Response to Tiegen/Legend miscarriage

In My Humble Opinion
41

We lost our first child just hours after he was born, and I can’t describe how painful that was. We had known for several months that things were getting worse and worse, but it wasn’t until he was actually born that they were able to tell if he would have lived for a while or not. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to survive long outside of the womb and only lasted a few hours.

Later, before our daughter was conceived, my wife had a miscarriage at less than 10 weeks, and it felt like another kick in the gut. After our daughter was born, she had yet another miscarriage before we had another child. So that was five pregnancies and two living children. For us, the second miscarriage had less impact.

Because the birth defects were discovered during the pregnancy, my wife went to specialized children’s hospital with an NICU (newborn ICU). The hospital sponsored a support group for parent who lost babies and in the group were a number of parents who also had had miscarriages.

Talking to other parents, you see a wide range of outward signs of grief, and heard about inner turmoil. Japan is also a culture which discourages outward displays of grief for the loss of children or pregnancies, and there was many people in devastating pain.

More mothers attended than fathers, but the pain was difficult for anyone. It wasn’t uncommon for fathers’ grief to come out as anger in various seemingly unrelated situations. One father got into a fight on the train with a stranger, for example.

This was a support group for parents who lost babies and while most cases the child had actually been born, there were parents of stillborn babies as well. I can’t see how it would have made a difference if the parents had a chance to hold their baby alive for a few hours, like we did, or if the baby had already died before being born. If anything, that seems harder to me, to have to go through the labor process for a baby which hasn’t survived.

I’ve read articles which talk about the high percentage of women who have had miscarriages who suffer from anxiety and depression. I can understand that.

I have no judgment about celebrities who live their lives openly. It’s not part of my world and I don’t have any experience.

Searching online, I couldn’t find any news about a funeral for Tiegen and Legend’s son. Where does the OP get that from?

Looking online, it appears that there is a legal requirement for burial or cremation of babies born after 24 weeks in the UK, for example, so I’m not sure why the OP is appalled by funerals for “fetuses”.

Having gone through some very painful experiences, I don’t see how people can make such judgments on grieving parents.

42

As far as I can tell, the law Pence signed did not require funeral services for fetuses. It mandated that fetal remains be disposed of by burial or cremation, which is a common requirement for pregnancy loss after a certain point. Apparently, the difference in the Pence law was that it would have applied at any point. I can’t stand Pence and I can’t stand that law - but when I had a stillbirth 32 years ago at 25 weeks, it only added to my pain to have the social worker bring me forms to sign for a “city burial” aka “potter’s field”. She gave me a strange look when I said I didn’t want the city burial and asked how to make arrangements. I couldn’t imagine anyone would have just assumed that was what I wanted if my baby had died when he was a month old , and it just felt like another way people were trying to minimize or ignore my loss.

If you look at the photos of Chrissy Teigen, there’s one where she’s sitting and leaning forward. My bet is that she’s getting an epidural - which means that not only did she have to go through labor and delivery, but the also that her labor was long enough to get an epidural and she knew when she was going through it that there would be no baby at the end.

43

Yes.

If you miscarried a fetus at 4 weeks into a pregnancy then that fetus would have to be either buried or cremated and not disposed of as “medical waste”.

I loathe Pence, but there was a lot of distortion about what that law actually entailed and I guess I’m an oddity for valuing truth over political point-scoring. The woman involved would have had to choose either cremation or burial, but if she basically turned the remains over to the place where she received medical care afterwards she would not be responsible for costs and would certainly not be required to hold a funeral. (If she did want a funeral or control over where, exactly, the body/ashes were permanently placed then she would have to cover the costs).

