developing foetus, and cited the case of Simone Dagleish, seven months pregnant, who
‘argued weakly’ that ‘she has “tried everything to give up”’, as she lit a cigarette. In her
report, women who continue to smoke despite the risks in pregnancy are characterised as
weak-willed, selfish and criminal, who need to be forced to stop displaying ‘blatant
disregard’ for their unborn children and to ‘act responsibly’. Morrell suggested that these
‘types’ of women should forfeit their rights and be subjected to urine testing to ascertain if
they were continuing to smoke cigarettes during pregnancy, 753 whilst a later opinion piece
by Andrea Burns, published in the Herald-Sun, argued that ‘nicotine-addled’ pregnant
women should be subject to a ‘citizen’s arrest’ for continuing to ‘still selfishly indulge a
vile habit at the child’s peril’. 754
However, smoking during pregnancy was not the only behaviour branded as morally
reprehensible and selfish. Towards the end of the twentieth century, women were burdened
with a seemingly-endless list of prohibited behaviours which ranged from the mundane to
the extraordinary, such as drug use in pregnancy which was branded as ‘child abuse in
utero,’ where the unborn child ‘copped a bashing’. 755 Newspaper articles from the 1990s
stressed the importance of maternal health from conception; for example, women were
751
Helen Carter, ‘Smoke Link to 63 Baby Deaths a Day’, Herald-Sun, May 26 1999, p. 1. My emphasis.
See for example Miriyana Alexander, ‘Healthier Mums Lift Live Births’, Sunday Star-Times, 22 June
1997, p. 5.
753
Morrell, ‘We Need to Put Kids First’, p. 19.
754
Andrea Burns, ‘Selfish Mothers-to-be Leave me Fuming’, Sunday Herald-Sun, 25 November 2007,
p. 114.
755
Stephen Juan, ‘The Junkie Baby: A Child Development Nightmare’, SMH, 23 June 1988, p. 18.
752
235
cautioned against using heavy doonas in the third to sixth week of pregnancy, with
researchers suggesting the use of a ‘good quality blanket’ instead, to prevent overheating
and the risk of miscarriage. Indulging in the so-called ‘peril’ of too much caffeine could
also cause miscarriage or premature birth, whilst women who were ‘too stressed’ –
particularly if the mother-to-be remained in particularly stressful employment, were warned
that they were not only risking miscarriage, but also lifelong negative consequences for
their unborn child. 756
Women who had been the daughters of the second-wave feminist movement and had grown
up with the understanding that they were not limited by their biology were also blamed for
reproductive difficulties and ‘pregnancy failure’ because of the growing trend of women
‘waiting too long to start a family’. Medical language explicitly cast the ageing female
body as likely to produce ‘defective’ pregnancy; the ova of women over thirty-five, for
example, were termed as ‘degenerating eggs’, and popular understandings of pregnancy in
older women continued this theme, urging women to reproduce at their ‘biological peak’ or
face the prospect of pregnancy loss. An article in the SMH, for example, explicitly linked
the rise in ‘unexplained’ stillbirths in the late 1990s with the ‘trend towards women having
children later in life’; a curiously definitive claim considering the researcher cited in the
article, Associate Professor Paul Lancaster, was reported as saying that this trend may only
‘partly explain the pattern’. 757
Those who did not heed the warnings that older age posed great risks to the foetus –
whether by choice, circumstance or otherwise – were roundly denounced as both selfish,
for ‘wanting it all’, and stupid, for not knowing their own biological limits. 758 Journalist
Angela Shanahan, for example, argued in The Australian that women who delayed
becoming mothers until their late thirties – ‘the principle target group of the feminist
message that getting a life is inimical to getting a husband and children’ – were ‘following
756
See for example Sean Parnell, ‘Caffeine Raises Birth Risks’, Courier-Mail, 26 November 1999, p. 16;
Angie Kelly, ‘The Baby Making Diet’, Sun-Herald, 25 April 1999, p. 8; John Ellicott, ‘Work Stress Brings on
Baby’, Australian, 7 September 1998, p. 1; Julie Robotham, ‘Anxiety May Cause Low Birth Weights’, SMH,
16 January 1999, p. 6.
757
Julie Robotham, ‘Stillbirths Rise: Links to Older Mothers’, SMH, 18 January 1999, p. 3; Kristine Gough,
‘Late Expectations’, Australian, 25 November 1999, p. 14.
758
As May notes, Susan Faludi warned that the new push towards parenthood which took place in the 1980s
was explicitly designed to induce guilt in older women, and, she argues ‘took the form of a media blitz aimed
at educated career women, warning them that if they delayed childbearing, they were likely to find themselves
infertile’. See May, ‘Nonmothers as Bad Mothers’, p. 206.
236
the path previously reserved for young men, of a prolonged period of infantilism, of sexual
promiscuity - of wild oat sowing, call it what you will’. To curb the growing ‘selfishness’
of young women, Shanahan continued, there should be a programme of ‘education in
sexual morality based on a sense of self-respect that regards fertility as a precious gift, and
marriage and parenthood as true vocations, is a valuable grounding for the future’.759
Prenatal testing: avoiding a ‘failed outcome’
Towards the end of the twentieth century prenatal testing became constructed as a routine
feature of pregnancy; consenting to prenatal screening and testing increasingly became
understood to be part and parcel of ‘responsible’ parenthood. 760 Popular understandings of
the role of prenatal diagnosis viewed interventions such as ultrasound as providing
reassurance that the pregnancy was developing ‘normally’, and towards the end of the
twentieth century, and beyond, such tests have become to be regarded as routine and an
essential part of pregnancy. Miriam Stoppard, for example, assured her readers that ‘your
baby needs scans’ to ensure its ongoing health and vitality, 761 whilst a number of
newspaper articles decried the withdrawal of public funding to some diagnostic tests,
claiming that it robbed women of much-needed reassurance. 762
In order for prenatal screening to have become considered routine, Eleanor Milligan argues
that in medical and popular discourse testing has been presented as unproblematic and
merely a means for reassurance, 763 whilst Melinda Tankard-Reist argues that when
something becomes routine, fewer questions are asked about the values implicit in such
interventions. 764 Therefore, whilst couched in such euphemistic and unthreatening terms,
759
Angela Shanahan, ‘Populate or Perish the Thought of a Full Life’, Australian, 18 November 1999, p. 17.
Eleanor Milligan argues that ‘once reserved for “high risk” pregnancies, prenatal screening has now
become a routine feature of antenatal care in most first world countries with up to 90% of women receiving
some form of testing during pregnancy … Widely regarded as a means of increasing reproductive choices
through enhanced knowledge and more informed decision making, prenatal screening is seen by parents and
doctors alike as unproblematic, even “responsible pregnant behaviour”’. See E. Milligan, ‘Ethical Practice in
Prenatal Screening: Can Informed Consent Deliver?’, in C. Bailey, D. Cabrera and L. Buys (eds.)
