Reconciling the Uniquely Embodied Grief of Perinatal Death: A Narrative Approach

Abstract

The death of a baby, stillborn or living only briefly after birth, is a moral affront to the cycle of life, leaving parents without the life stories and material objects that traditionally offer comfort to the bereaved, nor—in an increasingly secularized society—a religious framework for making sense of their loss. For the grieving mother, it is also a physical affront, as her body continues to rehearse its part in its symbiotic relationship with a baby whose own body is disintegrating. Attempting to forge continuing bonds with her child after death makes special demands upon the notion of embodied spirituality, as she attempts to make sense of this tragedy in an embodied way. This paper, which reconciles the distinct perspectives of bereaved mothers and children’s doctors, proposes that the thoughtful re-presentation of medical insight into pregnancy and fetal development may assuage parents’ grief by adding precious detail to their baby’s life course, and by offering the mother a material basis to conceptualize her own body as part of the distributed personhood of her baby.

Birth and Death: Studying Ritual, Embodied Practices and Spirituality at the Start and End of Life

“…Subjunctive futures-futures that could have beenbecome embodied within rituals and are, thus, made present in the here and now. In their paper on embodied grief and perinatal loss in Australia, Norwood and Boulton (2021) illustrate that not only the personhood of the baby is lost but also a sense of motherhood and sense of self. They argue that through the "thoughtful re-presentation of medical insight into pregnancy and fetal development", the body of the mother can become part of the distributed personhood of the baby.…”

“…Furthermore, many papers show that ritualistic practices happen before, during, and/or after birth and death and do not necessarily occur during the "main" rite of passage and do not always follow a linear transition. The studies on perinatal loss from McIntyre et al (2022), Norwood andBoulton (2021), andVaerland et al (2021), as well as Manfredi's (2022) work, on tattoos surrounding death and birth evidence that many people continue to ritualize the (re)integration of the deceased in their everyday lives not only after death has occurred but also long after human remains have reached their final destination (cf. Hertz [1907Hertz [ ] 1960.…”