by Samantha Schoech posted in Mom Stories
Apparently they just showed an episode of the Duggars where Mama Duggar finds out she has miscarried what would have been her 20th baby. Both Sara and Evonne wrote about their conflicting feelings about the Duggars and their loss.
I have never seen the show (and frankly, I don’t want to), so I’m not going to comment on their particular situation (except to say that the very idea of them give me the willies). But I will say that the comments section of both posts brought up a familiar pet peeve. If one more person calls a miscarriage the “death of a baby” I’m going to lose it.
Now before you start hacking me apart, let me just say that a miscarriage can be a horrible, horrible loss. I’ve had three of them and literally nothing in my life has been more painful than my third. I was so bereft at the loss of that pregnancy after three years of trying to have a baby that I couldn’t get out of bed for a week. What I experienced was real and intense grief.
But I did not lose a baby. What I lost was the idea of a baby. It was hope for the future. Losing that pregnancy was the death of something, but it was not the death of a baby. I have living children now and I can say that losing one of them would make my three miscarriages look like mosquito bites in comparison. I can’t even stand to ponder it.
I’m not trying to get political or establish when life begins. I am adamantly pro-choice and I believe life begins at conception. And I am not trying to discount the emotional toll a miscarriage can take.
But anyone who has ever lost a child who they once held in their arms, who lived with them and had a physical presence and a personality would tell you that a miscarriage is not the same thing.
We’ve probably all had miscarriages–many of them happen before we even know we’re pregnant. When we mourn, we mourn what could have been, but we don’t mourn an actual person.
The attitude that equates miscarriage with the death of a child bothers me because it is hyperbole and hyperbole bugs me (lipstick is not revolutionary, American politicians are not Nazis if they want to raise taxes). But mostly it bothers me because it’s what my grandmother would have called “ghoulish,” that weird delight we all take in recounting stories of horrible misfortune.
You know those conversations you sometimes get into where it just becomes one persona after another upping the ante on untimely deaths, awful illnesses, and hideous accidents?
Well, this “death of a baby” thing strikes me as the same thing. It’s reveling in its own melodrama.
My heart goes out to anyone mourning the loss of a pregnancy. Truly. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone (even the cringe-inducing Duggars). But let’s keep things in perspective.
What do you think? Play nice (anyone who calls me a Nazi will be deleted).
Read more from source:“babycenter-com-baby”
miscarriages are not baby deaths
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