Proceedings Social Change in the Twenty First Century Conference, Brisbane: Centre for Social Change
Research, Queensland University of Technology, 2004, p. 3.
761
Stoppard, Conception, Pregnancy and Birth, p. 181.
762
Peta Rasdien, ‘Scans a Loss to Peace of Mind’, West Australian, 11 January 2000, p. 5; Editorial, ‘A
Heartless Piece of Cost-Cutting’, Adelaide Advertiser, 11 January 2000, p. 16.
763
Milligan, ‘Ethical Practice in Prenatal Screening’, p. 7.
764
Reist, Defiant Birth, p. 16.
760
237
women were increasingly urged to submit their pregnant bodies to be screened for
‘abnormal’ foetal development in order to save themselves from the ‘tragedy’ of an
‘unsuccessful’ outcome – the death of a baby or the possibility of a disabled child. 765
Whilst prenatal testing and its corollary, termination for genetic ‘abnormality’, was
acknowledged as a difficult decision, it was rendered as less problematic because of reemergence of the medical inscription of ‘unknowable’ on the foetal body; Lachlan de
Crespigny, Meg Espie and Sophia Holmes, for example, argued that:
Women who have a miscarriage, or a pregnancy termination for a fetus with an
abnormality, can experience a grief reaction similar in intensity to that provoked by
the death of a partner or child. It is easy to understand how devastating it may be to
lose a partner with whom one has long shared experiences, emotions and
companionship. It is far less easy to understand how the same depth of grief can be
felt for a fetus who has existed for such a short time, and, in reality, has never been
a person. 766
The rise of ultrasound and associated prenatal diagnostic tests in the late twentieth century
has also strengthened notions of achievement, of manipulating the environment in order to
produce a ‘successful outcome’ – or avoiding an ‘unsuccessful’ outcome by way of
screening for imperfection. On the one hand, prenatal tests have been hailed for their
abilities to allow doctors to operate on babies in utero, but have also increasingly been used
to detect ‘imperfection’ – a ‘failed’ foetus. 767 The increasingly routine use of ultrasound
and other diagnostic tools has given the medical profession an increased surveillance over
women’s bodies during pregnancy and childbirth – in the medical textbook The Fetus as
Patient, the authors argue that ultrasound is a ‘unique opportunity to get in contact with our
object, the fetus’, yet another way to ‘organize the surveillance for the mother and her fetus
beyond the year 2000’. 768
765
Prominent Sydney obstetrician, Lachlan de Crespigny and co-authors Meg Espie and Sophia Holmes
recount the experience of one couple who came for a chorionic villius sampling (CVS) test for a subsequent
pregnancy after the death of their first child, a girl who had been born with Down Syndrome and who had
died five days after birth. According to the authors, the parents were ‘afraid to embark on another pregnancy
unless they had the reassurance that the disaster of their previous experience would not be repeated’.
Ironically, the authors continued to construct tests such as CVS as a means of ‘reassurance’, even though they
acknowledged that in this case the baby had died not because of being affected by Down Syndrome – which
can be detected by CVS - but because the vessels of the umbilical cord had ruptured when labour began,
which resulted in foetal haemorrhage and severe brain damage which ultimately caused the baby’s death. See
Lachlan de Crespigny, Meg Espie and Sophia Holmes, Prenatal Testing: Making Decisions in Pregnancy,
Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1998, p. 35.
766
de Crespigny et al, Prenatal Testing, p. 170.
767
See for example Margaret Harris, ‘Breakthrough Test to Save Deformed Babies’, Sun Herald, 29 October
1988, p. 3.
768
Salvesen and Eik-Nes, ‘The Routine Fetal Examination’, p. 87.
238
For example, Michael Bennett, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at the Royal
Women’s Hospital in Sydney, New South Wales, was enthusiastic about pioneering foetal
surgery in the late 1990s that would, he argued, help reduce the rate of stillbirths and fatally
ill newborns if potential candidates for surgery were selected on the basis of potential to
become a ‘productive’ citizen. When asked if such risky surgery was a waste of resources,
Bennett argued that it was fiscally beneficial to operate on worthy candidates. The reporter
wrote that ‘Professor Bennett says the resources used in such cases justify the results
because, if successful, “we've got ourselves a normal member of the human race who, in
terms of resources, is going to plough back an awful lot by being a taxpayer.”’ In the same
article, Dr Henderson-Smart, director-general of the perinatal medicine department at the
King George V hospital in Sydney, agreed that in-utero operations to ‘salvage’ otherwise‘useless’ lives would ‘save money’ – but only if foetuses were selected based on their
suitability. Foetuses with multiple abnormalities should not be selected, he argued,
presumably because they were likely to die before or at birth and would not become
‘productive’ citizens who would therefore justify the expense of such an operation. 769
Popular understandings of prenatal testing also viewed the ability to screen for
‘defectiveness’ as a means of reducing the number of babies who would otherwise be
unnecessarily and tragically be born ‘deformed’, stillborn, or die shortly after birth. A
newspaper report in a 1988 issue of the tabloid Herald-Sun, for example, proclaimed that
‘breakthrough tests save deformed babies’. However, as the ensuing article demonstrated,
‘saving’ deformed babies – in this case, babies with Down Syndrome – was equated not
with therapeutic attempts to improve the wellbeing of affected foetuses, but meant the
‘likely’ termination after a positive diagnosis was made using the nuchal fold test, and later,
amniocentesis. 770 In What to Expect when you’re Expecting, the authors echoed the notion
that prenatal testing could ‘save’ both a ‘defective’ foetus and its parents from either a
needless stillbirth or the perceived tragedy of a life of disability, proclaiming that ‘in spite
of the increased risks in delivering “abnormal babies”, prenatal testing is good news for
expectant mums over thirty five … evaluations for birth defects can be done in utero …
769
770
David McKnight, ‘Australian surgeons not far behind’, SMH, 9 October 1986, p. 19.
Harris, ‘Breakthrough Tests Save Deformed Babies’, p. 3.
