The Ignored Spontaneous Abortion

Last summer, I was leaving Mass when a woman, who was completely foreign to me, entered my path and thrust her hand in my direction. Her introduction came out even before I could I consider shaking her hand or not.

"This is my baby. He's only a couple of months old. We almost lost him."

This woman went on to tell me the truly harrowing tale of her son's near-death to pulmonary hypertension. I listened intently, agreeing with her that it was only because of God's mighty intervention that she was able to hold her son in arms that afternoon. Her story was, and still is, compelling and thought-provoking. It makes a parent instantly thankful. At that moment, I thought back to the two other women I know of whose children have experienced that very same disease at birth, or to my own son who did not breathe for four minutes after he was born. I was truly caught up in this woman's fright of nearly having lost a child.

I have met many women like this. Most of the women I am close to are pro-life, devout religious women - whether they are Protestant, Jewish, or Catholic like me. Most of them are also pro-life, and many of these women have experienced difficult deliveries where a child's life was in jeopardy. There was a chord wrapped around the baby's neck. Pre-eclampsia set in. Gestational diabetes threatened to make the baby too big, too early. Mom went into pre-term labor and the baby came out eight weeks early. These stories are tough to listen to. They make you grateful for never having lived them. Inevitably, everyone in the pro-life-centered room where the story is being told, immediately turns to the wretched act of abortion and declares, "If American medical science can work so hard to safe an unborn baby's life, then how can they not be human?" We all nod our heads in agreement. But, if someone breaks the contemplative silence of the room to announce, "I lost a child to miscarriage," a dozen pairs of confused eyes stair back.

This has always bothered me, but I have become more incensed since I have seen it happen just one too many times.

I have had two miscarriages. I have lost a baby at three months pregnant and again at four months. I refer to the first one as a miscarriage and the second as a stillbirth since I had to deliver her in the hospital. But many pro-life women have corrected me in this area. "How could you possibly have had a stillbirth? You were barely out of your first trimester?"

I was in my second trimester when I lost my fourth child. She was thriving and well, and then she suddenly died inside me, and I carried her dead for more than a month. Her still, quiet heart was discovered during a routine ob visit. "I'm sorry," the nurse said. "I'm really sorry. Your baby is gone." I looked over at the screen and saw her lifeless body floating in amniotic fluid. Her arms were folded up to her mouth as in prayer.

The first time this happened to me, I was home. I told no one but my husband. Because so many in my family would be upset that we were having our second child when my husband was till in college, we did not even announce the birth. To this day, only my best friend and my husband know of the death. The second one, was impossible to hide. Everyone who knew us noticed that I was no longer pregnant, and either outright asked what happened or simply stared and asked indirect but obvious questions.

But these were both deaths, and they deserve the attention that all near-deaths and chemical/surgical abortions get from pro-life advocates. After all, every single one of these deaths is either the result of an intentional or spontaneous abortion. Women who suffer the loss of a living, heart-beating baby deserve to be treated with the respect of a woman recovering at Rachel's Vineyard or who has spent the first couple of months of hew new baby's life at the Ronald McDonald House, because it was born ill and fighting for life.

But not only do women - with a pro-life slant - who suffer miscarriage get ignored, when their loss is discovered statements like, "At least it wasn't full term", or "It probably had something wrong with it. God saw fit not to allow your baby to live with Downs Syndrome or something," are delivered easily and without much thought.

Imagine how credible the whole pro-life movement might feel to a woman contemplating a surgical abortion when she overheard one pro-life woman comforting another by saying, "Your baby never had a chance at life. How unfair. How sad." Just some sympathy. Some acknowledgment that every baby, even an first trimester baby, is a baby worth calling a child, and every woman who had the joyous, but brief privilege of carrying it, was a mother forever because of it.

For a year now I have watched that woman's baby from Mass grow into a happy and healthy one year old. He is adorable and healthy and the apple of his mother's eye. I have mentioned my story to her before, but she has never commented. I have written articles about it that she has read, but she says nothing. I have read her Christmas card announces his birth, his salvation from physical death, and her continual retelling of the justifiably terrifying ordeal she went through. But I have never heard her, or anyone else who has struggled like the woman from Mass - say one word about my story, the story I rarely tell about having to give birth to my dead baby, Olivia Grace. Priests are mostly silent. Protestants and Catholics, alike. When my good friend recently lost her baby at full gestation, there was actually an Internet webring set up to deliver well-wishes and offer prayers and condolences. The baby who nearly died, got his own blog.

I had a quiet Mass for Olivia. Actually, it was just a Mass for our family. The Catholic Church, that I am so dearly devoted to, did not have a body to baptize, and therefore, could not have a funeral Mass or any Mass for the dead baby they would have wrestled me for if I had chosen to abort her. God aborted her, so she, to most pro-lifers, never existed. Most people invited to the Mass never came. "Sorry about your miscarriage," they said. I was not allowed to hold her. Pennsylvania law said she had died before being considered fully human, so she was taken by the hospital and cremated before I could lay eyes on her outside of the ultrasound. I am half-Jewish. I never would have allowed this, had I been given a choice.

"All the miscarriages get sprinkled at the Rose Garden in the city park," the nurse told me. "Please sign here to mark that you understand that you cannot see the miscarriage."

And that is what Olivia was then and is now to my doctors and most of my pro-life friends: Just a miscarriage and not a child. Hypocrisy can be a painfully life-altering experience. For me, Olivia's story renders me even more outspoken in my fight for the unborn. For others in the pro-life community, it creates immediate silence, allowing for a very sad commentary on the true heart of the pro-life issue in America.