My Baby is Dead

and it’s none of your business

My baby is dead. I sat there in the waiting room for over an hour, alone, with this unimaginably horrible sentence running through my head. I had been upstairs at my doctors’ office for my routine monthly prenatal checkup, and when the nurse and then another nurse and then the doctor couldn’t find the baby’s heartbeat, they sent me down here for an ultrasound. My husband had still not shown up; this was unscheduled, so I had to sit there alone and wait until they found a time to squeeze me in amongst the appointments. That was probably the longest hour of the worst day, to that point, of my life.

Things did not improve when I finally got in and the technician brought up an image on the screen. I find sonogram images difficult to read, but in this case it was very clear that what I was seeing was dead. Not moving at all, not pulsing with a heartbeat, just floating in there, dead. Even so, I demanded to know and the woman waited several beats too long and said “he passed away inside you.” That “he” was the first confirmation I had of the baby’s sex, and I had an incongruous moment of joy: a boy! But that made no sense: it was a boy, but he was dead. A dead boy, inside my body. Believe me when I tell you that this is not a concept that can be absorbed and understood in an instant.

After the devastating pronouncement, the technician apologetically told me that she had to take a number of images, measurements, whatever. I had to lie there forever while she did what needed to be done — machines beeping, weird silence punctuated by her apologies and condolences — and then she sent me back up to the obstetrician’s office, where I had to wait again. Finally I was invited in, not to an exam room but to an office, where the doctor sat behind a desk and explained what had to happen next. The baby has to come out, as soon as possible. She said there were indications that he had been dead for some time, and since my body showed no signs of relinquishing his remains, she would have to take steps to dilate my cervix and induce labor. She was going to insert something to get the process started, and I was to return early the next morning for…the rest of it.

This was my third child. So not only did I have to negotiate this physical and emotional trauma, I had to do it while caring for two very small children. My husband had not wanted this baby. We had a son and a daughter and he felt that was enough. I was extremely happy being a stay-at-home mom and, having grown up in a very quiet house with just one sibling, really wanted a bigger family. I wanted two more kids, in fact. This had become a sore spot in our marriage. When I told him I was pregnant, he tried to respond positively, but it was clear he was not exactly thrilled. So after the first couple of doctor’s appointments, I found myself reluctant to draw attention to the fact of our third child and, especially, to my pregnancy: no sharing of my excitement, no discussion of names or admitting to feeling nauseated or tired or otherwise uncomfortable. I went to OB appointments and the mid-pregnancy ultrasound — where the baby was alive and well, with no apparent issues — alone.

My husband finally arrived as I was moving from the doctor’s office into the exam room. I thought this would be a huge relief, but in spite of him hugging me and saying “we’ll get through this,” it immediately became clear that his presence would be no help at all. My first thought was that “we” are not going through this, at least not in the same way. I am. Alone. He was obviously not happy — not at all — but the idea that he might be even a little bit relieved made me angry.

I was told to report to the hospital surgical ward (notably not labor and delivery, not maternity) at 6am, to be checked in and prepped for the procedure, which wouldn’t commence until later. I had to get a ride from a kind friend while my husband got our kids up and fed and delivered to another friend so he could be with me for the rest of the day. I was given Pitocin through an IV to induce labor; then more; then more. I was in extreme pain but my body did not want to give up the baby. Eventually I was given morphine, which did not really help with the pain but made me feel even more awful. My memories of this are horrific and vivid but limited: I screamed and cried a lot; I screamed NO. NO this is not happening. The doctor told me to push and I screamed NO. My distraught husband said “don’t you want him to come out?” and I screamed NO. My first two kids were delivered with no pain medication and minimal screaming; this, needless to say, was a completely different experience.

And then the screaming part was over. The doctor and nurses huddled with their backs to me while I cried and begged them to give me my baby. I remember the sudden hush — the quiet, the stillness in the room. The doctor tactfully warned me that the fetus had “deteriorated considerably” and I might not want to see him, but I insisted. The nurses did their best to clean him up and make him look like a person; they put on a tiny hat and when the little gown wasn’t working they just wrapped him in a washcloth. He was barely bigger than my hand, kind of blue, vaguely translucent, alien-looking, cold, still. Stillborn. I stared at his badly distorted face, trying to discern what or who he might have looked like. I wanted to give him a name. My husband was reluctant to look at him or name him; he wanted to “get through this” and move on, but that was not possible for me. The name Bartholomew came to me. My husband didn’t like it, but, as I pointed out, he would never, ever have to call this child by that or any other name, and he acquiesced. So his name was Bartholomew.