239
which means that the risk that a mother to be over thirty five will bear an infant with a
severe birth defect can be reduced to a level comparable to that for a younger woman’. 771
Therefore in the late twentieth century, women were increasingly expected to consent to
prenatal screening as part of the rhetoric of ‘responsible’ pregnant behaviour, and having
submitted to these interventions, to act in ‘appropriate’ ways. Particularly with the cultural
veneration of ‘science’, a number of critics observe that ‘it is extremely difficult, if not
impossible for women to choose to reject technologies approved by the obstetrical
profession. Once tests are offered, to reject them is a rejection of modern faith in science
and also a rejection of modern beliefs that women should do everything possible for the
health of the future child’. 772 Rothman notes that although ‘non-directive’ genetic
counseling is held as the ideal with many counselors professing to hold to this ideal, genetic
counselors were given the power to ‘shape the session, and thus the decision-making
process, by directing the woman’s attention toward some questions, and away from
others’. 773
Medical and popular literature from the 1980s on this subject overwhelming subscribed to
the idea that women are the agents in choosing interventions and prenatal diagnosis. The
authors of the 1980 edition of Williams Obstetrics, for example, argue that genetic
counseling allows parents to make ‘intelligent decisions about future childbearing …
Amateurish advice, particularly of the unjustifiably optimistic variety, may produce tragic
results’. 774 In Prenatal Testing the authors argue that, because prenatal testing is at least
legally elective, ‘ultimately, it is the pregnant woman who must decide whether or not she
wishes to undergo testing. The choice is [hers] alone’. 775 Later in the book, they claim that
771
Eisenberg et al, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, pp. 29-30.
Leon Kass and Wertz and Fletcher quoted in Reist, Defiant Birth, p. 16.
773
Rothman cites two examples of genetics counsellors in the United States who were part of her study; one
counsellor explained why she entered genetic counselling by saying that ‘I’ve had enough freaky kids throw
up on me. I want to get it before it happens’. The other articulated her thoughts about children with Down
Syndrome by saying that ‘Sure they can be sweet children. And they grow up to be ugly adults’. Whilst
acknowledging that these cases are at the extreme end of the spectrum, Rothman argues that ‘if this is how
you see it, how can you not influence?’ See Rothman, The Tentative Pregnancy, pp. 46-47.
774
Williams et al, Williams Obstetrics, p. 1003.
775
de Crespigny et al, Prenatal Testing, p. 14. Later in the book the authors continue to stress that parents
themselves must choose testing; whilst the authors acknowledge that patients may be ‘subject to paternalistic
advice’, they ironically then continue to give ‘positive’ examples of parents who ‘initially had not thought
about prenatal testing’ but who did undergo this, after being ‘strongly advised’ from medical professionals.
See de Crespigny et al, Prenatal Testing, pp. 43-45.
772
240
‘a doctor cannot decide what a woman’s attitude to termination of pregnancy should be. We
support the right of the pregnant woman to make an autonomous decision on which if any
test to have, and what to do if an abnormality is found’. 776
However, like antenatal care, which critics have seen as a ‘coercive measure’ and a means
of supervising women’s bodies in the history of obstetrical management, 777 the rise of
prenatal diagnosis and the emphasis on the development of the foetus and ‘successful’
outcomes in the late twentieth century can be seen as operating within a discourse of
authority and coercion. 778 As I have argued earlier, prenatal screening and antenatal care
are predicated upon similar goals: to ensure a ‘successful’ outcome of pregnancy, yet
prenatal screening differs from the latter because, firstly, testing towards the late twentieth
century (and beyond) cannot detect all disorders, and secondly, the vast majority of
disorders that can be detected are not ‘curable’ – leading to the obvious conclusion that the
‘improved outcome’ is non-continuation of the pregnancy. For example, the authors of
What to Expect couched prenatal testing in terms of saving parents the futility of bearing a
baby who would be unlikely to survive. 779 Milligan observes that the ‘reassurance’ offered
by genetic counselling in the late twentieth century has not been focused around assuring
parents that their disabled child will be supported in the community, but rather that modern
776
De Crespigny et al, Prenatal Testing, p. 21.
Murphy-Lawless, Reading Birth and Death, p. 198.
778
As some geneticists and counsellors themselves have recognised, the consumer-oriented model in prenatal
genetic counselling, whereby individuals are left to make their own decisions, often conflicts with broader
policy goals which focus on measures of efficiency and define 'successful ' prevention in terms of termination
of the pregnancy. Angus Clarke, a medical geneticist, for instance, noted that 'it is impossible to maintain a
sincerely non-directive approach to counselling about a disorder whilst simultaneously aiming to prevent that
disorder’. He continued that, ‘I contend that an offer of prenatal diagnosis implies a recommendation to
accept that offer, which in turn entails a tacit recommendation to terminate a pregnancy if it is found to show
any abnormality. I believe that this sequence is present irrespective of the counsellor's wishes, thoughts or
feelings, because it arises from the social context rather than from the personalities involved - although
naturally the counsellor may reinforce these factors. Thus the Holy Grail of non-directive counselling is
unattainable, because the counsellor's conscious or even unconscious motives are irrelevant: the offer and
acceptance of genetic counselling has already set up a likely chain of events in everyone's mind’. See A.
Clarke, “Is Non-Directive Counselling Possible?”, Lancet, vol. 338, October 19 1991, pp. 998-1001.
778
Furthermore, as some critics observe, not all women understand medical interpretations of ‘risk’, nor are
all women aware that ‘co-opting’ out of termination is a viable possibility after a positive prenatal diagnosis
for abnormality. Furthermore, the combined factors of the power structure of medicine, the cultural
subordination to this authority and the contemporary faith in medical technology have in the past led to
women feeling coerced into termination. See Milligan, ‘Ethical Practice in Prenatal Screening’, pp. 1-16.
779
De Crespigny et al, Prenatal Testing, p. 45.
777
241
medicine can assist in averting the ‘frightening tragedy’ of bearing a ‘defective’ child. 780
Reist quotes an Australian obstetrician, Andrew McLennan, who articulates the idea that a
‘successful’ outcome can only be the birth of a live, healthy baby: ‘Now we’ve got a
system that allows us to pick up close to 85 per cent or 90 per cent [of foetuses with Down
Syndrome]. So that’s a significant improvement in a short space of time’. 781
The decision to continue a pregnancy with a foetus that is ‘incompatible with life’ has been
made more difficult by the misrepresentation of disability, argues Milligan, and the attitude
that to continue would be ‘pointless’. 782 Bioethicist Sjef Gevers argues that the
continuation of pregnancy in the case of severe foetal abnormality is a ‘pointless
pregnancy’ because continuation to term cannot change the outcome of a ‘failed
pregnancy’; 783 screening, and the option to terminate for ‘defectiveness’, therefore, has
been positioned as sparing women the ‘tragedy’ and the ‘futility’ of an unnecessary
pregnancy which was likely to end in stillbirth or perinatal death. In Prenatal Testing for
example the authors argue that, in the case of a ‘failed pregnancy’ 784 ‘it is unusual for
couples to choose to continue a pregnancy when the fetus has a severe abnormality
preventing it surviving long after birth … most women find it intolerable to continue the
pregnancy for even a short period’. 785
Karen, for example, was told at twenty two weeks pregnant that her unborn child was
‘incompatible with life’ due to a ‘lethal placental chromosomal abnormality’ and she was
urged to consider termination. Both the genetic counsellor and her obstetrician told Karen
that she needed to ‘think about saving [her] uterus for a healthier baby’ and informed her
that she would be approved for a termination, despite being past the cut-off point of twenty
weeks gestation, because they were ‘prepared to fake dates up until twenty two weeks’.
