Bodnar had previously pleaded not guilty to aiding, abetting or failing to provide for a child and recklessly causing harm when she appeared in Fairfield Local Court in July.
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Despite regular breastfeeding, by the time the eight-month-old boy was admitted to the hospital, he was on the brink of starvation.
Guy said that the mother went against her training and all the telltale signs that would have been pretty obvious to anyone who saw the condition of the child.
Lawyer Richard Kouchoo during a sentence hearing argued that the 33-year-old mother followed the diet out of desperation to cure her child’s eczema.
Her baby boy had been vomiting for up to a week, had sunken eyes and was hardly moving when a mother finally made a decision to take him to an Australian hospital.
The prosecution asserted that the mother “decided to blindly follow a naturopath she had only just met” and that the child would have inevitably died if the woman hadn’t eventually gone to a doctor.
A BREASTFEEDING mother who took on a “water-only” diet has faced court after her baby nearly died of starvation while the mum was following the orders of a naturopath. He expressed surprise on how a trained midwife could not realise that her emaciated child was days away from dying when she took him to the hospital.
The naturopath is expected to defend the charges against her and will face a committal hearing next week.
“[She] is herself a victim in all of these circumstances”, he said. “You have to be 100 per cent raw if you want to see your son heal”, Ms Bodnar allegedly told the mother.
Officers allege the naturopath advised the mother to stop medicating her child.
When the boy came down with a fever, the naturopath allegedly told the mother that the baby’s temperature was indicative of “raised vitality”, and his vomit was just the body “eliminating toxins”.
Bodnar told the mother there was a way to cure her son during a massage session in February previous year, according to a police statement.
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The woman complied and only drank water and ate watermelon for a number of days.
