When Mike Pence was governor of Indiana, shortly before he became the vice president, he signed HB1337 into law. Among other things, it decreed that “a miscarried or aborted fetus must be interred or cremated.”1
It included specifics on how a hospital or clinic could confirm the burial had happened. The process could be done anonymously, and the parents didn’t necessarily have to name the miscarried or aborted fetus.2 (How generous.) A lawsuit wound its way through appeals before reaching the Supreme Court in 2016, which rejected most of the law but kept the part about the disposal of remains. The court declined to take a fresh look at the case in May 2023 after a second lawsuit was filed, so the law was left on the books.3
The idea was to force people who had abortions into thinking about the consequences, and it hewed closely to the notion—popular among some lawmakers in Indiana and other conservative-leaning state legislatures—that people who had abortions and those who provided abortions should pay or at least feel guilty. “Unborn babies are more than medical waste,” Indiana attorney general Todd Rokita said in 2022. “They are human beings who deserve the dignity of cremation or burial.”4
That’s great, Indiana. We’re happy for you. We assume, since you care so much about the dignity of remains, that you’re going to get behind stillbirth awareness campaigns or scientific study to determine what causes late-term miscarriages? Maybe you’ll allow for bereavement leave from work for people grieving a pregnancy loss? Help them pay for a memorial? Offer state-funded support groups for the postpartum depression that may follow? Maybe work miscarriage awareness into sex education classes? Oh wait. Indiana doesn’t require sex education in classrooms. It does, however, mandate that schools choosing to teach sex ed emphasize abstinence.5 Maybe we won’t hold our breath.
The laws focus on the “humane and dignified disposal of human remains.” They were designed in part to punish those who have abortions in a state that restricts them, but they also spill over into pregnancy loss.
“These laws also send the unmistakable message that someone who has had an abortion or miscarriage is responsible for the death of a person,” wrote the attorneys in the failed lawsuit challenging the Indiana law. “As a result, they have caused many abortion and miscarriage patients…to experience shame, stigma, anguish, and anger.”6
The attorneys also argued that the laws “coerce pregnant people who obtain abortion and miscarriage management care to engage in rituals that are associated with the death of a person.”7 We have a cultural script for what to do when someone dies, but the state doesn’t mandate how we handle the funeral. And when we’re dealing with a liminal state of pregnancy and loss, everything gets more complicated. Because you’re not burying or cremating a fully grown human. In some cases, remains don’t resemble a baby at all. It’s impossible to know how you are going to feel in that moment when the situation happens to you. And now, in Indiana anyway, you must do what the government demands you do.
In a post about her research on the blog Nursing Clio, Lost author Shannon Withycombe wrote, “It is dangerous to think that miscarriage is now somehow imbued with certain natural and inalienable meanings as a death, a tragedy, and something gone wrong.”8
The Indiana law raises an interesting question: What happens when you miscarry at home? Many people we spoke to said they passed tissue in the toilet. Do people have to dig it out, seal it in a baggie and send it to the hospital for burial? Let’s face it, the usual instinct is to flush. It doesn’t mean that you’re not sad. It just means you don’t know what the hell to do. Couldn’t it compound the grief and trauma to have to then take those remains to be buried? Are you going to get arrested if you flush the toilet?
In Indiana, the law states that pregnant women can use the healthcare facility’s final “method of disposition,” but they’re responsible for the costs if they choose their own location. The law also requires a certificate of stillbirth for non-live births at twenty weeks gestation or later.9 If someone delivers or miscarries at a hospital, there are methods to dispose of remains already in place, usually mass graves.
Cleveland-based Brittany had a miscarriage at roughly ten weeks. She went in for a D&C procedure and checked the box for burial. She knew it would be in a mass plot, knew the name of the cemetery, and asked numerous times to be notified when the remains would be moved. When she and her husband went to visit, they searched the infant section but never found it. The entire process seemed to drag out her sadness over the miscarriage, and she wondered whether there could have been a more sensitive process.10
State laws regarding fetal remains differ. Most hospitals offer to take care of the remains free of charge, which varies by hospital and often by religious affiliation of the hospital. Some incinerate the remains with medical waste like tumors or kidney stones, while others opt for unmarked mass burials at cemeteries, and sometimes parents can find out a general area if they wish to visit. (Though Brittany’s experience shows that isn’t always the case.).
