Nobody has funerals for miscarriages, and Rick Santorum was mocked for his treatment of his wife’s pre-term delivery and stillborn baby death. But what age is too young for a funeral ceremony? Stillborn babies do not get the treatment, but what about 3-month, 6-month old babies? 1 year old?
(Not a Need Answer Fast, of course, just asking for opinions.)
Oh, I thought this was going to be about bringing babies to funerals.
I think the answer is that it depends on what will be comforting to the parents.
I have been to a funeral for a stillborn baby, and certainly nobody mocked the proceeding or thought the parents were anything other than devastated. I never heard that about Santorum. I greatly dislike the man, but that’s really awful. I’d never question the grief of a parent.
I suspect that the people who mocked it thought he was making a big show of it to support his anti-abortion views, rather than as a result of true grief. He’s not the most genuine guy.
I used to work and am on Facebook with a woman who had a cremation and private service for her son, who was stillborn late last year at about 18 weeks gestation. I don’t have an issue with that, if it’s part of the healing process.
Today, she displayed a picture of a large commemorative tattoo, something that many artists will not do for at least a year after a big life event, and 5 years is better. Time will tell if she regrets it.
Huh. Ignorance fought here. I never knew this. Is the idea the person might regret the tattoo selection or regret even getting a commemorative tattoo? Five years seems like a looooong time to wait.
18 weeks? that would not ever have been viable. My mother lost a pregnancy at 5 months (21 weeks) and never called it anything but a miscarriage.
I think a lot of it has to do with your religious background. Judaism is very specific that you don’t formally mourn a baby who did not live 3 months. At three months, you must than sit shiva and observe yahrzeit. The rule goes back to a time when miscarriages and stillbirths were more common, and shiva/yahrzeit could become burdensome if you lost a lot of pregnancies.
I think were in a fetal-loving culture right now, with all our framed sonograms, and birth plans, and it’s not necessarily a good thing.
Well, I’d say it’s fine for those who like it, though I agree with you that there’s doubtless extra emotional trauma involved in equating an early-term miscarriage with the death of a beloved child.
What worries me about it is its promotion as part of anti-abortion-rights ideology, to put pressure on women to regard an embryo or early-term fetus as a beloved child even if they don’t want to.
A coworker’s wife at my old job miscarried in the first trimester and they took it pretty hard, it seemed. He took a week or so off of work and was clearly unsettled when he did return. I think it would’ve been their 4th or 5th child.
I don’t what, if any, funeral proceedings they had.
The youngest funeral I’ve ever been to was a full term but stillborn infant. They had an open coffin, even. It was horrible.
The parents and all grandparents were grief stricken. It was to be a very welcomed birth and long awaited grandchild.
Very sad.
I love the dry understatement of this paragraph:
I thought for a second there that I might have to defend Rick Santorum but even in grief, he proved he is a demonstrably weird guy with generally inhuman responses to events.
That said, people can grieve a child of any age and there’s no reason not to hold a funeral when you’ve suffered a loss. My grandmother died when she was 92 years old. She had two sons and grandchildren by her side when she died. Even on her deathbed, she grieved for her stillborn son from six decades before. Would I deny her the chance to hold a funeral for him (not that she had one)?
I do think it’s bad that Santorum imposed his grief on his children in a way that might have harmed them.
Whatever helps you get through the grief is fine with me. If that means a funeral for a stillbirth, that’s not for anyone else to judge. Some hospitals have a thing called a CuddleCot (NYT paywall warning) that is essentially a refrigerated baby bed so the parents can spend time with a stillborn baby.
Look, even when someone dies as an adult, some people take days, or weeks or months or years to grieve. It all varies.
My sister’s first baby was born 4 months premature. He weighed about a pound and lived for an hour. They named him James Robert after his grandpas. They were able to hold him and were given his little hat to take home. They had a graveside service for the baby who was buried in the same plot as our grandpa. The cemetery allowed them to use the foot of the grave so they wouldn’t have to buy a plot, which at that time they couldn’t afford. This was over 30 years ago. She and my BIL still mourn him. My sister gets very upset when someone, namely her MIL, calls it a miscarriage. My sister says, “he was a baby, he was alive if even for a short time.” I make it a point to remember him with a note/text on the anniversary of his birth/death. They always appreciate it. No one wants their child to be forgotten.