Karen refused, but was still subject to continual pressure to terminate her supposedly
780
Milligan cites disability advocate Tom Shakespeare as noting that ‘whilst I support a woman’s right to
choose, I regret situations where a pregnancy is terminated because of inaccurate or prejudiced information
about what it is like to be disabled’. See Milligan, ‘Ethical Practice in Prenatal Screening’, pp. 10-11.
781
Andrew McLennan cited in Reist, Defiant Birth, p. 6.
782
Milligan, ‘Ethical Practice in Prenatal Screening’, pp. 10-11.
783
Sjef Gevers quoted in Reist, Defiant Birth, p. 6.
784
de Crespigny et al, Prenatal Testing, p. 164.
785
de Crespigny et al, Prenatal Testing, p. 143.
242
‘pointless pregnancy’: she was told at twenty five weeks gestation that ‘we can [still] admit
you to hospital today and induce you for medical reasons if you like’. 786
Prenatal Testing and Maternal Responsibility
In 2000, bioethicist Henriikka Clarkeburn argued that parents had a duty of care towards
their unborn children; these responsibilities fell under the ethical principles of ‘beneficence’
and ‘non-maleficence’ and included the obligation that one must prevent evil and harm.
According to Clarkeburn, in the case of a ‘severe genetic abnormality’, this obligation
possibly extends to include termination, if the disability renders a life ‘worse than nonexistence’. 787 Although she noted that genetic conditions usually found in prenatal
screening, such as Down Syndrome and cystic fibrosis, did not fulfil the definition of ‘life
worse than non-existence’, Clarkeburn suggested that:
If a condition which is worse than nonexistence were identified, the parental duty of
beneficence, in a moral sense, would extend even to those parents with only a
minimal chance of having a child with such a condition. However, for a society to
increase prenatal testing procedures in order to detect all extremely rare conditions
is unlikely to be an acceptable use of public funds. Thus the moral duty is more
prominent when parents are aware of an increased risk of having a child with a
genetic condition which would lead to that child having a life worse than nonexistence. Parents in such a situation would have a duty to take all possible
precautions to prevent a child with the condition being born. These precautions
include terminating an affected pregnancy. Parents who know of such risks and are
not willing to use prenatal testing with the possible termination of an affected
pregnancy, should refrain from conceiving. Society should allow for the realisation
of this moral duty, by providing testing opportunities either prior to conception or
during pregnancy. 788
786
Despite the diagnosis of ‘lethal placenta abnormality’ Karen’s baby was born healthy. Karen, personal
correspondence with researcher, 15 January 2007. Email in possession of researcher.
787
Clarkeburn argues that ‘if … being born is worse than non-existence, the parental act of carrying to term a
child with such a severe impairment can be considered as a harmful act. The parental duty of beneficence to
use prenatal testing in conjunction with a possible termination of an affected pregnancy, can therefore only be
sustained if it can be proved that it is possible 1) to have a life worse than non-existence, and 2) to detect an
affected genetic constitution before conception or birth … If being born inflicts intolerable harm on the child,
and there is a form of prevention in relation to financial and technical abilities and opportunities, the parental
duty of beneficence requires such preventive measures to be taken’. See H. Clarkeburn, ‘Parental Duties and
Untreatable Genetic Conditions’, Journal of Medical Ethics, Oct, 2000, vol. 26, no. 5, pp. 400-405.
Clarkeburn’s position on ethics is undoubtedly derivative of the ideas of influential ethicist Peter Singer; see
for example P. Singer, Practical Ethics, Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993, rev. ed.
788
Clarkeburn, ‘Parental Duties and Untreatable Genetic Conditions’, pp. 400-405.
243
However, the discourse of maternal responsibility and the notion that women should strive
to achieve reproductive perfection serve to create a strong sense of ‘social pressure,’ argues
Milligan; at the end of the twentieth century women have been cast as ‘advocates for their
child’s health’ beginning in the womb. 789 The notion that prenatal screening could ‘reduce’
parents’ suffering by sparing them the inevitability of a perinatal loss, or worse, a lifetime
with a disabled child, meant that women in the late twentieth century were increasingly
faced with an agonising decision should their child be diagnosed with an abnormality in
utero. 790
For some women, unwittingly contradicting the cultural expectation of a healthy pregnancy
and healthy baby was a heavy burden to bear. Kelly, whose third child was diagnosed
during a routine anatomy scan with severe congenital abnormalities ‘incompatible with
[post natal] life,’ was given the choice by the team of specialists: to ‘interrupt’ the
pregnancy or to continue, knowing that nothing short of a miracle would lead to the birth of
a healthy child. Kelly chose to continue the pregnancy and at thirty eight weeks gave birth
to a girl who lived briefly and died in Kelly’s arms: I think it was about three and a half
hours of start to finish with the labour, it wasn’t very long, and they put her on oxygen for
ten minutes, which gave us ten minutes with her, which I’m very thankful for. A lot of
women who have babies that are born still don’t have that time, so I value my ten minutes,
in that regard’. 791 Nonetheless, Kelly did not tell many people that she had had an option to
terminate the pregnancy, for fear of being criticised.
At the time, with a lot of close friends, I didn’t tell that I had the option to either
terminate or continue, because I found they were judging me, and I didn’t want to
be judged, I just wanted to be respected for the decision I had made. And even now,
I know, when I talk to people, you get to know new people at playgroup or
789
Milligan, ‘Ethical Practice in Prenatal Screening’, p. 11.
Towards the end of the twentieth century, this rhetoric was strengthened by the notion that serious
disability was not only a burden to parents, but to society. The authors of Prenatal Testing argued that ‘there
is a large cost to the community in raising children with Down Syndrome’, de Crespigny et al continued,
‘[and] it would be irresponsible not to consider the cost benefits’. They vigorously rejected the ‘popular’
perception that children with Down Syndrome, for example, were bright, happy children who may enjoy a
satisfying, fulfilling life, arguing that the reality was vastly different: ‘Down syndrome babies are a major cost
to the community and may cause a family considerable financial and emotional hardship – because of the
stresses of raising a child with Down syndrome, the potential for conflict within a family can increase’.
Prenatal testing, then, has been positioned as providing parents with reassurance that their unborn babies are
‘normal’, or, in the case of ‘abnormality’, ‘providing the opportunity to reduce the amount of such suffering’.
