Losing a child before you’ve even had a chance to get to know them is a wound that cuts deep. For any woman who has ever had a miscarriage, stillbirth, or lost a child soon after delivery, the pain is real, lasting, and can be quite confusing.

Up to one-quarter of clinically recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage and there are about 25,000 stillbirths in the U.S. every year—nearly 70 a day.

There are countless reasons a pregnancy can end in miscarriage or stillbirth, and in today’s toxic-overloaded world, the suspects are endless: everything from common chemicals in plastic water bottles to toxins in our couches, to the much more rare genetic issues that can cause a pregnancy to terminate. But the reasons why miscarriages and stillbirths happen don’t matter nearly as much to the women who lose their babies as making sense of it all and moving on.

How does a woman grieve for a child she hardly knew? And how does she go on to try again?

Meet Kiley Hanish. She and her husband Sean lost their first child when Kiley was 35 weeks pregnant. Their story is the inspiration for the film “Return to Zero”, made by her husband. It tells the aching story of her son’s death in utero and the couple’s grieving process.

After the film’s success, Hanish left her job as an occupational therapist in order to help other women who had lost a child either in miscarriage, stillbirth, or as a newborn.

“There weren’t too many resources out there,” Hanish told EcoSalon. She struggled to make sense of her own loss, and while the film process helped her and Sean move on (they now have two children), there was something bigger driving Hanish, some work that was guiding her, she says.

She started the Return to Zero Center for Healing, which leads retreats all over the world for women who are grieving the loss of a child.

Hanish works with other facilitators to engage the process, but the work, she says, is largely intuitive, something much bigger than her or the women. “Just being together [with other women who’ve lost a child] helps all of us to heal,” she explains.

The retreats, while held at peaceful and beautiful locations, aren’t exactly the definition of relaxing vacations—women attend to face their painful grief head on—and the retreats have been selling out. Women use words like “grateful”, “empowered” and “feeling whole again” to describe their takeaway. Some even return to further their healing work at future retreats. And Hanish says it’s what keeps her going. “These women realize they have a community—other women who understand their grief—and that is such a huge factor in the healing process.”

Hanish has also begun working with hospitals to help improve the system when dealing with stillbirth. Her own experience in the hospital with her son was rather unpleasant—an uninformed and unprepared staff. Hanish is educating health care providers on how to better care for families who experience the loss of a baby and help families spend time together before saying their last goodbye.

For more information, visit the Return to Zero Center for Healing website.

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Grieving woman image via Shutterstock

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The Permacouture institute is a transatlantic business, with education programs in both the UK and U.S. Their courses span small scale school projects to university programs, marking seeds at seed libraries for their fiber and dying potential to running workshops like Dinner to Dye For. In this week’s article by London based writer Sarah Lewis-Hammond called Permacouture’s Dinner To Dye For (London Style), she gives us a first hand look at what dinner is like when “dying” is a main course.

In the latest assault on reproductive rights, losing a pregnancy could mean serious legal consequences for the mother – even the death penalty. In Legislating Misogyny: Miscarriage Could Now Become A Crime (Really), Senior Editor Andrea Newell writes “As you cry for your loss and for the child you will never know, a male police officer arrives and asks you, ‘What did you do to cause this?’ As you are trying to come to terms with your own unfounded feelings of guilt, a man is putting it into words and demanding answers, never mind the fact that in most cases doctors cannot determine the precise cause of a miscarriage. Despite that, the burden is on you to prove that your behavior did not in some way cause your pregnancy to terminate, or you could face life in jail or the death penalty.” A controversial topic and one that has us all talking (and screaming).

HeARTbeat columnist Dominique Pacheco writes this week about Posies for Predators and questions whether colorblindness lends some advantage to seeing the world. In HeARTbeat: Doris Mitch’s Series Posies For Predators Asks “Can You See Red & Green?,” Pacheco writes “And so Mitsch’s series asks us to consider her musings. Though the answers may be harder to suss, she is perhaps encouraging the other 92 to 93 percent of us to understand the striking differences of color recognition as we contemplate her luscious images stripped of their ‘natural’ color. Or, at least our perceptions of it.”

“Local” is the new “global” and fancy is put on the back burner for simpler, more laid back food. We like this (as much as we appreciate a meal with all the aesthetically pleasing trimmings). In Foodie Underground: Haute Is Out, Fun Is In, food columnist Anna Brones says the push for local might be because of the down economy but no matter, “it’s empowering to know that food change could come from the ground up. No longer dictated by big restaurants, it’s the smaller, more local operations that are making a difference and the rest of the world is taking notice.”