The great part of this story is that their second daughter was born on James’ birthday!
The death of a child is THE worst thing that a parent can experience no matter what the age of the child is. If a funeral gives them even a small fraction of peace then they should have one. Unless it’s happened to you, you cannot judge, you have no idea what the parents are feeling or going through.
I don’t think there’s any such thing as “too young” for a funeral, it’s all about what is comforting to the mourners and honouring their deceased family member.
What “we think” is of no consequence, IMHO.
My niece did do a funeral with her stillborn. Burial, casket, headstone and all. Nobody criticized her for it to my recollection.
What “we think” is of consequence, because the expectations of your immediate company, and society as a whole are behind a lot of people’s reactions.
I know some people who mourned a c-section that resulted in a perfectly healthy baby, because they belonged to a homebirth group that was practically a cult, and to them a c-section was a failure of the first order. There was even another mother who offered sympathy in the statement that her c-section (that resulted in a healthy baby) caused he more grief than her (vaginal) home birth that was a miscarriage/stillbirth-- I’m not sure what term she used, because I got the info second hand, and yes, it makes a huge difference, but it’s my understanding, that is was not full-term; however, it was far enough along (34 weeks, IIRC), that it likely could have lived if it had been delivered in a hospital.
My healthy son was born by c-section, so I am very glad that group’s ideas are not the prevalent thoughts of the country as a whole-- I still do very occasionally get crap from people who venerate the vaginal birth process over the result of a healthy baby. It goes like water off a duck’s back, because I very specifically think it’s BS but I worry about women who might buy into it *after *having had a c-section, and how that could mess with their relationships with their children.
I am also very glad that in 1970 when my mother had a miscarriage, she was allowed to just get over it as soon and as quickly as possible. That worked out really well for her, and worked out well with out background.
I had some Jewish friends who had a miscarriage more recently, though, and were told to name the fetus, hold it, etc., when they didn’t want to, and just wanted it disposed of as medical waste, and her checked out as soon as possible.
I don’t think there’s “too young”, but I’m not a mother and I’ve never been the father of a miscarriage, so maybe I’m missing something. I certainly wouldn’t ever criticize someone for mourning a miscarriage or stillbirth or even having a funeral. However, I would criticize exploiting your miscarriage (or another person’s miscarriage) to make a political commercial out of it. I’m not sure what happened with Santorum, but I’d imagine there are an uncountable number of things he’s done or said that deserve more criticism than having a funeral for a stillbirth.
I’ve visited the gravestone of my stillborn cousin. I don’t remember if I went to his funeral but I would have only been two or three years old. My understanding is he was a healthy pregnancy right up until birth, when he got the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and was strangled to death. My aunt and her family were devastated. They definitely think of him as their child who died, not a miscarriage.
I had a sister who was stillborn (I was around 2 years old at the time). Apparently I was so looking forward to the baby that my parents brought home a puppy when my mother came home from the hospital. I don’t remember any details.
Fast forward about 40 years. I had an aunt who died and was to be buried with her husband in one of our family’s burial plots. Turns out I own the plot, so I had to give permission and go to the cemetery office to sign some paperwork. They gave me the “inventory” of who is buried in the plot and saw an entry for “Baby Girl Martian”. So my parents at least buried the stillborn baby, nobody is left alive who is old enough to remember if they actually had a funeral.
It isn’t that he had a funeral for a stillbirth, it is that they brought it home from the hospital overnight for his young children to play with.
It was a second trimester fetus, and from what I can Google, a week earlier than the pregnancy my mother lost when I was three, which was never anything but a miscarriage to us. All my parents told me was that the pregnancy didn’t work out, and they had to try again. Three-year-olds certainly understand that not every endeavor ends in success, and that’s how this was presented to me.
I can’t imagine, at 3, being instructed to hold a dead baby, let alone a fetus; I would understand what a baby was, having seen one before, but seeing a fetus would be confusing, I think.