(~7 min read)
This is an account of my own pregnancy loss, mingled with thoughts on related topics. I've left out the more graphic details, but proceed with caution if the subject of pregnancy loss is difficult for you. Lots of love and healing to you if you are recovering from or grieving a lost pregnancy.
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Mormons are pretty obsessed with keeping records of family relationships. Many of us spend hours doing genealogy research: tracing our roots back to our early ancestors using census data, immigration lists, rubbings from old gravestones, anything that will provide information on another branch of the family tree. We decipher handwriting to learn who married whom and when, we log names and dates into charts, and we literally store this data inside a mountain in a vault that can withstand a nuclear blast. We want to make sure that every single person who ever lived is accounted for, and that's not hyperbole.
So, Mormons love genealogy. Hold that thought, and I'll come back to it.
Several years ago, I got pregnant for the third time. At my first doctor appointment, around 8 weeks gestation, I learned that the pregnancy had already terminated. My obstetrician offered two options: schedule a surgery to remove the embryo, or wait for a spontaneous miscarriage. I asked her which she recommended, and she said it was my choice.
I reasoned that there was no need to go in for an elective surgery, which carried its own inherent risks, like any surgery does. My body would just take care of things when it was ready. But also, there was definitely a whisper in the back of my mind: Dilation and curettage. That's the same surgery they use for abortions. I don't think I want to do that.
My doctor gave me the impression that I would likely experience something like a heavy period. Several weeks later, on a Saturday, I started bleeding. My husband Matt was an hour away, camping with one of our kids, so I put my other kid in front of the TV and hung out in the bathroom. I passed a lot of blood. An unnerving amount of blood. Everything went black and starry, and I fainted, hitting my head on the door frame on the way down.
When I came to on my bathroom floor, I called a friend. She found me lying on the cool tile in our front entryway, trying not to move too much. Matt came home from camping, and my friend took my kids to her house. I fainted again and then took a ride in an ambulance to our nearby hospital.
The on-call doctor was occupied, so we waited for her backup to arrive while I continued to bleed. In the case of a full term pregnancy, you deliver the baby and its accoutrements (cord, placenta, etc.) and then the uterus continues to contract until it has flushed out all the extra blood and tissue that was in there. In my case, that process wasn't working properly, and my body just kept pumping out blood. The ER staff gave me various drugs to stop the bleeding, but none of them worked.
My blood pressure dipped very low, like, diastolic in the 40s low. It's a pretty terrible feeling to be in a facility full of trained health care workers who are trying one thing after another, failing to stop your uncontrolled bleeding. It's the closest I've ever felt to death, lying there weakly while my energy literally drained out of me.
At one point I asked someone when I'd need to get a blood transfusion. "Oh, don't worry, you aren't there yet," he reassured me. "You can lose a third of your blood volume and not need a transfusion." My first thought was, Well, how do you measure that third? How do you know how much of it I left back at my house, in the toilet, on the bath mat, in my underwear?
Eventually, the doctor showed up, and I was prepped for surgery. Since I was at a Catholic hospital, I had to sign a form in which I had to either declare that I would bury the stuff they were about to remove from my body, known as "products of conception," or else give them permission to bury it.
Got that? I was lying on a gurney, exhausted, disoriented, and with a plummeting blood pressure. I was minutes from surgery, and before we could proceed I was required to make decisions about what to do with leftover blood and tissues, fragments of an embryo that had stopped developing a month or two previously. If that's pro-life, it sure didn't feel pro-MY life. I signed the paper, then counted backward from one hundred and fell into anesthesia sleep around 96.
A few hours later I was sitting on the couch at home, sobbing with my head on Matt's shoulder. I was sad about the lost pregnancy, but far, far more than that, I was letting out the terror I had been holding all day, the fear that I was going to die. While lying in the hospital bed, when nothing was working to stop the bleeding, when my blood pressure kept dropping, I wondered if I had said goodbye to my kids for the last time.
I subsequently talked with other women who had experienced miscarriage. More than one confirmed scary amounts of blood loss, lightheadedness, and fainting. This was not some wildly unusual circumstance, and the fact that I was sent home with such a pitiful lack of information still makes me angry.
Shortly after my miscarriage, I met with the leader of my local church congregation, called a bishop. I asked him to clarify our doctrine about the status of that lost pregnancy. Will it be "on the records of the church," a phrase we use when blessing new babies and baptizing new members? Will I meet that person some day? Will he or she be part of our family in the afterlife?
I was surprised to learn that there aren't answers to these questions. There is no official doctrine or policy about exactly when the spirit enters the body, what the status of that spirit is in case of miscarriage, and if the spirit is there, whether it is linked to the woman who carried it, however briefly. Nowhere does our church doctrine declare that life begins at conception, or at 8 weeks, or at 15 weeks. A pregnancy does not have the same status as a baby that is born and takes a breath.
So how is it possible that a church that cares so deeply about record keeping and linking families together, a church that encourages me to find and document every tenth-great grandparent, has no need to document a miscarried embryo/fetus/baby? Why don't we give it a name and make a record of it? (To be clear, some people still do give their miscarried babies a name and/or hold a funeral service, but it's a matter of personal preference, not based on official policy.)
Could it be that live birth qualifies one for a different, more fully realized category of personhood? I suggest that a living person is more important than a potential person and should have more rights. You are welcome to believe differently, but to force your own religious beliefs on others is unethical and unconstitutional.
Six of the nine justices on the Supreme Court are Catholics. What if instead they were Jehovah's Witnesses, who believe that blood transfusions are against God's will? Would it be ethical or constitutional for them to force such a belief on the rest of the country, or to allow state legislatures to do so? Of course not.
There’s a flashback scene in season two of Bridgerton in which the mom is in active labor with her eighth child. Things aren’t going well, and the doctor pulls aside the man of the house to consult. He’ll try to save both, but if he must choose between them, should he save the mom or the baby? It’s disturbing and shocking, and I wonder if it’s the kind of urgent scenario people picture when they say that they are only in favor of abortion to protect the life of the mother.
But reality is often far less dramatic. What about a woman who was preparing to leave her abuser, only to discover that she’s pregnant with his child? What about a woman struggling with mental illness, or who knows from past pregnancies that she is headed for a black hole of postpartum depression? What about a woman who is exhausted to the bone due to caring for the children she already has? Shouldn’t we allow women to determine for themselves how to save their own lives?
Pregnancy and childbirth and are inherently dangerous and potentially deadly and should not be forced on any woman. If you believe that terminating a pregnancy is wrong, please understand that you are holding a personal religious belief that applies to you alone. You are free to go your whole life without ever getting an abortion. But the United States is not a theocracy. We don't infringe on the rights of others to satisfy the religious beliefs of one group.
Leave a woman's medical care to the woman and her doctor. Give her the right to self-determination that you undoubtedly expect and demand for yourself.
Oh, the heartbreak! I never got to see what old stuff people give away in New England. It's the oldest region of our country; I'll bet their old stuff is pretty good.