More repulsive to me is that the law prohibited abortion if the baby had any detectable birth defects, no matter how dire. So if you found out at 6 or 8 weeks that you had a fetus with some sort of horrific defect that had zero chance of survival the law would still compel you to carry that fetus a full nine months and go through labor to deliver a corpse. Nevermind that in such cases it’s much safer for the mother to terminate the pregnancy early, it’s more important that she be made to go through nine months of physical and emotional turmoil. Now, being pro-choice myself, IF a mother chooses that route of her own free will due to her own beliefs I defend her right to make that choice for herself but this is imposing Pence’s beliefs on every other person in the state of Indiana and damn the consequences.

As it happens, the courts blocked that law and it never went into effect.

44

As I said above, I appreciate the ability to get other peoples’ views and experiences on things such as this.

Then along comes a post like the above, which reminds me of the possibility that maybe they ARE just fucking nuts! (Yeah, I know I should just ignore the crazy…)

45

I don’t think what I said was crazy. I think your question was judgmental and insensitive.

I mean, have you changed your mind? Having learned that a 20 week old baby is full formed, close to viable, big enough for the mother to feel movements, and requires a labor, delivery, and hospital stay, do you still think it’s emotionally indulgent to name the child? Do you think it’s “horrific”?

46

You are in education - you should have better comprehension skills. My question was with the newspaper’s reporting, not the couple’s personal decision. And no one has explained to me what magically changes at 20 weeks - as opposed to 19, or 21…

I will say no more, other than to observe that you could have engaged in this discussion in innumerable ways other than ad hominem attacks. (Yet, you criticized my POST, if you wish to pretend that was not intended as a criticism of the poster.)

Like I said in my OP, I was happy to try to adjust my perception if appropriate. Thanks to the posters who have helped me in doing so. Thank you as well, for clarifying what ought to be my perception of you.

47

So do you think it was inappropriate, emotionally indulgent, to give a 20 week old fetus a name? If your kids did such a thing, would you be embarrassed to mention to other people, that they “counted” that lost child as real? Would ypou want to clarify that you didn’t think of that tragedy as losing a grandchild?

These are sincere questions.

48

I apologize, but I do not respect your professed sincerity, and have no wish to engage you further in this thread (at least).

Please carry on however you wish.

49

Just for the sake of clarity, the testing for genetic abnormalities usually starts at 14 weeks, you get the nuchal translucency ultrasound between 16-20 weeks, and the detailed ultrasound at 20 weeks. You may have half a clue by the 14-week blood test that something might be up, and the nuchal translucency can show markers of Down’s Syndrome, but you’re unlikely to find out with any conclusiveness until that 20-weeker. Incidentally, that’s well past the abortion restrictions in many states.

It’s an arbitrary marker, but a reasonable one. For earlier pregnancies the fetal tissue can usually be passed at home. When I miscarried at 10 weeks and my baby’s tissue wouldn’t pass on its own, I had a D&C, a surgical procedure to remove the tissue under general anesthetic. Doctors choose 20 weeks for the detailed ultrasound because up until that point, the organs have not fully developed. At 20 weeks you have a baby more or less as it’s going to be at birth, only smaller. And, as has been noted earlier, at 20 weeks gestation or later, you’re giving birth. That means a full - scale labor and delivery.

50

Nothing magically changes at 20 weeks as opposed to 19 or 21. There may be a medical or legal definition * that defines a loss at 20 weeks differently than one at 8 weeks , but that doesn’t mean there’s any sort of hard line in terms of the parents’ emotional experience. It’s a continuum where you can say having a miscarriage a day after the pregnancy test comes back positive is very different that having a stillbirth on your due date but there isn’t necessarily any one day or week that’s very different from the one before or after.

  • For example, NYS issues a certificate of stillbirth, and the law includes " For the purposes of this section, the term “stillbirth” shall mean the unintended intrauterine death of a fetus that occurs after the clinical estimate of the twentieth week of gestation."
51

I can’t imagine the horror of passing fetal tissue at any stage. From my POV I was lucky to have the D&C… Never went through the cramping or bleeding or the trauma of delivering fetal tissue. It was traumatic, however, to have to carry a dead baby in my womb for a week. And because it was “missed” we had no clue anything was wrong until the second ultrasound where they found no heartbeat. Excitement to despair in 15 seconds flat.