The doctors estimated that he had been dead for approximately two weeks, and could offer no explanation. I was told any number of versions of “it just happens.” In the weeks and months that followed, l learned that stillbirths and miscarriages — with or without explanation — are shockingly common. It seemed like every time I told someone what had happened, they would respond with their own story of losing a child, and however long ago that story had taken place, the grief and trauma and anger were always still present, and the woman would be eager to share with me, as if it were a secret she could not often speak of. It eventually became clear why this is: aside from it being both exceedingly intimate and a major downer of a conversation topic, it seems that only other people who have had a similar experience really felt that they had lost a child — a person, a son or daughter. The rest of the world seems to view the situation as something sad that happened to the mother.

A couple of months earlier, my husband had time off work and I took the opportunity to go on a short trip to do research for my dissertation. I spent three days in a university library, and three nights in a motel, with a couple of breaks to hike up a nearby mountain. This was the first time in years — since my oldest child was born — that I’d gone off by myself and spent more than a few hours away from my kids. Aside from dinner one night with friends, I was alone the entire trip, but the whole time I felt like I had company, an intangible little companion, sort of like an imaginary friend. I found myself holding an internal dialog with the baby-to-be. I did not try to picture him as I did this — not as a baby, or child, or adult, and certainly not as the tiny fishlike creature he physically was at that time. He was mostly an idea. I had told very few people that I was pregnant, and it was not yet outwardly obvious. He was my secret, my creation, my own private little person.

Some time in early May, I knew something was wrong. Later, I obsessed over exactly when I knew, but I don’t think there was a specific moment. The knowledge came on little by little. My lips were chapped, dry and flaky like dead skin, no matter how much water I drank. A few days before that awful prenatal checkup the friend I was visiting repeatedly offered me lip balm and asked a disturbing number of times if I was feeling okay. I took this question to be baby-related, and insisted I was fine. I had worried that the baby wasn’t moving, but in spite of the dull ache in my lower abdomen and the general sense of dread that had developed, I thought (and was repeatedly told) that I was just “being silly.” Pregnancy is uncomfortable; I was just imagining things. It did seem to me, looking in the mirror, that my skin was dull — rather gray, in fact — but all had appeared well at the ultrasound in mid-April. After the fact, that friend told me that she thought I had looked extremely unwell at that visit, whereas the last time she had seen me I had appeared “radiant.” I now understand that my knowing that something was wrong was not just “mother’s intuition” concerning my baby but the physical awareness of my own body, which as it turned out was accurate: there was dead, rotting tissue inside me, and had it remained there much longer could have become septic and eventually killed me.

After it was all over I tried every way I could find to regain my sanity and find some peace. One of the most helpful was a group facilitated by a grief counselor at the hospital that met once a month. When first invited to this meeting I could not decline fast enough — the thought of listening to a bunch of other women’s horror stories, and worse, talking about mine, seemed very much the opposite of healing. But after a couple of months of spontaneous stories from friends, random acquaintances on the playground, even a dental hygienist as I was having a tooth repaired, I realized that it did seem helpful to share the experience. Sure enough, when I finally attended, the group was enormously comforting. All the stories were different: a spectrum from an early miscarriage to a baby killed during birth by the umbilical cord around her neck. Twins delivered pre-viability in order to save the mother from imminent organ failure; a baby killed in-utero by a tick-borne virus. The thing we all had in common was that virtually no one who didn’t belong to this unhappy club really understood our grief.

Other people simply could not fathom the way that we had imagined and bonded with our babies, and therefore didn’t consider us bereaved. The children we mourned had no existence outside of us — not only outside our bodies, but outside our minds and hearts. They were excruciatingly personal; excruciatingly ours. The rest of the world viewed these beings as, at most, a prospective baby, a person who might have been, or someone who never existed. They had never been born; never drawn a breath. When I told people I “lost a child,” the usual (horrified) response was questions about name and age and manner of death, and when I answered that he was stillborn, a frequent reaction was relief. The person would say “oh, you had a miscarriage!” as if that makes the whole thing much less uncomfortable (for them, clearly). The implication was that I didn’t lose a real baby — a living, breathing child with a name, with whom I had experiences, and of whom I had memories. I couldn’t argue with this, because to everyone else, Bartholomew was at most a theoretical baby. I did have experiences with him, and I do have memories, but no one else does. He was — and he is — mine and mine alone.

