March 16, 2005
Raping the Dead
by Lorraine Berry
This was originally posted as a Kos diary. Liza has asked me to repost it here. I want to give props to Liza for giving me this amazing platform, and in the days and weeks to come, expect to see rants from me on reproduction, sexuality, and claiming the body back from the right wing.
It isn't often that a news story will make me cry, but this one did. The layers of wrongness here are so manifold that it's going to take me a while to sort through them. So please bear with me.
The essential story is this. Sacred Heart of Mary Catholic Church in Boulder, Colorado, has taken upon itself the task of "rescuing" fetuses from the facilities where they are sent to be cremated. The purpose? To use the remains as part of a "memorial for the unborn." That's right. It’s a memorial to the fetuses that have been lost through miscarriage, abortion, and stillbirth. And, it's all been done without the permission of the women whose pregnancies ended.
I am filled with rage. Why? Let me see if I can count the ways.
First of all, the fact that the "scientist" who ran the medical waste disposal site felt compelled to contact his local Catholic church gives me the willies. Will there be a memorial to gall bladders next? Or brain tumours?
Secondly, imagine for a moment, that you're Jewish or Muslim or Hindu or, like me, an atheist. You experience a miscarriage in a hospital. Your fetus is then turned over to the Catholics to make a holy shrine to it. Don't you think you’d find it a wee bit disturbing? Feel that perhaps your own religion had been denigrated by the assumption by another religion that it had a right to your fetus?
Third. Deep breath. In 1996, I had a second-trimester spontaneous abortion. A fetus I was carrying, a little boy, a child I wanted, spontaneously aborted when I was at a conference. I was a thousand miles from home, and bleeding and in pain and alone, I delivered a fetus in the women's restroom. The experience was devastating. But the hospital staff, and the EMTs who retrieved the fetus, were unbelievably kind and gentle. I agreed to allow an autopsy to be performed because I wanted to know why my body had expelled him. The autopsy contained no answers. Afterward, the fetus was disposed of. I assume, cremated. Because, while the possiblity of that child and the love I felt for what I was carrying within me were real, when he emerged, he was not fully formed, he was incapable of life outside of my womb, and in purely scientific terms, he was the product of a spontaneous abortion.
Did I grieve him? Of course. Did it hurt me that people had no idea how to respond to my loss? Of course. Do I wish there would have been some form of ritual that could have acknowledged my loss? Yes. But, because it was my loss, I enacted my own ritual. I grieved my own way. And I said goodbye to the possibility of that child's life on my terms. Not anyone else's.
If I had found out that someone had absconded with that body, a part of me, in order to make a political point about abortion, I would have taken those people to court. I would have charged them with theft. I would have charged them with rape. You see, that fetus was part of my body. Not anyone else's.
If the people of Sacred Heart of Mary would like to build a memorial to fetuses, go for it. But they could at least have the human decency to approach women who have suffered the loss of parts of their body--and ask their permission. But you see, they won’t do that. Because they do not recognize that a fetus is a part of a woman's body. They see it as a political football, and they want to call all the plays.
I think about the loss of that fetus from time to time. It's still a painful memory. But it's my memory. Not theirs. Goddamnit, not theirs.
Posted by in Abortion
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Found inMarch 20, 2005 10:45 PM
Say it loud, say it proud!
Scary story. Now that I am pregnant I am thinking about all of these things much more. I feel very sorry for your loss and even sorrier about the fact that this church thinks it knows what's best for all of these "unborn babies." What is surprising to me is that they treat miscarriage and abortion the same way here - it makes me feel like they think the mother did something to "deserve" or cause the miscarriage. Wow. I pray all the time that my pregnancy will go perfectly, but certainly if something did go wrong, I would want to be in charge of what happened after, you know? Thank you for sharing your story and the related one in Boulder.
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Comment by: Carolyn at March 16, 2005 12:23 PM
p.s. - Just wanted to clarify that I don't think that abortion is wrong and didn't mean to imply that in my comparison between abortion and miscarriage - but of course the Catholic church does. I guess the flip side of this is that this particular church could have a more liberal stance on abortion, though I'm not sure that's clear from their website.
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Comment by: liza at March 16, 2005 12:57 PM
Carolyn, Congratulations!