See de Crespigny et al, Prenatal Testing, p. 135.
791
Kelly, interview with researcher.
790
244
wherever, and they –‘oh, you’ve got just this one?’ ‘No, I’ve got three at school’ –
and you do stop and think, no I don’t really want to go into this today, with you. 792
For those women who did choose to interrupt a pregnancy on genetic grounds, the view that
it was ‘for the best’ was a problematic explanation. While some women accepted this view,
others found that their grief was problematised by the misconception that they had not
wanted their pregnancy to continue. Support After Foetal Diagnosis of Abnormality
[SAFDA], for example, was established to explicitly challenge the notion that the ending of
a pregnancy for genetic abnormality was a means of relieving expectant parents of the
‘burden’ of bearing a child with severe abnormalities, noting that within the cultural ideal
of ‘healthy pregnancy, perfect baby’, parents were often ill-prepared when this ‘utopic
picture’ was shattered. 793 Recalling the care of women who terminated pregnancies under
twenty weeks gestation for genetic reasons, Belinda Jennings argued that:
In some respects, there is a minor degree of this punitive response where [nurses
say] ‘you don’t deserve my best care because you don’t want your baby’. And I can
give you an example from … gynaecology, where we give out mementoes – in the
form of footprints, handprints, photographs - for all women experiencing perinatal
loss - on the gynaecology ward, if they’re having a termination, sometimes for
social reasons, sometimes for foetal anomalies reasons, they won’t do that, because
they say, ‘they don’t want that baby, they don’t deserve it’. So there is a degree of
punitive action. 794
Transgressing the ideal of the ‘good death’
The discourse of maternal responsibility constructed pregnancy as a process which could be
controlled, from daily activities such as managing diet and exercising, to the ‘routine’ use
of prenatal testing which was particularly constructed as a means to ‘spare’ parents the
trauma of giving birth needlessly to a child that would either die shortly after birth or who
would live a severely disabled life. Within this context, perinatal loss was a corollary of
what constituted a ‘good death’ in western societies at the end of the twentieth century. In
Chapter Six I have argued that the last decade of the twentieth century saw a formalising of
hospital policies designed to help women form attachments to their deceased infants;
however, the expectation that medical science had conquered perinatal death meant it was
792
Kelly, interview with researcher.
See SAFDA, Diagnosis of abnormality in an unborn baby, Sydney: NSW Genetics Education Program,
1995.
794
Jennings, interview with researcher.
793
245
still a taboo subject, as stillbirth and neonatal death fell outside the idea of what constituted
a ‘good death’. 795 Anthropologists Bloch and Parry observe that:
The notion of a good death may sound oxymoronic to many people living in
contemporary Western societies. These societies are infused with cultural
assumptions about illness, disease and death; health is beautiful and good, aligned
closely to perfection, whereas disease and death are imperfect and implicitly bad.
However, throughout history people have attempted to distinguish between “good”
and “bad” deaths. From an anthropological perspective, a good death is one which
suggests some mastery over the arbitrariness of biological occurrence. 796
Despite the shift in hospital practices away from ‘shielding’ women from their deceased
infants, stillbirth and neonatal death were still difficult and confrontational topics in
Australian society. In seeking to educate the public about the incidence of perinatal death
through radio interviews and other media, the perinatal pathologist Simon Knowles noted
that some interviewers were open with their distaste for the subject; for example, the radio
host who told Knowles that he ‘didn’t want to do the interview in the first place because
‘this is a family show’ and who then proceeded to introduce the subject on air as
‘morbid’. 797
Many mothers found that their relatives and friends reacted with horror to their mementoes
of the deceased baby. Women often left the relative safety of the hospital, with their only
mementoes of their child – some photographs, footprints and handprints, the baby’s clothes,
and perhaps a lock of hair, but, unlike the mementoes of a happy birth, found that relatively
few were willing to share in these memories, perhaps unable or unwilling to plumb the
depths of the loss. Claire, for example, remembers that for several years after her child
died, she was eager to join in the inevitable conversations amongst groups of mothers about
labour and birth but soon realised that her experience was too difficult for some to hear, or
regarded by some as not a valid experience of motherhood.
I’d want to say, ‘I’m a mother too!’ I’ve gone through labour, and I would initially
talk about it … I’ve always been very open about it, and when people would talk
about having their kids, or whatever, I would want to talk about my experiences,
and I soon learnt that they weren’t always received as well as you would hope. It
795
Beverley McNamara, Fragile Lives: Death, dying and care, Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2001, p.
41.
796
Bloch and Parry, cited in McNamara, Fragile Lives, p. 42.
797
Knowles, ‘A Passage Through Grief’, p. 1708.
246
made people uncomfortable, when I would tell them, especially in the initial sort of
year or so afterwards. 798
Women’s understandings of their miscarriage or perinatal loss were also contradicted by
the view that miscarriages and stillbirths due to foetal abnormalities were often ‘for the
best’. 799 When Christine miscarried her second child only six months after her son was
stillborn, an acquaintance tried to console her with an offhand remark. She recalled that ‘I
had one woman say to me … third time lucky! … I don’t think it’s anger - it’s frustration,
where you just want to push that person, where you want to say, “hang on, hang on. I’ve
already lost one baby, and now I’ve lost two”’. 800 Upon returning to work after her son
died, Christine was faced with the difficulty of telling her colleagues why her child had
died in the womb. Very few friends were willing to go into the details of her baby’s death,
but Christine still persisted in sharing the story of her child.
Oh, I’m a very open person, I tell people – probably people who didn’t want to
know (laughs) but I would tell them. And you would always get, ‘well, at least …’
And you’d be, ‘no no no. It’s not ‘at least’. It is what it is’. And I remember telling
– I was working on a television commercial shoot, and the last time I had seen this
person I was six months pregnant – and I saw this person again, and he yelled
across the room, ‘So have you had that baby yet?’ And the guys I was working with
just cringed. And I went, ‘do you have a moment? I lost the baby’. ‘Oh. Do you
have any idea – can I ask that?’ I said, ‘of course you can. He was really sick’. ‘Oh,
well that’s better it happened that way because he was so sick’. And I said, ‘you
know what? Either way, I’m dealing with something. Either way, I would be
dealing with a really disabled baby that perhaps wouldn’t have survived very long,
or doing what I’m doing now, and dealing with the death of my baby. So there’s
nothing easy about it’. And people think they’re being helpful by making those sorts
of suggestions. 801
As Layne argues, the culture of ‘meritocracy’ in the late twentieth century has served to
exacerbate the contradiction in understandings that a woman faces after pregnancy loss. 802
For instance, Charlotte, whose first baby was stillborn shortly after the turn of the twenty
798
Claire, interview with researcher.