Catholic and other Christian cemeteries often have miscarriage and infant areas that are free or cheaper than the main areas of the cemetery. Jewish law does not traditionally allow parents of a baby that did not live for more than thirty days to attend the funeral or know where the child is buried, but that has changed among reform rabbis who now allow it for the parents to find closure.
Most of the clinics where the parents we talked to terminated for medical reasons offered a lower cost option for cremains, which were sent to their home a week or two after the procedure.
Those who opt to bury or cremate on their own pay a funeral home. Private burials include outlays for the funeral, burial plot, casket, and marker, and the median cost for a funeral and burial was $7,848 in 2021.11 Cremation is usually thousands of dollars cheaper. Some funeral homes will waive or reduce the fee for a cremation or funeral for a miscarriage or stillborn, and nonprofits like the Tears Foundation12 can help offset the costs, but none of this is guaranteed and puts the onus onto a bereaved family. Many just can’t afford a burial or private cremation and have to use the free hospital service. Among the dozens of people we spoke to, the most important element in how to handle these decisions was choice—that they had an option to get remains or not, had the option to have a service or not. But the prohibitive costs and proscriptive laws sometimes mean there’s no choice at all.
The registrar of vital records in each state issues a “certificate of fetal death” or some type of legal record when a stillbirth happens. The National Center for Health Statistics tracks fetal deaths after twenty weeks, but it was only in 2018 that every state adopted a standardized report on deaths, which would make it easier to count them and derive any data on causes. Miscarriages are not counted in any tally. Abortions are.13
It’s not like any of this is terribly new. It’s just gaining steam in the post-Roe and post-Dobbs world. In Motherhood Lost, author Linda Layne wrote about an Ann Landers column from 1998 in which a New Jersey woman had a full-term stillborn and wrote that the state laws required that she and her husband dispose of their stillborn, but they couldn’t claim the baby on their income taxes. She suggested “our government ought to allow grieving parents a way to recognize that their stillborn child existed.”14
This is the paradox inherent in laws like this—they demand recognition that a fetus is a person deserving of a burial but don’t bestow that “personhood” onto stillbirths in a consistent way.
Erica Bailey gave birth to a stillborn in Missouri, where abortion is now essentially banned. “My precious son who lived for 39-weeks, was not seen as a person in the eyes of the law. We did not receive a birth certificate, even though I still gave birth to his 7-pound 6-ounce body,” Bailey wrote in Motherwell. “We were not able to claim him as a tax dependent, even though we paid for all the same things in preparation for his arrival, in addition to the funeral, burial, headstone, and years of trauma therapy at $150/hour. In the eyes of my very ‘pro-life’ state, he didn’t even exist.”15
Joanne Cacciatore, the professor who studies grief and trauma, was instrumental in the passing of a so-called Missing Angels Act (not her phrase) in Arizona in 2001.16 In 1994, she gave birth to a baby, Cheyenne, whose heart stopped beating about fifteen minutes before she was born. She got a death certificate in the mail, but she wanted a birth certificate. She gave birth after all. But no such record existed. Cacciatore worked with a focus group of other bereaved parents to convince the state legislature to make a change. And it worked. In September 2001, the first birth certificate for a stillborn baby was issued in the United States. It reads: a certificate of birth resulting in stillbirth.
The idea behind this, Cacciatore told us, was to honor the babies, honor the parents who labored and delivered, but also to align with the laws already in place that required stillborn babies to be buried or cremated. It was for parents who are already traumatized and struggling with ways to make sense of what happened, particularly because we’re so bad at talking about any of this openly. Cacciatore makes a distinction between stillbirth, though, and miscarriage and abortion. She doesn’t think miscarriage is on the same level biologically, because it occurs at an earlier stage in pregnancy.17 There is no giving birth, no milk coming in.
Now forty-three states (most through the grassroots efforts of grieving families) issue some kind of memorial certificate of stillbirth or a certificate of birth resulting in stillbirth.18 Many are on request—it’s not automatic but is an alternative to the “certificate of fetal death” Cacciatore received when her daughter died.
