“Soothing My Child's Soul and My Own”: Dealing with Pregnancy Loss in Postcommunist Romania

Abstract

In Romania—where induced abortions were legally prohibited during communism and are now morally condemned by many—those who lose a pregnancy against their will have long been regarded with suspicion, confronted with a sense of culpability, and surrounded by silence. This ambiguity is reflected in the local terminology and the perceived etiology of loss. In this article, which is based on 15 months of fieldwork between 2012 and 2015, I illustrate the various meanings and manifestations of a silenced sense of culpability around involuntary pregnancy loss in the lives of women from Bucharest and a small town in Central Romania. I also show how many of these women attempt to break the silence around their lost fetuses and carve out a personal space of commemoration and consolation. Their informal use of forbidden religious rituals paradoxically allows them to confirm the existence of their lost little ones and to position themselves as caring, rather than culpable, mothers. [pregnancy loss, commemoration, culpability, postcommunist Romania]

The Anthropology of Death Revisited

“…But a "do not resuscitate" order was not an option for the parents, who understood the matter at hand in relational, not individual, terms, the significance of which was marked by the value of care, not secularized renderings of suffering and pain (Asad 2003, Fassin 2011. Related work focuses on debates over fetal personhood and pregnancy loss (Gammeltoft 2014, Morgan 2009, van der Sijpt 2018.…”