Certainly in Australia the idea still persisted that miscarriage and stillbirth were ‘nature’s way’ of getting
rid of ‘defective’ foetuses; one popular book aimed at women conceiving after loss, for example reassured
readers that miscarriage was ‘nature’s way of abandoning those fertilised eggs that don’t come up to scratch’.
See Anne Stonehouse and Bruce Sutherland, After a Miscarriage, Melbourne: Pitman, 1986, p. 18. This
sentiment was echoed in a later pregnancy handbook; the authors remarked that ‘nature does a good job of
supporting strong, healthy pregnancies – and of abandoning those fertilised eggs that don’t come up to
scratch’. See H. Welford, Pregnancy: The Complete Australian Guide to Planning and Birth, Wetherill Park:
Gary Allen, 1998, p. 93.
800
Christine, interview with researcher.
801
Christine, interview with researcher.
802
Layne, Motherhood Lost, pp. 146-147.
799
247
first century, remembers that she felt ‘like a freak’, and that her body had ‘let her down’ by
producing a deceased baby; her baby was rarely mentioned by family and friends after the
event, despite the baby’s arrival being a much-anticipated and discussed event amongst the
family. 803
Similarly, after delivering her first child in 1997, Brenda found it difficult to not to blame
herself for her baby’s death, even though the autopsy had revealed the cause of death to be
‘inconclusive’ and most likely due to a lack of oxygen. In her interview, she recalled that
she was initially reticent to hold her baby because she feared that she had in some way
contributed to his death, even though she ‘knew’ that she had done ‘everything right’ by
watching her diet, stopping vigorous exercise and abstaining from alcohol. After gentle
encouragement from the midwives, she did hold her baby, but she found it difficult.
I felt like he was going to … grab a knife and kill me, [because] I’d killed him.
Your mind just doesn’t … I don’t know whether other people have really
experienced this, I haven’t spoken to others about it, but it was like my mind just …
turned it round, like it was my fault and that this baby was going to wreak revenge.
Maybe it was because I was responsible for this little one, and it was almost like I’d
failed. And yet I know, sort of now, that I did everything right but there still is that
ten percent that says, there’s something you did. Something happened, for some
reason. 804
After Christine’s stillbirth and miscarriage, she felt that her body had failed her in
something that was meant to be a natural process. She commented that ‘the thing that was
in the back of my mind was, I can’t even get that right! You know, the self-pity, and the
blame. You know the medical mechanics of it. You know medically why you’ve lost those
babies but you don’t know, spiritually, why’. 805 Christine’s feelings of guilt threatened to
displace the ways she was able to grieve her baby and, she said in her interview, meant that
she and her husband had decided to ‘stop trying’ to fall pregnant again. 806 Even though
Christine had been reassured that her difficulties in pregnancy were the result of medical
issues and not her behaviour during pregnancy, she found this to be scant consolation. She
and her husband were told that they should have no problems conceiving again after her
stillbirth, except for her body’s ‘inability’ to accept her husband’s sperm: ‘again we were
having problems falling pregnant, so … my doctor referred me to [an IVF clinic]. So we
803
Charlotte, personal correspondence with researcher, 12 August 2005. Email in possession of researcher.
Brenda, interview with researcher.
805
Christine, interview with researcher.
806
Christine, interview with researcher.
804
248
went there and had some tests done and … it just turned out that – it sounds so awful – my
mucus was hostile. It meant that [my husband’s] sperm wouldn’t – it would have a go, but
[for] that angry mucus’. 807
Penn, on the other hand, found great reassurance in the advice of a relative who sent her an
email shortly after her miscarriage. The relative wrote: ‘how very sad for you both. I want
to be really philosophical and give you some wonderful piece of advice that will help you
with that but really, there’s nothing that can help at all with such a heartbreak, especially
after the euphoria of discovering you were pregnant. I can only believe that sometimes this
is a blessing, however badly disguised. It’s nature’s way of selecting only the best and
perhaps the miscarriage has saved you from a lifetime of guilt, with a disabled child, which
would be an even harder burden to bear. You are one of nature’s beautiful children yourself
and you should have only the best’. 808 After Penn posted the contents of this email on a
public internet forum, she was inundated with replies, many from other women who had
suffered miscarriages, who found the construction of miscarriage as ‘nature’s way’ to be
offensive and hurtful. 809
Conclusion
Earlier in the thesis, I have considered notions of maternal responsibility and the
condemnation directed towards ‘selfish’ mothers who put their unborn children’s lives at
risk by indulging in ‘dangerous’ behaviours from the early to middle decades of the
twentieth century. Towards the end of the twentieth century, pregnant women once again
increasingly bore the burden of responsibility in producing a healthy child – or, in the
language of obstetrics, a ‘successful’ outcome. At this time the foetal body has also
become subject to intense scrutiny; as I have argued in previous chapters, the foetal body
was categorised in medical discourse as either ‘viable’ or ‘unviable’, dependent on
gestational age and, to an extent, the degree of visible deformity. However, in the latter
years of the twentieth century the foetal body was subject to a greater surveillance, and the
categories of viable and unviable were widened to include other factors than gestational
807
Christine, interview with researcher.
Penn, personal correspondence with researcher, 20th December2007. Email in possession of researcher.
809
Penn, personal correspondence with researcher.
808
249
maturity and ‘gross abnormality’. Because of the medical profession’s increasing ability to
observe the foetus in the womb, due to developments in in utero technologies, the foetal
body has become embedded with values of worthiness and merit, which has in turn
impacted upon understandings of perinatal death particularly in cases where the foetus was
deemed to be ‘deformed’ or ‘unviable’, and thus, inherently ‘failed’. The rise of prenatal
diagnosis and its construction as an ‘essential’ part of the supervision of pregnancy served
to problematise the emerging understandings of the late twentieth century that pregnancy
loss was a significant and traumatic experience for many women.
250
CONCLUSION
Although the incidence of stillbirth and neonatal death has declined significantly over the
last one hundred years in Australia, some form of pregnancy loss remains a significant part
of many women’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth. Despite the relative frequency
of pregnancy loss, miscarriage and perinatal death have remained relative silent subjects in
historiography concerned with women’s lives in Australia. Since the 1970s feminist
historians have contributed to a vast, rich and ever-increasing body of scholarship which
gives insight into women’s experiences of maternity and motherhood; however, although
some of these studies make reference to perinatal loss as part of a broader research focus,
this thesis is the first focused study of the changing constructions of miscarriage, stillbirth
and neonatal death in Australia and the experiences of some women who have suffered
such a loss. In order to enlarge existing scholarship which has challenged the silence of
women’s lives in the historical record, this thesis has sought to uncover what has been
previously hidden in both women’s lives and the historical record, by privileging women’s
voices of the experience of losing a baby.