Welcome to my heaven and hell. Spawning can be a mixed blessing. Right now, life is good. The spawnage is dancing to The Police's "M u r d e r by numbers". The irony, especially given the topic of this post. But you should see their dance scene. It's a mix of Martha Graham and Spongebob. In other words, they look indecently cute dancing.
Welcome to the parenting club.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHA!
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Comment by: spyder at March 16, 2005 04:45 PM
I believe this story was in the news last summer, when one of the women involved in the "rescue" turned out to be a state legislator. She had actually written legislation that made it illegal to improperly dispose of fetal remains(an attempt to breach confidentiality issues at clinics) while simultaneously violating her own legal efforts. As i recall they had been doing this for several years, collecting the remains and baptizing them before burying them in unmarked graves(also a violation of Colorado law). The monument idea was an attempt to subvert the investigation into their previous law breaking behaviors.
We must keep in mind that the Mormons have, for decades, been rebaptizing all of us as we die, in order to fulfill the various prophecies of BY and JS. It is these acts that have led to their being the number one world repository of geneological information--and one of the main providers of personal data in the US. This has made them extraordinarily wealthy.
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Comment by: liza at March 17, 2005 12:28 AM
What happened to Lorraine happened to a relative of mine --after years of trying to have a baby. She was devasted, to say the least. But because she had declared her fetus her baby, she and her husband decided to have a funeral and a grieving ceremony.
Yes, I think that's what she called it, a grieving ceremony.
I feel like in cases like my friends and Lorraine's, hospitals turn the event into paperwork and the miscarriage into refuse. In her case, because there were indications the fetus was not thriving, she at least had time to prepare for the worst and think about the "what ifs" well enough to ask the hospital to let them go ahead and honor the fetus as the child that never was.
A spontaneous miscarriage? I can't even process the horror of that one, but boy, how many women do I know that have gone through that horror during their first trimester.
Not to put a damper on any woman's desire to have a baby, but nothing, NOTHING is certain during a pregnancy. And there is no amount of tests or procedures or forecasting that can change that.
To tell you the truth, I think that there is no truer act of faith than pregnancy, motherhood and parenting in general because you can never, EVER know for certain anything about your baby, how they'll develop as children and adults and what lives they'll lead.
But, utter faithfulness this thing called parenting.
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Comment by: lorraine at March 17, 2005 08:01 AM
I think that one thing that gets forgotten, and that you've pointed out, Liza, is something like one-third of all pregnancies end spontaneously. The body recognizes that the blastocyst/zygote/embryo/fetus is incapable of thriving and rejects it. Apparently, many of these happen around the time a woman would expect her period, so she never knows she was pregnant.
I think the thing about pregnancy is that it's about hopes and dreams for something in the future. If you've chosen to be pregnant, then you build an entire world around your pregnancy. When that ends, so do all the hopes and dreams. That's what's so hard to deal with in losing a pregnancy you wanted. And, I dare say, many women who choose abortion also experience this--but I would never presume to speak for them. We are all different.
As to the hospital. Yes. They give you the option of having the fetus for burial or for allowing them to incinerate it. I chose the latter. They also autopsied the fetus to see if they could find a genetic defect. As it was, there were none. Most likely, the problem had been in the placenta or in the attachment to my womb, but not in the fetus itself.
The act of kindness that I remember so well from the hospital was the OB-GYN who came in to do the D&C because parts of the placenta were still attached. He knew I had seen the fetus on an ultrasound, twice. So, when he turned on the ultrasound machine to see what he was doing, he said to me, "I'm going to turn this away from you. I know you saw your baby before, and now he's not there, and I don't want to make this any more painful for you." Such a small act of compassion, but so meaningful to me.
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Comment by: Carolyn at March 17, 2005 11:59 AM
Despite all the sad talk, I'm gonna hold onto the Martha-Gay Sponge dancing vision for a long time!
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Comment by: lorraine at March 17, 2005 12:06 PM
Oh gosh. Carolyn. I didn't mean to put a damper on your pregnancy. I have two amazing daughters who are the light of my life.
You're going to be fine. Okay. Maybe crazy, but fine.
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Comment by: Carolyn at March 16, 2005 12:16 PM