In this morning’s paper, I read an article related to the recent loss of a child/miscarriage experienced by Chrissy Tiegen and John Legend. Apparently she recently experienced a miscarriage when 20 weeks pregnant, and published some related photos.
What surprised me about this morning’s article, was that it described “the loss of their third child” named Jack. That struck me as curious, both referring to a miscarriage at 20 weeks as the loss of a child, and assigning that unborn child a name.
I don’t think I feel really strongly about this, nor do I feel terribly strongly about the individuals involved - they are both very much on the periphery of my awareness. And I don’t really criticize how anyone chooses to deal with an unsuccessful pregnancy. I guess my confusion resulted from the terms being used in a mainstream paper (Chicago Trib.)
And it kinda smacked of what I personally consider the horrible practice of holding funerals for and burying fetuses. So maybe the couple strongly shares some religion that advocates such practices.
Any thoughts? Not something I’ve given a ton of thought to, so I’m happy to try to adjust my perception if appropriate.
I read about that when it happened. Apparently the 2, particularly Chrissy, share their entire lives on Instagram and other social media. I was raised to keep your bizness to yourself, so the whole “follow us through the pregnancy/miscarriage” thing tacky.
Yeah, I probably agree, but my response is basically to pay little attention to such social media.
My question concerned the description of a miscarriage at 20 weeks as the “loss of their 3d child”, and calling such a miscarried fetus by name.
Heck, I didn’t know if that meant she had had 3 miscarriages, but I THINK some of the little I read suggested that they had living children. If they do have 2 living children, I think calling this the loss of their sibling is weird and kinda creepy.
Many people give their unborn babies names before birth. I don’t find that odd. I guess everyone handles grief differently and I’m guessing since they live their lives on social media, their living child/ren know about the miscarriage and would wonder what happened.
My aunt and uncle still mourn the loss of their still-born first son, and he’d be in his sixties if he had lived. At twenty weeks, I’m sure the parents had formed an emotional bond with their inchoate son. Naming and mourning him doesn’t seem odd to me.
Normally I’d rush to judgement but is this something they had their publicist release to the press or did some enterprising reporter decide to invade their privacy in a highly inappropriate manner?
The article was a blurb in the “celebrities” column in the entertainment section. (I usually at least skim it on my way to the comics, just to retain SOME familiarity with the names of current celebs.) The article said Teigen had written an “essay” which she posted on something called Medium. I haven’t read that on-line essay. The Trib article referred to “her first public response since announcing the loss of their son, Jack, on Sept. 30.”
The only reason this caught my attention, is that I vaguely remembered reading somewhere - likely the same section of the paper - that the couple had experienced a miscarriage. In light of that, I thought the paper’s description of the loss of a son, and the name, to be odd.
I would recognize Legend - I believe he was Jesus in a recent televised Superstar. I think he and another guy whose name and face I would recognize wrote the music for Selma. But I don’t know any of his songs. Teigen, I believe she is brunette, and has been on some TV shows which I don’t watch, but I couldn’t pick her out of a line-up.
I care next to nothing about how they choose to conduct themselves, but slightly more about how the newspaper reports such things.
I readily acknowledge the possibility that I am a dispassionate monster.
But, being celebrities and thus having a large social media presence and following, I imagine it would be difficult to say nothing at all to their adoring fans. Expecting one day, not expecting the next - yeah, people are going to ask questions and talk. However, the details of the naming and the funeral arrangements, that’s highly cringy in my opinion and should have been kept private, regardless of their personal feelingns on the matter.
It’s Tiegen/Legend living their lives very publicly. The articles and tweets I’ve seen tend to include one or more photos of the two in the immediate aftermath. I don’t want to say the photos are staged in the sense of the whole thing being a hoax - no doubt they are truly grieving - but these are not paparazzi shots, they’re carefully framed black-and-white pics taken with their cooperation/consent. Examples here.
These two statements appear to be incompatible. Can you try to reconcile them?
What I meant to say is that I don’t criticize anyone’s right to choose how to live their life, but that doesn’t mean I give up my right to express opinions about those choices.
And I was also trying to express that a miscarriage would be a traumatic event, and there is no one way that people ought to react. I never went through a miscarriage, so I was expressing my hesitance to declare someone’s experience and choices “wrong.”
Finally, I was thinking about our wonderful Veep, and efforts while he was governor to require funerals for aborted fetuses, practices of the RC church, etc. I’ve heard about people choosing to hold various ceremonies following unsuccessful pregnancies. They are absolutely free to choose to do so, but I also am free to declare the practice personally repugnant to me, and any body - religious or governmental - that attempts to require such actions by others despicable.
So, yeah, there were various thoughts imperfectly expressed in a short section of an internet post.
My ex-wife and I lost a baby at 20 weeks gestation. The fetus was 4 inches long and weighed just 2 ounces. But he had 10 fingers and ten toes, eyes nose mouth and ears. Definitely a little person, not just a clump of cells.
We had a name picked out and thought about “saving it” for a future child, but decided that he deserved a name, so Jackson Christopher he was. His little body was donated to science and his remains interred in a cemetery in central Pennsylvania.