Oral history has been a vital methodological tool in gaining insight into the ways women
have understood their experiences of pregnancy loss. However, the dominant constructions
of perinatal loss in twentieth century Australia have often been at odds with the way
women themselves have understood the loss of a baby. The twentieth century was host to a
number of constructions of miscarriage, stillbirth and neonatal death; although at times in
contradiction with each other, these constructions have primarily been, to paraphrase the
words of feminist legal academic Jocelynne Scutt, predicated upon the dominant cultural
construction of woman’s humanness as dependent on the products of her womb. 810
Throughout Australia’s past, the medical profession in particular has claimed the right to
speak about perinatal death; whilst this authority has been both challenged and reinforced
by the constructions produced by other groups in Australia’s past, medical inscriptions on
the foetal and maternal bodies have produced enduring and dominant ways of
understanding pregnancy loss.
810
Jocelynne Scutt, ‘Women's bodies, patriarchal principles’, in J. Scutt (ed.) The Baby Machine:
Commercialisation of Motherhood, Carlton, Vic.: McCulloch Publishing, 1988, p. 196
251
At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the medicalisation of childbirth
heralded a greater scrutiny over the pregnant body and positioned the medical profession as
an authoritative voice in describing, naming and classifying the maternal and foetal bodies.
Medical discourse constructed pregnancy within the duality of ‘successful’ versus ‘failed’
outcomes; a crucial part of this was the discrediting of women’s knowledge of pregnancy
and childbirth, initially focused around the figure of the female birth attendant. The
activities of the untrained midwife were dramatically curtailed by the development of
obstetrics and gynaecology, and the professionalisation of medicine signaled the end of
pregnancy and birth as events to be managed by women themselves.
Furthermore, within the context of the concern over the declining birth rate, the figure of
the mother took on greater importance. The ostensible veneration of the (white) mother as
vital to the project of nation-building was reinforced by the privileging of medical
knowledge over women’s knowledge, and gave rise to the prevailing view that women
should take responsibility for ensuring the birth of a healthy baby by submitting to the
authority of the medical profession. Those women whose babies died either in utero or
during the newborn period were constructed as having transgressed cultural expectations of
motherhood. Bereaved mothers were regarded as anomalies and the unwelcome reminder
of a ‘failed’ birth within the regimented environment of the postwar maternity hospital,
which was principally organised towards the care of live babies and their mothers.
Sometimes placed out of sight down a far corridor, at other times, placed back on the
maternity ward, those women who miscarried or whose babies died shortly before or after
birth presented somewhat of a conundrum for hospital staff. The practice of ‘protecting’
women from a perinatal loss was motivated by the construction of women in medical
discourse as prone to ‘emotional instability’ during parturition, and the fear that bereaved
mothers would become hysterical was an underlying motivation behind both sedation and
the removal of the deceased baby’s body.
Both the medicalisation of death and the cultural rejection of the public expression of grief,
wrought by the impact of the two World Wars, meant that perinatal loss was rendered taboo
in the postwar period. The inscribing of the unborn baby as essentially ‘unknown’ and
therefore replaceable led to the prevailing belief that, whilst perinatal loss was a ‘sad
252
event’, any grief following this event would be resolved by having another baby. This
prescription for loss was also part of the cultural expectation that women’s ‘natural’ roles
were that of wife and mother, and the act of having subsequent children signified a
bereaved woman’s willingness to resume ‘normal’ life by fulfilling her rightful place in
Australian society. Furthermore, the inscribing of either ‘abnormal’ or ‘normal’ on the
foetal body led to some ‘deformed’ babies being regarded as ‘failed’ babies.
The impact of the wider social upheaval of the 1970s and 1980s in Australia would herald
great changes in the way that perinatal death was managed in the clinical setting, due in
large measure to the emerging ideas of the psychological impact of stillbirth and neonatal
death, and later, miscarriage. Prior to the 1970s, very little writing - if any - existed in
medical and psychological literature specifically on the subject of the impact of perinatal
death; however, the beginning of the decade marked a focus on this type of loss. The
cultural shift within the hospital from shielding women from their dead infants to
encouraging them to form attachments with their babies was borne out of the emerging
ideas of maternal-infant attachment and the wider cultural reform in matters of pregnancy
and childbirth. In some Australian hospitals, this fostered a more supportive atmosphere
within the hospital, yet many women still articulated a sense of guilt and failure after their
babies were stillborn. The emerging theories of grief and loss were problematised by the
continuing dominance of the medical construction of pregnancy loss, and it would be some
years before the efforts of social workers, midwives, and some obstetricians to provide care
which better reflected current trends in psychology would bear fruit in the hospital
environment.
However, by the 1990s it was widely accepted that the practice of ‘protection’ was not an
appropriate way of managing perinatal death. Formalised hospital policies at KEMH in WA
and RWH in Victoria reflected the construction of perinatal death as an event of great
significance in a woman’s life. The rejection of the practice of ‘protection’ in favour of
assisting women to form attachments with their deceased babies and the shift away from
hospital disposal or mass burial towards individual burial rituals, for example, give insight
into the radical changes to the management of perinatal loss and the reinscribing of the
deceased baby as eminently ‘knowable’ and irreplaceable.
253
In recent years, growing interest in the psychological impact of stillbirth and neonatal
death, and the accompanying openness towards public rituals of mourning and grief, has
also provided a space for some older women who suffered the death of a baby in the
postwar years to revisit and renegotiate their memories of a long-ago experience. Whilst
some older women sought to reinterpret their experience of the loss of a baby through the
enactment of memorial practices such as the placing of plaques at unmarked gravesites,
others continued to articulate their experiences within the cultural expectation of ‘spartan
control’, whilst simultaneously recasting their memories within the greater openness
towards grief and bereavement at the end of the twentieth century.
Towards the end of the twentieth century, however, these changing constructions of
pregnancy loss were problematised with the medical profession’s increased ability to
‘screen’ the foetal body for ‘imperfection’. The rise of prenatal screening and the
expectation that women should strive for reproductive ‘perfection’ has produced a cultural
expectation that women can, and should, control their behaviours and bodies to produce
trouble-free pregnancies and deliveries; this expectation has led to some women who
suffered the death of a baby to question their actions during pregnancy and to feel a deep
sense of shame that their bodies had ‘failed’ to produce a healthy baby. In the late twentieth
century, the rise of prenatal screening has wrought a re-emergence of ideas of ‘appropriate’
maternal behaviours, potentially leading to stigmatisation for those women whose
experiences of expectant and early motherhood fall short of these ideals.