In Sex By Numbers: One Night Stands, columnist Abigail Wick might just have us at one night stands. Who hasn’t had one glorious night? Wick writes “In recent weeks, a trend emerged among this column’s readers: namely, one-night stands. Whether you’re actively relishing in its minimal-strings-attached pleasures or simply curious about how to play the field, it seems ladies are of the consensus that life might be sweeter if you adhere to this adage: Why buy the bull when you can just have it for sport?” A must read.

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In the latest assault on reproductive rights, losing a pregnancy could mean serious legal consequences for the mother – even the death penalty.

Imagine that you are several weeks pregnant and growing more excited by the day. You have decided to wait to tell people until you are past that tricky first trimester, the time period of so many losses (some estimate that 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage). At your first checkup, the doctor scans your belly and frowns. Scans again and frowns. There is no heartbeat. An ultrasound confirms that your baby is not moving and there is no blood flow, just a sad, little unmoving body.

As you cry for your loss and for the child you will never know, a male police officer arrives and asks you, “What did you do to cause this?” As you are trying to come to terms with your own unfounded feelings of guilt, a man is putting it into words and demanding answers, never mind the fact that in most cases doctors cannot determine the precise cause of a miscarriage. Despite that, the burden is on you to prove that your behavior did not in some way cause your pregnancy to terminate, or you could face life in jail or the death penalty.

Sound like something from The Handmaid’s Tale? Margaret Atwood might be prescient. We are well on our way to living in a dystopian society caused by the systematic dismantling of women’s healthcare and rights. 2011 has been an appalling year for women. State after state has mounted a legislative assault on Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood, chipping away at a woman’s right to choose, access to affordable birth control, STD screening and early breast cancer detection. But, it hasn’t stopped there.

Legislators have suggested that women carry abortion insurance in the event they might be raped and a Georgia bill proposes prosecution of women who can’t prove they didn’t intentionally cause a miscarriage. Thirty-eight states have fetal homicide laws, designed to protect the fetus from attack from a third party, like a violent male partner, while other states have chemical endangerment laws passed to punish parents who expose their children to meth fumes – yet overwhelmingly, these laws are now being used against the women themselves. South Carolina has prosecuted one man for attacking a pregnant woman, but almost three hundred women for their behavior during pregnancy. Other states have followed suit, twisting the language to focus on punishing women.

Of all the proposed and recently passed legislation, the Georgia bill proposed by Rep. Bobby Franklin potentially punishing women for miscarriages is the most disturbing. The language of the law demands that women prove “no human involvement whatsoever in the causation.” This vague language leaves the door wide open for prosecutorial abuse.

The bill has been shelved for now (and in a further twist, the representative behind it, Bobby Franklin, passed away July 26th during development of this story). Regardless of the tragedy of this individual’s death, the fact that anyone could put that into words, and attempt to pass it, affecting thousands of women in one state with the potential for other state legislators to follow suit – speaks volumes about what men in power think of women. It spells out their belief that they have the right to oppress women and punish them without proof for perceived behaviors and lifestyle choices.

Even though many pregnancies end in miscarriage, doctors routinely tell women that they will not do any additional testing until a woman has had three consecutive losses. Three investigations. Three heartbreaks where a mother can be questioned and be blamed, when she is already feeling grief, hopelessness and despair of ever having the child she wants so much. It is an incredibly private and painful time, and legislators want to not only intrude, but vilify and punish. Should law enforcement really determine if a woman is to be charged, when even doctors can’t say with certainty why a pregnancy ended and will do nothing about it until she has had three losses?

What is the purpose of this law? It and others like it are simply state-sanctioned witch hunts. The chemical endangerment law, passed to prosecute parents who subject their children to harmful fumes in meth labs, has been expanded to include pregnant women who tests positive for drug use or whose infants test positive after birth, and even women who have lost pregnancies when the cause can’t be proven.

Prosecuting women with drug problems would seem like a deterrent to drug use during pregnancy, but realistically, it will more likely just cause women to not seek help, and when they are pregnant is precisely the time they need help the most – before their babies are damaged by their habits. This could cause more babies to be born with health problems or more women to seek abortions for fear of being prosecuted if their baby tests positive.

This could deter women from considering giving up their children for adoption, as well. Many adoption agencies question birth mothers about their medical histories and habits during pregnancy to get an idea of the health of the child. If birth mothers believe that their behavior will be used against them, they will either lie or simply avoid adoption altogether.

