I lost a daughter perinatally (4 days after her birth) and I can sum it up for you: when you lose a baby basically at full term you are left so empty-handed. Anything that you can keep takes on huge significance as something to touch and handle. So I think that's why the impulse. Also you sort of do want a record that that baby was there, however briefly.

I'm not sure whether that is the government's responsibility or not. But hospitals can definitely help. In our case the hospital helped us make casts of our daughter's hands and feet, snipped her hair for us, and gave us a long record of her stay. All of these things are really precious to my family. The materials for all that were generously donated along with training for the staff on doing the casts, and that might be a program people might want to consider starting in their area, if hospitals are open to it.

Carol, you take things very literally. That's how you think. Other people have different ways of thinking. To some of them symbols are very important.

It's not for you to decide that their way of thinking is inferior to yours.

But IIRC, don't birth certificates state on them "certificate of live birth" or something to that effect. Maybe (probably!) I'm insensitive, but isn't this exactly what is not the case of a stillborn child?

What an awful thing for a family to go through, though. I can understand the desire to seek something, anything to help following the loss of a desired child.

Why would I want a piece of a dead relative? If you want a piece of paper that says that you born a stillborn child, then make it yourself. To me it is just a sign of selfishness. I need something to help me remember. What consideration is there for the dead child? Does the dead child care that there is no certificate recording its existence?

As to the person calling down the writer for being too literal. Sorry. This is an opinion piece. If you don't like the opinion, then maybe you should read something else or attack the thoughts rather than the person.

from someone who worries that her overweight young daughter will most likely become a "hootchie mama" simply because of her weight.

Ms. Lloyd, you are like someone who corrects the grammar of a love letter. While you may be technically correct, you have entirely missed the point.

I truly pity you.

is because they want to chip away at the legal basis for abortion rights.

and how you cooperate in keeping these people down.

Frankly I find your vitacentrism and your morbidiphobic behaviors repellent. You are no better than Kos who today lambasted Kathy Sierra.

The true victims here are of course the mothers(*) whose babies were taken from them by the evil banality of a patriarchal obstetro-morticio industrial complex.

Oh the fetality!

(*) I won't respond to the dead baby haters that would claim these individuals aren't mothers just because they had a stillbirth. Vitacentrist!

Wouldn't a certificate called a Stillbirth Certificate make sense? Weigh and measure the baby, give his or her name and the time of stillbirth just like on a birth certificate. A Stillbirth Certificate could serve the same purpose as a death certificate and a birth certificate. You would be acknowledging the baby's birth and death, like everyone else's birth and death. Would such a certificate be insensitive?

Call it a certificate of live birth, call it a certificate of stillbirth, call it certificate of miscarriage, call it whatever you want. Just stop calling it a figment of the mother's imagination. As someone who has been through five miscarriages hearing that all the changes your body has gone through were meaninless, all your hopes and dreams are pointless, and that human shaped object with eyes, hands and feet you had to drag down to the ER just a lump of tissue to be tossed in the trash is both heartbreaking and crazy-making. At least if they had to issue a certificate the hospital staff would have to acknowledge that you lost a baby, and hopefully acknowledge your grief. Sometimes you just have to show paperwork to get people to believe you.

Or we could just start honoring the loss women feel when they lose a wanted child, and accept the fact that there are mothers in this world who do not have living children. I think having the legislation passed might be an easier battle.

i am a labor nurse, who takes care of both the mother and the stillborn baby. i also live in massachusetts, and i am pretty sure the stillborns don't get a birth certificate. we do provide a non official certificate of birth, not live birth like a birth certificate is, but one that will include the statistics everyone wants, such as weight and length, date and time of birth. we take pictures, and treat everyone involved in a respectful manner, because usually this is someones tragedy we are dealing with.

i don't think official birth certificates should be issued for stillborn babies. it won't help anyone cope with anything so tragic as losing a wanted and loved baby. that will take time, and support from family and friends. i also think there is a legal precedent for tax purposes, if a child is liveborn, the parents are able to claim them in the year they are born, even if they live only for a very brief time. (i don't have the exact rules on this, and could be very wrong about it.)

whatever happens, it is bound to make someone unhappy. i do think the anti abortion people are probably involved in this idea.

I have a friend who is a nurse practitioner and it is her speciality to deliver dead babies. She uses the term babies (not because she's an anti-abortion rights person) but because that is what her patients call them. They are wanted babies.

The psychological and emotional impact of losing a child (fetus, baby, child) is something I don't pretend to understand.

The issue here, is about the State. Acknowledging that you lost a child by your family/friends/community is important--many may prefer to think of this as a "miscarriage" or to encourage you "to try again," like your pregnancy is a renewable resource. How much are you invested in the State as a real entity? The State is a fiction we tell ourselves. It is made up of people (renewed), structures and institutions, and most importantly rule-giving and enforcing bodies. Part of those rule-giving bodies is the ability to define personhood. To define the "normal" human. That is part of the fiction and the death and birth certificates are part of starting and concluding that prescribed notion of the individual.

If you are wholy invested in the State, you don't see this or that piece of paper as part of the fiction, then I see why that paper is important to you. If you have doubts about the State, if you find your identity making--your ability to self-define--among communities (religions, political, artistic, educational, etc.) or within family, then you are less likely to give key significance to that piece of paper. This is not a judgement, we are probably all on both sides of that divide throughout our lives. My concern is, why is taking advantage of the grief of parents who have lost who they see as their child before it is born in order to grant all fetuses personhood? If a piece of paper is so important, does it need to be the normative "birth" and "death" certificates. Something horribly wrong has occured and stillbirths are much less common today than in the past, so could there not be an alternative or is that frankly not the point. Are people in crisis and grief really concerned over this or do this just want something to cling to as they go home?

Peace