Keeping a corpse at the house seems strange to me. However, I regard the unborn as human and when my first wife’s physician recomended terminating her pregnancy, I assured her that if that was her decision, the remains would be handled with dignity, as human remains, not mere medical waste.
She couldn’t bring herself to make that choice and I couldn’t bring myself to pressure her to do so. I wish I had. She may have hated me for it, but she might still be alive now. As it turned out, I never got to hold my son while he lived, anyway. Just his tiny, lifeless body, after a failure in the OR. You never realize how much tension and tone there is in the muscles of a sleeping child until you have lifted the completely limp body of a deceased baby.
Eh, sorry. I get to rambling. I don’t talk about it much. Maybe it’s easier to do so in such a detached medium. Still, there is a tension between the freakish or macabre nature of retaining possession of a human fetus and the respectful disposal of human remains. Where that balance is struck is sure to be different for different people, cultures and families.