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I have grappled with abortion and miscarriages; I have not carried a child to term, though I long to do so. Oddly, for an abortion I didn't want at 19 I felt the need to name the child, and have been unable to let go of awareness of what that child might have grown to, even over two decades later. For miscarriages I felt no such self-punishing need, and wanted only to set them aside and keep on trying.
But it seems to me that the act of childbirth is such a profound event that one attempts to ignore it at one's peril. Dissociating oneself from the pain only pushes it out in another direction. Symbols and rituals help us cathartically grapple with emotional challenges; it may be that for this reason, some women discover a birth certificate helps them with this.
But there are some people who are very good at rerouting pain and other strong emotions (artists, etc.), and for these people a birth certificate may actually be a problem because it gives them an object that pulls them back into their pain, rather than an object that helps them acknowledge and set it aside. For those people a birth certificate could cause more harm than good.
Could this be optional? The woman's choice? A hard one to make, to be sure, but better than no choice at all.