All this to say…no, it’s not weird to name a baby lost at 20 weeks. It’s a person, it would be weird not to.
She was far enough along in the pregnancy that they felt safe announcing it. So when she miscarried, they had to make it public. While they shared to a degree I’d consider overdoing it, that’s what their fans have come to expect, and they’ve encouraged it. They’re celebrities and much of their livelihood depends on staying in the public eye. Not a big deal.
And yes, naming your fetus at that stage is completely common. I’d be more surprised if they hadn’t. And I’m more surprised that anyone else would challenge that.
Couples handle a miscarriage in different ways. If a couple chooses to treat a miscarriage as the death of a child and have a funeral service, it’s not a choice I feel I would make but it’s none of my business if they do so and I wouldn’t criticize their decision.
I have no problem with a newspaper like the Chicago Tribune reporting this in the terms the couple chose to use.
FYI 20 weeks is about halfway through the gestation period - the baby/fetus is about 10 oz and the size of a banana. So it’s not like this was some spontaneous abortion type of miscarriage in the 8th week or something. This was much more similar to a stillbirth.
Here’s the thing- at what point does it quit being a nameless fetus, and becomes a stillborn child? I’m sure there’s a legal definition of that, but as far as the parents are concerned, all are going to handle it differently. Some are going to potentially just look at it as something that wasn’t meant to be, and leave it at that. Others, especially first-time parents, are going to look at it in a very similar way to the loss of a child, even if it is a very early spontaneous miscarriage. Maybe they won’t have named the child by then, but they certainly were anticipating its arrival very eagerly.
Like most things, it’s complicated. I personally make a distinction with regard to gestational age. At 20 weeks, you’re not having a “miscarriage,” you’re having a stillbirth. You’re giving birth to a dead baby. Hours of pain and labor and the end result is tragedy. Probably coming home to an empty nursery and a bunch of baby stuff you can’t use. I can’t imagine how traumatic that must be and I don’t fault anyone for dealing with it through this kind of remembrance.
I miscarried in 2014 at a mere 10 weeks gestation and it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever endured. But I can’t relate in any way to the fetus as a person. We didn’t have a name. It’s not the same as my living son. There’s this culture that has sprung up, particularly among women who have had multiple miscarriages, to believe their dead babies are somehow watching over them like angels, and these dead babies are personally selecting their brother or sister… it’s this weird pseudo-religion that chased me off the miscarriage boards because I felt so alienated from the prevailing culture. I suspect there is a strong overlap between this magical thinking and thinking of a stillbirth on the same level as your living son or daughter. I also think women who have never had a child, only miscarriages, often cling to this because it is the only experience of motherhood available to them. That’s a very human response.
I think whether the suffering parents are famous or not it irrelevant. People should feel free to talk about miscarriage. It’s a rite of passage for so many women. There is a vast repository of cultural knowledge that has just been lost under the veil of secrecy. So more power to them.
I’ve known a number of women in my life who have had miscarriages. If the pregnancy was desired, the child wanted, and it was far enough along that the result was recognizable as a baby then it’s long been the case that many women (and their men) have mourned that lost pregnancy like the loss of a child.
These days, when a woman is able to know she is pregnant far, far earlier than in the past, with sonograms going into baby albums as first pictures, knowing the sex in advance, choosing names before birth… yeah, I can see mourning this event as the loss of a child.
There’s a huge difference between people choosing to hold a funeral for a stillbirth/miscarriage and being required to do so - that’s the problem I have with Pence, he’d force people to do this.
Whatever brings comfort to those in mourning in a situation like this I’m OK with. As long as it is voluntary. There are a lot of women who, over the years, had their grief at such a loss discounted and denied a funeral for what they regarded as their child. I find that that is also tragic.
Tiegan and Legend have chosen to live their lives on line. Hey, their choice. Perhaps they find some comfort in their fans joining them in mourning.
I’m OK with it. Some people want private grief, some public. As long as it’s all voluntary I’m fine with it.
Yeah, I was gonna say that we live in unprecedented times, where you follow fetal development from 6-8 weeks, the smallest flicker of a heartbeat, to at least the second trimester. It’s now possible to get a 3D image of the unborn baby that shows incredible detail including facial features. I think as a result of this women have become much more attached to the child before it was born at an earlier gestational age than in the past.
In the case of my recent pregnancy with Spice Kit, we must have had 5-6 ultrasounds, and we put those photos into a frame my grandmother got me which said, “X days until we meet you!” Literally counting down the days. That baby was all I could think about. We knew his sex at 14 weeks gestation due to blood testing. We called him by name later in the pregnancy. Some people thought it was weird to call him by name, but oh well.
I don’t even know what I would have done if we had lost him. Probably not a funeral, but bottomless despair.
I think that’s a lot of it; people can now get pregnancy tests at like 5 weeks that are accurate, and they start getting sonograms not much later than that. So they start thinking of themselves as parents and start getting excited, and when the miscarriage happens, it’s very much like the loss of a child.
In the past before the tests and sonograms, the time frame was a lot longer, and as I understand it, women might just think they had an exceptionally heavy period or something along those lines and not even identify it as a miscarriage, as they might not have even realized they were pregnant.