Bartholomew went from prospective person to a baggie of ashes in a tiny urn 21 years ago. Some years the anniversary of this has passed almost without notice — just a pang, or even the realization a few days later that I had made it through virtually pain free. But not this year. That hideous wait for the ultrasound and all the rest of the nightmare that ensued has come up again and again, well before the middle of May, because of relentless news of the destruction of women’s autonomy in this country. Even before the outrageous Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v Wade became public, draconian laws restricting a woman’s right to make her own medical decisions have arisen in several states, with more likely to come. If you think my story of losing my baby has nothing to do with abortion laws, you’re wrong.

Amongst the deeply upsetting challenges in the aftermath of my loss was the charge on the hospital bill, for “labor and delivery.” When I asked the doctor about this, she delicately replied that, medically speaking, what I had been through was “the same event” as having my other children. It was a delivery, in spite of not being a birth. Similarly, the medications prescribed to aid in the recovery from a miscarriage are the ones used in a medication-induced abortion (AKA a miscarriage: same event). The procedure performed to stop excessive bleeding and clear the uterus is the “same event” as a surgical abortion. And the procedure that induced Bartholomew’s delivery is the “same event” as what was required to deliver those twins to save their mother’s life. Every variation here, including giving birth to a live, healthy baby, is the same event: a pregnancy ending.

Had what happened to me happened now, in Texas, I could be prosecuted for having an abortion — a “late term” abortion, no less, because it occurred past 20 weeks of gestation. Not only would this life-destroying legal nightmare be piled atop my own already hideous trauma, but the doctor, the kind nurses, my husband, the friend who drove me to the hospital, and any number of others who helped me through the loss of a baby I very much wanted could be subject to prosecution. Would terrorizing me in this way reduce the number of abortions? Of course not. The terrorizing is the point: the divisiveness; the cruelty. It has nothing to do with “unborn” babies. It’s politics. Many more women will die. And just to be clear, when they die, the fetus they are unwillingly carrying will die, too. There is nothing “pro-life” about any of this.

The whole anti-abortion “movement” was conceived as a way to enlist white evangelicals to vote for Republican segregationists. Leaders of the so-called “religious right” such as Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell, had no problem with legal abortion until the late 70s when the IRS started questioning the tax-exempt status of certain religious institutions because they explicitly excluded people of color. Few people wanted to vocally admit to overt racism, but the specter of dead babies both mobilized the White evangelicals and distracted them from the real objectives of the politicians they voted into power. The late 70s was also when the NRA transformed from a non-profit promoting gun safety to a fear-mongering multimillion-dollar political lobby for gun makers: another way to enlist voters to the GOP with an incendiary non-issue. Gun violence is also not “pro-life.” But I digress.

I have never had an abortion, but I know dozens of women who have. And so, probably, do you. Of the many that I personally know, not one of them regrets it. Every one of these women viewed their unwanted pregnancy essentially as a medical emergency. They did not feel like they had a secret little friend, but more like a tumor or an infection or a parasite — and their response was get it out of me. For these women, choosing an abortion is fairly straightforward. The vast majority (over 92%) of abortions occur in the first trimester, when the embryo has just barely become a fetus, or not even that far along. A small percentage are performed in the first part of the second trimester, before Week 20, usually for medical reasons. I am certain that most women by this point have developed a bond with their own private idea-baby, and that deciding to terminate a pregnancy at that point would be profoundly difficult, for the mother. That the decision should belong only to the person solely in possession of the theoretical, prospective person’s existence is absolutely inarguable. It is no one else’s business.

For years I kept the little urn of Bartholomew’s ashes next to my bed. I sometimes even held it against my body while I slept. I had another baby — an actual child, with a name and a birthday — and was reminded how completely separate a little person is from my early imaginings. Bartholomew never became an individual: never hated something I had hoped he’d like, or broke something I cared about, or kept me up into the wee hours worrying about where he was. That is to say, he never lived. He was and remains an ageless, incorporeal being that no one on Earth knows except for me. He has no objective reality. And if I had felt differently about that pregnancy, I would not have imagined his personhood the way I did, and he simply would not be. My mind and heart contain his entire existence.

Even the Bible equates life with breath: a person is born when they draw their first breath, and dead after they breathe their last. The understanding that Bartholomew didn’t really exist was reinforced endlessly by (mostly) well-meaning people trying to console me with the “just a miscarriage” line of reasoning. That included people I know to be rabidly anti-abortion: even they acknowledge the way the so-called “unborn” belong exclusively and entirely to the mother. Therefore it is the pregnant woman and ONLY the pregnant woman who should decide whether the product of conception contained in her body should become a living individual person. If you want to be “pro-life,” work to provide affordable, effective and available healthcare to everyone. Work to eliminate murder weapons. Be kind.

Whether a woman you know, or one you will never meet, has an abortion is none of your business.