These certificates are for the purposes of memorial only; they don’t hold any legal sway and aren’t equivalent to a personhood law. But the abortion debate has consumed this too. Antiabortion advocates seized on these laws as proof of what they’ve been arguing for the past fifty years—that life begins at conception and that abortion is wrong. Cacciatore has been adamant that her movement isn’t about right to life; it’s about recognition and grief for people who lost a very wanted baby.19
This has spread to first-trimester losses. Former Florida governor Rick Scott made the state the first to offer death certificates to women whose pregnancies end after nine weeks but before twenty weeks. Idaho’s Unborn Infants Dignity Act does the same.20 Other efforts, like one in Wyoming in 2018 that would have required a mandatory “certificate of non-viability,” failed to pass.21
The biggest critics of these efforts have been, perhaps unsurprisingly, advocates seeking to safeguard abortion rights. Most major groups, like Planned Parenthood and the National Organization for Women, opposed this kind of legislation on the grounds it could create pathways for antiabortion groups to pass more personhood laws and to further restrict abortion. For many loss parents, this too feels cruel. But to some extent, maybe it has. Look at where we are right now.
“Concern about Missing Angel Acts remains because once a category or status is established, it may take on a life of its own,” wrote Columbia University professor Carol Sanger, a legal scholar specializing in reproductive rights. “Legal status is a common—indeed an important—mechanism for the distribution of value and goods in a society, and over time more substantive benefits may attach to that status. For example, over time posthumous citizenship became a source of immigration benefits for kin in a kind of ‘rights creep,’ as the meaning, use, and entitlements of that status expanded.”22
Now that Roe has been overturned, maybe it’s time to start rethinking how we view pregnancy loss and abortion, said law professor Jill Wieber Lens. She, like so many others, started to work on stillbirth issues because she suffered one, her baby, Caleb.
“There’s still this fear that anytime you start talking about fetal lives, you are going to endanger Roe even more, which is impossible,” Lens told us.23 “I think if we could all get a little bit more realistic about how inefficient human reproduction is, I think it would benefit everyone, right? If we were honest, like 70 percent of fertilized eggs don’t turn into people, because they don’t implant in the first place, we’d all be better off, and we’d be able to allow for the space that people need when, you know, they give birth to a dead baby.”
Lens and fellow legal scholar Greer Donley argued in a guest essay in the New York Times in 2022 that the line between abortion and pregnancy loss has always been blurry. “But over the past few decades, the anti-abortion movement has forged a cultural bright line between the two experiences, promoting dueling narratives of ‘bad’ mothers who voluntarily cause fetal death versus ‘good’ mothers who grieve unpreventable pregnancy loss,” they wrote. The abortion rights movement has also created problems “by minimizing focus on the fetus, to ensure that the pregnant person’s interest can never be outweighed. That has allowed many in the movement to avoid the difficult question that pregnancy loss raises: What was lost?”24
There’s something about that piece of paper though. Whether it’s a memorial or a death certificate, it helps ground the loss. And its absence can also cause bureaucratic difficulties. Because Colleen went to an abortion clinic, she wasn’t given a death certificate. At the time, they told her they’d test the remains, but neither she nor her husband thought through what would happen afterward. Where would the baby end up? And she didn’t start asking until years later.
Some fetal remains are buried on Hart Island, a potter’s field in New York City off the coast of the Bronx where more than one million bodies are buried. Human remains end up there because people were too poor to afford a private burial or the body went unidentified in the morgue. Historically, though, it’s been very difficult for anyone to access the island to pay respects. That’s because the property was managed for years by the NYC Department of Correction; prisoners at Rikers Island jail tended to the grave sites. But in 2019, stewardship of the land went to the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation. After years of legal wrangling, you now can get on the island by ferry to a gazebo that overlooks some of the grounds, but in order to go to a grave you need a death certificate.
Colleen doesn’t have one. She can’t remember the exact date of the procedure, only that the baby was dead during the ultrasound appointment five days after their wedding. The only paperwork Colleen had on the procedure was lost during a move from New York. While doing research for this book, she called the city to ask if she could go and was told she needed the certificate. But when she called the clinic, they told her they don’t keep medical records that long, and they wouldn’t say for sure where remains from 2012 would have ended up. It was a safe bet, Colleen was told by the clinic, that the remains of her baby had been sent to Hart Island.
Here’s the grand catch-22 of it all: she would’ve had a death certificate if she had gone into labor and delivered the baby in the hospital instead of going for the procedure at the clinic. Delivering a dead baby felt like it would be too much. But it turns out she gave up something else by opting for the procedure: the ability to mark the death as a death—the end of the baby boy they’d been preparing to meet. Shouldn’t there be some way to bypass the politics of all this?
Colleen didn’t think to ask any of these questions at the time because she was struggling under a lot of grief and shame. She mistakenly thought she would pretend like nothing happened and everything would be fine, but it didn’t work like that. She wasn’t fine. And now she wonders if the baby is out there somewhere. She’s in a liminal state of a different sort.