There’s a certain point at which a D&C isn’t even an option. 14 weeks? 16 weeks? I’m not sure exactly why that is, but I’m sure there’s a medical reason for it.

52

Modhat On: OK, both of you take it down a notch. This is not the pit. Please remain civil. I feel like both posts could merit a warning. So lets call it offsetting penalties and just leave it at a ModNote.

Do not continue along this vein though.

53

Another response to the Tiegen/Legend miscarriage, an article by a journalist who suffered several miscarriages herself:

55

Thank you for sharing this.

When I was pregnant with Spice Kit I was so terrified of another miscarriage all I could do was cry. I had to run to the bathroom at work like three times a day just to bawl my eyes out. I’m not a religious person, but I remember thinking, “Childbirth is not the woman’s curse. This is the curse.”

56

On second thought, that’s not totally fair. Childbirth can be traumatic and also kill you. It just sucks all around.

57

I’m lucky, I’ve never had a miscarriage, but I still worried about it all the time. It must have been much worse for you. It’s terrifying how easily something can go wrong. Having a stillbirth was my worst fear and I don’t blame anyone for grieving it the way they find most comforting.

As for sharing the news, I didn’t tell anyone at work that I was pregnant until I was well over 20 weeks. I knew having a baby would impact my career, but if the worst did happen then I didn’t want it affected just because they knew I was trying. I didn’t tell anyone but my partner until after the 12 week scan. Maybe that was the wrong way to go about it, I don’t know.

58

Coincidence, I just watched this video the other day, in which the channel owner interviewed several women in Japan who had suffered multiple miscarriages (click on “cc” at lower right to get English captions):

59

Chorionic villus sampling can be done as early as 10-12 weeks (and I have a nephew who did that recently to rule out a serious genetic defect we now know runs in our family). So yes, I exaggerated slightly. Although wikipedia says it can be done as early as 8 weeks in some cases without going into further detail.

Granted, that’s not usually done unless there is already elevated concern, but it is a form of testing that gives results in the first trimester. And since it wouldn’t be done at 12 weeks or prior unless you were already concerned there was something Very Wrong, those are the very people who would be barred under Pence’s law from aborting a fetus/baby with severe defects and being forced to carry a hopeless situation for another 7-8 months.

One of the things that can be traumatizing about at-home miscarriages is that the “fetal tissue” can look enough like a baby to trigger nightmares. This happened with my mom’s second miscarriage. The pregnancy test came back negative, she went home now worried about what the hell was wrong with her, then miscarried “fetal tissue” that, when she called the doctor, was developed enough she could identify it as a boy. Granted, this was the 1960’s before we had a lot of the testing and imaging we do these days, but there is no sharp line between “fetal tissue” and “it’s a developing baby”.

It was a very bad day for my parents.

60

Some people probably also know her from Lip Sync Battle, which she co-hosts.

61

While we may debate the whole publicity thing (I knew those guys existed, but they didn’t have faces), at 20 weeks you’re out of the first trimester, it should be all clear after that. Whatever yor thoughts are about personhood/fetus/tissue/baby at 20 week it looks like a (tiny) person.
My first child had a name before he was conceived. Children #2 and #3 had placeholder nicknames before we knew the sex, and were given those names as soon as we knew. If my wife had had a miscarriage, I wouldn’t have used that name again, not for superstition, but because it already had an owner.

It that specific case, when the pregnancy is so public then you have so many people on the case so simply saying “Sorry, miscarriage”. When my wife was expecting out third child she had one night where she couldn’t feel the, normally very active, baby moving and even after 18 years she still gets the chills when she remembers going to the clinic to have it checked. She’s an MD, by the way. We still shudder at that tiny hint of miscarriage.