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Miscarriage/Abortion - just saving some thoughts.
I read this piece and in reply to it developed the following thing
The author speaks of that it should be up to the woman to define if the weeks-old fetus that left her body: If it was a child or a tissue. And I agree, and it seems quite logical to me - because grief is not about what we lost. It is about them who lost it. A funeral isn't there for the dead person, it's for the person they left behind.
I don't think that it is necessarily a clash between miscarriages and abortions. This is something that I took back with me from Japan, but there are aborted fetuses of any stage who are mourned just as a miscarried one would be. And the other way around, as I witnessed in my sister, there are miscarriages that are not mourned at all. An aborted child could have been unable to live if born, or it could not have been possible because other children in the family would not have received enough care anymore, or because it would have endangered the mother's life, or it could not have been a good idea for any other reason, but the mother/parents can still mourn it. Or a miscarriage could have been of a fetus that was unnoticed so far, or unwanted, or something else that made the fetus leaving naturally a good thing.
I feel like it's a harmful dichotomy to make, and one partly born out of a culture that didn't consider stillborn or miscarried babies worthy of a funeral until only a few years ago, that refuses to talk about miscarriages and makes women suffer in silence when they mourn them, and at the same time criminalized people for an abortion until not that much longer ago and still shames them for it. Neither is something that you talk about. Neither is something that you admit to outside of close friends, if you're lucky. So how would we develop a proper mourning culture for wanted fetuses of either kind?
The author speaks of that it should be up to the woman to define if the weeks-old fetus that left her body: If it was a child or a tissue. And I agree, and it seems quite logical to me - because grief is not about what we lost. It is about them who lost it. A funeral isn't there for the dead person, it's for the person they left behind.
I don't think that it is necessarily a clash between miscarriages and abortions. This is something that I took back with me from Japan, but there are aborted fetuses of any stage who are mourned just as a miscarried one would be. And the other way around, as I witnessed in my sister, there are miscarriages that are not mourned at all. An aborted child could have been unable to live if born, or it could not have been possible because other children in the family would not have received enough care anymore, or because it would have endangered the mother's life, or it could not have been a good idea for any other reason, but the mother/parents can still mourn it. Or a miscarriage could have been of a fetus that was unnoticed so far, or unwanted, or something else that made the fetus leaving naturally a good thing.
I feel like it's a harmful dichotomy to make, and one partly born out of a culture that didn't consider stillborn or miscarried babies worthy of a funeral until only a few years ago, that refuses to talk about miscarriages and makes women suffer in silence when they mourn them, and at the same time criminalized people for an abortion until not that much longer ago and still shames them for it. Neither is something that you talk about. Neither is something that you admit to outside of close friends, if you're lucky. So how would we develop a proper mourning culture for wanted fetuses of either kind?