This paperwork conundrum causes problems on the job too. It’s no secret that there aren’t many workplace protections for working mothers. There is no shortage of stories of women showing up within days of giving birth, pumping breast milk in a toilet stall because there’s nowhere else to do it, or being unable to take time off (or punished for doing so) to care for a sick child. (Remember how well that whole pandemic went for caregivers?) Pregnancy loss has been mostly ignored at work until recently, and there are (meager) signs of improvement.
Most of those we interviewed described a Kafkaesque drama of bureaucracy to obtain leave, in which some took unpaid because it was all they were eligible for, and those who had decent leave mostly benefited from the help and sympathy of individual coworkers and managers more than any standardized policy.
Isabel, who works for a federal agency in Washington, DC, had a thirty-nine-week stillbirth due to an umbilical cord knot in 2023. She wasn’t eligible for paid parental leave, “because I no longer had a baby to bond with,” and she had only accrued 3.5 weeks in her time at the job to take for her own recovery from a vaginal delivery. She had used up some leave during her pregnancy. Her bosses created a leave transfer program, so other employees could donate time for her to extend beyond six weeks. In total, she was able to take twelve consecutive weeks.25
On top of this, the federal parental bereavement policy is two weeks paid. And Isabel’s bosses were advocating for her to qualify because she could bank it for later in the year, when she or her child got sick. She was denied.
“Liberal politics shy away from paid leave for stillbirth and miscarriage because they think it will be an attempt to codify personhood for fetuses,” Isabel said. “I don’t want to advocate for a policy that leads to restrictive abortion laws. A coworker suggested that all you should need is a medical cert from a doctor saying a person needs this much leave. But low-wage women have so little access to healthcare, even that would be hard for them. What we need are policies that think about the actual people giving birth, what they actually need.”
Isabel said she thinks people are worried about the effects of leave for stillbirth on reproductive justice because they do not understand stillbirth, and a law would just have to be crafted the right way.
“Other countries have easily solved this issue by including language in their laws on stillbirth, usually saying that if you give birth after twenty, twenty-four, or twenty-six weeks gestation—the lines are drawn slightly differently everywhere—you are entitled to maternity or parental leave,” she said. “This is not about fetal personhood age but about the weeks of gestation at which you have to give birth via vaginal delivery or C-section. This also would be inclusive of terminations. This is ideal.”
Her bosses were outraged by the denial, and she did get an exception. “All of my leave was due to relationships and luck,” Isabel said. “Not to mention that I was still wearing postpartum diapers at six weeks.”
Sacramento-based Jodi M. works for a regional nonprofit. When she had a miscarriage, her female coworkers were very sympathetic, and the bookkeeper tried to code her time off as bereavement days to be helpful. “The chief of operations [a cisgender male] called me and said, ‘I’m sorry, but you can’t use bereavement time for this.’ Why are you calling me about this? Who gives a shit? And he said, ‘Well, it’s not a funeral.’ And I said, ‘Listen, don’t ever tell a woman who lost a child that what she’s going through isn’t a funeral. I don’t care how you code it or how you code the time off or whether it’s unpaid, whatever. I don’t care.’ I was shaking and sobbing when I hung up.”26
Most people we talked to had no idea what they qualified for and either had to do rigorous research to figure out what was available or were lucky enough to have a manager or coworker guide them through the process. Many went back early because they didn’t think they met the requirements, though some also went back as a distraction from grief or because they financially just didn’t have any other choice.
What are the possible ways to get time off? The Family and Medical Leave Act gives employees the right to take unpaid leave of up to twelve weeks to care for their own serious health conditions, which includes miscarriage. (The fine print: you have to work for an employer with fifty or more employees within a seventy-five-mile radius of one another, have worked there for at least one year, and have clocked at least 1,250 hours within the twelve months preceding taking the benefit.27 People at smaller companies would not qualify.) So even unpaid leave is only available to 60 percent of the workforce, with nothing to prevent the remaining 40 percent from being fired.28
Employees could possibly also cobble together sick leave and short-term disability and take leave or get accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act if the miscarriage, stillbirth, or other pregnancy loss had a complication that “substantially limits a major life activity.” (Not something that most miscarriages would qualify for.) The Pregnancy Discrimination Act says that an employer cannot treat you worse than other employees because you are pregnant or have a condition related to pregnancy,29 but what does that mean if you lose the baby? For example, high blood pressure after preeclampsia may qualify for accommodation, but that person is still at work; it’s not a reprieve.
