Should private pain be shared publicly? The model Chrissy Teigen recently sparked a debate on that subject when she posted about her miscarriage on social media.

It is no surprise that the secular world can’t agree about the ways in which we privately and publicly mourn – especially when the life in question would, in the context of abortion, not be considered a human one.

Yet even within the Church, where we unequivocally proclaim that a miscarriage marks the loss of a human life that is no different from the death of a child outside the womb, we do not as yet have clear frameworks for the ritualisation of such mourning.

When I ask why we don’t tend to witness many funerals for miscarried children, my priest assures me that “It’s fully possible” to have a funeral for a miscarried child, but that “the custom is not as common, because the family is given the freedom to decide how public they want to be with their loss.”

For a long time, our culture has treated death-by-miscarriage as a private matter: it is usual not to announce a pregnancy for the first 12 weeks because this is the period of highest risk, when the pregnancy is most likely to end prematurely. The idea is that, should we go through a miscarriage, we would want to do so privately, having shared the original happy news with few if any loved ones, and thus sparing us the pain of sharing the bad news many times over.

These early months are also, typically, the most physically taxing stage for the mother, who will be struggling with a sudden surge in hormones that will probably cause nausea, fatigue and chronic pain in the best of cases. It has always puzzled me that the time when I am most likely to require a sick day or a seat on the train is when I am least likely to get it. People associate the seventh- or eighth-month stage with the most discomfort; but in fact, while the late trimester can be difficult and each pregnancy is different, it is no secret among women that the first weeks are often the toughest, and loneliest, of the journey.

And yet if we were to lose a baby in the early weeks of pregnancy, a funeral might not be as straightforward as my priest suggests. First, there is the question of the remains: if there is no body to bury, as often there isn’t in the early weeks, there can’t be a burial, Christian or otherwise. This is often the case with those missing in action, who receive a memorial Mass instead of a burial.

The other issue is that of Baptism. An unbaptised person was historically not allowed a Christian burial. In the new Code of Canon Law of 1983 it is clear that where parents had intended to baptise the child then the local ordinary can permit Christian burial. And so, in the case of many stillborn children to Christian parents, Christian burials are possible. However, there’s yet another obstacle for those who miscarry in the early weeks: whether the state recognises this as a death.

The difference between miscarriage and stillbirth is one of English law and does not have any bearing on how the Church views such deaths for the purposes of ritual. But it poses practical, rather than liturgical, challenges: the legal distinction within England, where there is no obligation to bury a pre-24 week baby who dies in utero, means it is not always possible to obtain a death certificate for a miscarried child. And without a death certificate, it is not possible to obtain a council cemetery plot.

This means that, under English law, it is not possible to have a burial (except for some hospitals’ provision of a shared grave, or if you have access to private land) for a child miscarried before 24 weeks. This legal technicality may account for the lack of funerals given for miscarried children, compared to those considered stillbirths.

The 24-week marker not only serves as a legal time limit for most abortions under the Abortion Act 1967, but also serves as a legal reference point for whether babies are registered with the Register Office, and this in turn creates structural barriers against ritualising the death of miscarried babies.

This throws up the question of whether 24 weeks should play this kind of legal role: these days, it can’t even be considered a reliable marker of post-birth viability. It certainly does not measure the weight of the grief, the scale of the suffering, of a mother and father who have lost a child in this way.

(Photo: Getty)

The post The grief of miscarriage is terrible. Can we make mourning easier? appeared first on Catholic Herald.