Shane, for example, regarded her first child as precious and valuable despite the prenatal
diagnosis that her baby was affected by the chromosomal condition Trisomy 13; the doctors
classified her unborn child as ‘incompatible with life’ and Shane was strongly
recommended to terminate her pregnancy at twenty weeks gestation. In her interview, she
recalled having a meal with her husband on the night before being induced of her
pregnancy; the waiter at the restaurant asked Shane when her baby was due, to which she
responded that her baby was very sick and would not survive long after birth. The man
reassured Shane that this was ‘nature’s way of getting rid’ of ‘defective’ pregnancies; just
as racehorses often produce a ‘defective’ foal before producing a ‘good’ specimen, the
254
stranger assured Shane that it was ‘for the best’ that their first, ‘defective’, child was born
dead. 811
Throughout the twentieth century, medical discourse has sought to classify, surveille and
supervise women’s bodies. The rise of prenatal testing and the reinforcing of the inscription
of ‘defective’ on certain foetal bodies give insight into the vitality of this research. In recent
feminist scholarship there has developed the strong tradition of locating the pregnant body
within particular social and historical contexts; feminist sociologists have also been
increasingly interested in what has been termed the ‘maternal/foetal conflict’ and the
emergence of the notion of the foetus as an individual patient. However, the polemical
nature of the abortion debate has led to an avoidance of an analysis of the foetal body by
some feminist writers, which has ironically reinforced the medical discourse of ‘successful’
versus ‘failed’ reproduction.
If, as Mary Douglas argues, the body is a ‘powerful symbolic form, a surface on which the
central rules, hierarchies, and even metaphysical commitments of a culture are inscribed
and thus reinforced through the concrete language of the body,’ 812 then both the maternal
and foetal bodies as surfaces of cultural inscriptions are of great importance to the future
direction of feminist scholarship. In this thesis I have argued that the recent shifting of the
medical gaze towards the foetal body has further entrenched the notion that women’s
bodies are merely hosts to the developing foetus, cementing ideas of maternal responsibility
and the linking of maternal behaviour to foetal outcome. It has, however, also meant that
the foetal body has become subject to intense scrutiny. Whilst the foetus has long been
categorised as ‘viable’ or ‘unviable’, dependent on gestational age and a relatively small
litany of congenital deformities, in the latter years of the twentieth century the foetal body
has become subject to a greater surveillance, and the inscriptions of ‘viable’ and ‘unviable’
have been widened to include other factors. The foetal body has become embedded with
values of worthiness and merit – in a culture where the foetus is considered to be individual
patient, this is a seemingly paradoxical shift, yet this shift has in turn impacted upon
understandings of perinatal death particularly in cases where the foetus was deemed to be
‘deformed’ or ‘unviable’, and thus, inherently ‘failed’.
811
812
Shane, interview with researcher, 30 July 2005. Tapes and transcript in possession of researcher.
Mary Douglas, cited in Bordo, Unbearable Weight, p. 165
255
It is my hope that this thesis will serve to motivate other historians to continue to engage in
the serious and worthy business of challenging the notion that the body is merely natural;
rather, it is a site of contestation, power and oppression, simultaneously a site of embodied
pleasure and resistance. In particular I am hopeful that many more feminist scholars will
recognise the importance of the foetal body as a surface of cultural inscription, a body
which is not merely in competition or conflict with the maternal body, but upon which has
been inscribed a variety of meanings – some of which, in particular, hold significant
challenges for women and women’s struggle for the right to describe and understand their
own pregnant bodies. Whilst not all women neither inscribe the products of their womb as a
‘baby’ nor construct pregnancy loss as a tragedy, perinatal loss has been in the past, and
remains, a significant event in many women’s lives. As such, this subject is deserving of
further feminist scholarship to continue to challenge the hegemonic constructions of
pregnancy loss which invalidate or devalue women’s own experiences.
256
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Alexander, Jennifer, ‘When a Baby Dies’, Age, 9 December 1992, p. 1
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265
ORAL HISTORY AND PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE
ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEWS
New South Wales Bicentennial Oral History Project
Baxendale, Kathleen, interview with Josie Castle, 31 August 1987
Saunders, Ida, interview with Bronwyn Hughes, 1987
Battye Library Collection, State Library of Western Australia
Carpene, Victor (Vic), interview with Gail O’Hanlon, 29 October and 12 November 1993
Manners, William (Bill), interview with Gail O’Hanlon, 10 May – 10 June 1993
Oral history interviews undertaken by Susannah Thompson (tapes and transcripts in
possession of researcher)
Anderson, Robert, 16 November 2004
Astrid, 3 June 2005
Audrey, 1 June 2005
Barbara, 10 June 2005
Brenda, 4 April 2005
Christine, 7 June 2005
Claire, 9 June 2005
Daphne, 9 May 2005
Dorothy, 1 August 2005
Iris, 12 October 2005
Ivy, 6 May 2005
Janet, 3 August 2005 (pseudonym)
Jennifer, 24 May 2005 (pseudonym)
Jennings, Belinda, 18 November 2004
Julie, 31 May 2005
266
Kelly, 24 May 2005
Lena, 2 June 2005
Liz, 18 May 2005 (pseudonym)
Lloyd, Libby, 17 November 2005
Lynette, 30 May 2005 (pseudonym)
Marie, 19 May 2005 (pseudonym)
Margaret, 31 March 2005
Maureen, 16 May 2005
Mead, Mrs, 29 August 2005
Melanie, 24 May 2005
Michelle, 3 August 2005
Rayma, 3 October 2005
Robin, 11 August 2005
Shane, 30 July 2005
Personal Correspondence with Susannah Thompson (letters and emails in
researcher’s possession)
Angelina, Email, 14 June 2005
Brain, Peter, Letter, 27 October 2005
Charlotte, Email, 12 August 2005
Coralie, Letter, 19 May 2005
Denise, Email, 11 May 2005
Janice, Email, 23 May 2005
Jodie, Email, 12 May 2005
Karen, Email, 15 January 2008
Katie, Email, 5 May 2005
267
Kaye, Letter, 27 July 2005
Miro, Letter, 7 August 2005
Nancye, Email, 12 May 2005
Pam, Email, 8 May 2005
Penn, Email, 20 December 2007
Sally, Email, 31 May 2005 (pseudonym)
Suzanne, Email, 12 May 2005
Valerie, Letter, 25 August 2005
Vicki, Letter, 8 June 2005
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UNPUBLISHED THESES
Featherstone, Lisa, Breeding and Feeding: A Social History of Mothers and Medicine in
Australia, 1880-1925, PhD thesis, Macquarie University, 2003
Murray, Suellen, A history of menstruation in Australia, 1900-1960, PhD thesis, University
of Western Australia, 1996
Selby, Wendy, Motherhood in Labor’s Queensland 1915-1957, PhD thesis, Griffith
University, 1992
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