Bereavement leave has become more common in the last five years but is still a patchwork of laws and individual private-sector policies.
Illinois passed a fairly comprehensive Family Bereavement Leave Act that went into effect in 2023, which requires companies to provide ten days of unpaid leave for employees who experience a miscarriage, stillbirth, unsuccessful fertility treatment (IUI or IVF), failed surrogacy agreement, failed or nonfinalized adoption, or diagnosis affecting fertility. This is available to the employee or to a close relation of someone experiencing one of these losses.30
Utah; Pittsburgh; Boston; Portland, Oregon; and Washington, DC, also offer paid bereavement leave that include miscarriage or stillbirth.31 California has pregnancy disability laws that allow an employee to take partially paid, protected time off due to a miscarriage.32 But it’s all pretty random and spotty. As of 2022, according to the National Partnership for Women & Families, fourteen states, nineteen cities, and four counties have laws mandating paid sick leave for medical needs, which can apply to employees dealing with mental and physical health issues due to pregnancy loss.33 (“Can” being the operative word.)
Although much state and federal legislation is at various stages of attempted passage, the fact remains that bereavement leave is not a federal requirement and is mostly reliant on individual company and private-sector policies. A smattering of companies allow for compassionate or bereavement leave, but not many. None that are America’s largest employers. (The largest being the federal government.34)
The answer to whether someone qualifies seems to be a hard maybe—you can try your luck if your company has a bereavement policy, but no guarantees. A study from NFP, a property broker, benefits consultant, and wealth and retirement plan adviser, finds that nearly one quarter of bereavement leave policies allow an employee to take time off for a miscarriage or a failed in vitro fertilization.35 Not much.
Part of the problem is the inconsistency of the bureaucracy in each state and the arbitrary nature of where the line gets drawn between miscarriage or stillbirth. “So you get a birth or death certificate when your baby is born at twenty weeks, but if it happened at nineteen and a half weeks, you get neither. Nothing happened legally. That’s a crazy solution,” Kristen Swanson, the nurse practitioner who has worked in the pregnancy loss space for decades, told us.36
The paperwork matters for both emotional and bureaucratic reasons. Some parents want a piece of paper that recognizes that their child existed; practically, you may need a death certificate to qualify for bereavement leave or a birth certificate to qualify for a tax credit.
It’s hard to overstate how confusing and inconsistent all this is. Even some well-meaning policies don’t cut it. For instance, the New York State Paid Family Leave policy enacted in 2018 does not cover stillbirth bereavement. It includes language that the leave allows “eligible employees to bond with their new child, care for family members with serious conditions and assist loved ones when family members are deployed abroad.”37 The word “bond” has led to those with stillborns to have their paid leave revoked—“linguistic red tape” that excludes them.38 As of 2023, there were efforts underway to fix what many think was an unintended consequence of a well-intentioned law.
Rachel Unkovic, mother of a stillborn daughter who died after cord compression, volunteers for the PUSH advocacy organization. “People who deliver stillborn babies often don’t receive important benefits, such as parental leave and death certificates. It’s not because the birthing parent had their body wrecked any less, has less milk coming in, or isn’t very busy parenting (in our case, finding a funeral home and planning a funeral),” she told us by email.39
A handful of states offer a one-time state stillbirth tax exemption during the year of birth. Minnesota offers a tax credit that is a one-time financial relief to offset unanticipated expenses of funerals, burial, testing, and therapy. The others offer a tax deduction like the dependent child tax credit that can be claimed each year for living dependent children.40 Some stillbirth parents find this helpful, but it has also been used as a political cudgel.
Amanda Pinkham-Brown is an educational researcher in a PhD program who had a full-term stillbirth and is gathering narratives from teachers who have experienced pregnancy loss. “A lot of people go back to work soon after their loss, because there isn’t much available leave, and a lot end up having to white knuckle it,” Brown said. “It’s adding to teacher demoralization, especially after the pandemic.”41
Jackie Mancinelli, a high school English and ESL teacher in New Jersey, founded the nonprofit Start Healing Together to support educators experiencing pregnancy loss and infertility by advocating for rights in the workplace. They help with bargaining contract language and work as intermediaries between teachers and administrators and unions to help secure leave and create individual plans to return to work after a loss or for time off during fertility treatments.
In 2014, Mancinelli was a nontenured teacher at a new school, so she went to work the day after finding out by ultrasound that she had a missed miscarriage. In 2016, she lost her son Richard an hour after an emergency C-section at thirty-three weeks, five days due to a rare fetal-maternal hemorrhage. She went on to have two complicated pregnancies with her living daughters and founded the organization after her youngest was born in 2021, in tribute to Richard.
“When I had my loss, I had to figure out everything on my own and wondered why it wasn’t being done on a bigger scale,” Mancinelli told us. “There’s such a need for this, and it’s so shrouded in secrecy and shame.”42 She has created language for union contracts to allow bereavement leave for pregnancy losses. “The goal is to try to maximize paid leave options,” she told us, and the language has been approved for her union, the New Jersey Education Association, and is endorsed by the National Education Association.
Currently, in places that offer a stillbirth certificate, she recommends a parent find out if they collect stillbirth data and count it within the fetal demise statistics for the state and at which week—twenty or twenty-four or beyond. That language can be used to negotiate bereavement leave because it “counts as a child legally,” Mancinelli said. “But our contract language lists out every single loss you can have from a chemical pregnancy on up, so it is incredibly inclusive, and you can’t say an ectopic is only sick leave. No, it’s bereavement leave. We want to try to protect the sick days because that’s a huge part of maternity leave for teachers. In New Jersey, we have paid family leave, but if your baby dies, you no longer qualify. You’re only caring for yourself, and you need to be caring for someone else to qualify.”
What. A. Mess.
Many we spoke to felt the need to suffer quietly or to at least try to hide how they felt because capitalism is pretty indifferent to the trials of any individual human by design. But the poor policies were exacerbated when the suffering became obvious in the workplace.
Ashley L. from central New York had a TFMR at seventeen weeks, five days for trisomy 21 after having to wait two weeks for official confirmation of the diagnosis. She worked at an open-concept office. “I was crying on the phone at my desk,” she said. Her boss brought her to the conference room, and “all I got out was ‘something’s wrong with the baby.’ I hadn’t worked there that long, and everyone was like, ‘What’s the deal with the new girl?’” A follow-up ultrasound confirmed severe abnormalities that were incompatible with life. She took five weeks short-term disability after the termination and had retained products of conception (basically lingering tissues), so over the summer, she had eight separate blood draws and a methotrexate shot to clear it. This was followed by two early miscarriages.43
She asked to work from home the day she was expecting confirmation of the miscarriage, but her boss’s “sympathy had expired,” she told us. Her boss mentioned lost productivity and suggested she “take some long walks.” Ashley gave notice soon after, and her boss said, “‘I think it would be better for your mental health if today was your last day,’ and she helped me to my car.”
Though the emotional side is important, it isn’t the only issue. A 2021 study showed that pregnancy loss is associated with about a $2,500 loss in annual income.44 And many ended up switching jobs or industries. (Some to move into advocacy.)
Boise, Idaho–based Angelica Kovach worked as a NICU nurse. After her stillbirth at thirty-three weeks, four days, her coworkers set up a GoFundMe for her. She was able to take twelve weeks paid leave. “My work was so wonderful to me,” Kovach said. “It hurts my heart that there are people out there that have to go straight back to work and don’t have time to heal from the delivery, let alone process what happened after losing a baby.”45
She eventually switched out of the NICU and into a new role teaching a medical assistant course following her stillbirth and a fourteen-week miscarriage because it was too hard to be around the babies. She was very transparent about it in the interview for her new job, telling her new boss, “I lost two babies, and it has gotten too difficult to work on the floor,” she said. “It would feel disingenuous to intentionally omit two of my children and what their deaths have done to me, so I was up front.”
Similarly, Texas pediatrician Jenna C. took twelve weeks off after her son, Connor, was stillborn at full term. When she returned, she only saw kids five years and up for about six months. “I couldn’t go to the nursery yet or to labor and delivery and see a healthy newborn,” she said. When she finally did go back, it took time to adjust. “I was thinking, how weird that this baby was born and is alive and fine. Nothing bad happened to anyone. How?”46
Westchester-based Taylor was a teacher when she had her eighteen-week loss, and the school arranged for her to have two paid months off. “They quietly kept paying me and told me I could come back when I was ready,” she said. “It was such a golden example of how a boss and a business should operate because when I came back, I was ready to come back.”47
But PTSD made it hard to continue teaching. “Holding space for the kids had been one of my favorite parts of the job. I couldn’t do it anymore. I was this leaky container,” she said. She took a year off to work on a writing project. “It’s really hard to live in your body as a postpartum person without a baby.”
There’s only so much you can power through.