This virtually eliminates a woman’s right to medical privacy. No woman will want to tell her doctor or any other medical health professional the truth about her habits, and this can have serious repercussions when medical staff don’t have all the facts when they are treating someone. Will all reports of miscarriages be investigated? With state budgets facing shortfalls and police forces enduring personnel cuts, is this what police should spend their time on?

Will women have to be nervous about every action they take? What if a woman drinks alcohol before she knows that she is pregnant and suffers a miscarriage? What about any woman who goes against a doctor’s advice and loses her pregnancy later, even though those two events might not be linked at all? What does “human involvement” mean? Where does it stop and who will the law be enforced against? Will all hospitals have to report gunshot victims and miscarriages?

I have a friend whose daughter died in utero 10 days before her due date, another who lost two different babies at 18 weeks, another whose twin girls were stillborn at 22 weeks, and several who had one, two or three miscarriages. If pressed, none of them could prove “no human involvement,” since their doctors weren’t even sure why it happened. Should these tragedies have potentially cost my friends their lives?

image: Y, La Bella Vida, Tourist On Earth

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Due to the common use of assisted reproductive technology, twins and triplets are now subconsciously labeled “natural” or “unnatural.”

In Katharine Wroth’s Salon article about the questions people ask pregnant women, she expresses her outrage at continually being asked “Were you trying?” She thought it was not only too personal, but the answer potentially passed judgment on her relationship and lifestyle. The good news is that once she gives birth, this question will most likely disappear. As the mother of twins, there is a question I feel is far more invasive and offensive that begins with pregnancy and is more frequent after birth.

“Are they natural?”

It is universally the most-hated question asked of parents of multiples, followed closely by “You must have your hands full!” or “Better you than me.” In just three words, strangers pry into your method of conception – a private and intimate moment – and tack a label on your children. Using the term “natural” to describe children conceived without any help automatically conveys what the asker thinks of children who were conceived using assisted reproductive technology (unnatural).

What is an unnatural child, anyway? Am I really supposed to answer: Yes or no? It’s shocking that strangers and casual acquaintances think it’s appropriate to ask someone how their children were conceived. Although fertility treatments account for 77 percent of multiple births, many single children are born that way, too, yet I don’t see the same people marching up to everyone they meet and asking how their child was conceived. Whenever I am asked, I get the creepy feeling that the person is either picturing me in bed with my husband or in a gown and stirrups at a doctor’s office. I was raised to be polite, so as yet I haven’t asked that person how they conceived their own children – flat on their backs or in some other position? Maybe next time, I will.

I have seven friends with twins to whom I am close enough to know the circumstances of their origin. Out of our group, six sets (one mom has two sets) were conceived with no outside intervention, and three were the result of assistance. We have all been asked how our children came to be, and I’ve noticed that when the answer is that they were conceived naturally, the asker smiles and is supportive, commenting on how cute the children are. When the answer is that they were conceived with help, the asker usually replies, “oh,” rather flatly. Many parents report that they have resorted to lying or giving outrageous answers like “No, they’re plastic” or “We had sex twice in one night” in an attempt to end unwelcome conversations in the mall or at the supermarket.

My friend’s mother was talking the other day about a coworker’s daughter who had IVF and subsequently had triplets. She said, “Well, you get what you deserve.”

Exactly what do couples who have infertility issues deserve? The repeated disappointment of not being able to get pregnant, month after month, while watching their family and friends reproduce without issue? The devastation of miscarriages? The bone-deep, hollowed-out heartache of watching a fetus on an ultrasound that is not moving and has no heartbeat? Or, because they had the nerve to see a specialist and use fertility medications, they “deserve” multiples? Evidently, multiples are somehow a punishment.

Assisted reproduction has become more common now due to a variety of factors, and it is certainly discussed more often. Perhaps that’s why people feel that they can ask parents how their children came to be, however inappropriate it still is. While it’s more common, judging by the reactions, assisted reproduction is still looked down on by many. For some reason, having one child through assisted reproduction is a miracle, but having multiples that way is unnatural, even though having twins or triplets is always out of anyone’s control. One commenter on a twins blog said that he had “natural” twins, and felt they were special, whereas twins conceived through IVF were not.

Whether people are fascinated, admiring, or just plain nosy, the issue affects more than the parents – the kids can hear these comments, questions, labels and tone of voice, too. One mother posted a story about a woman who asked her if her triplets were “natural.” She then said, sympathetically, that the mother’s life must be so hard and how did she possibly do it? Later, her sad daughter asked the mother if she wished she had had only one child instead of three. I worry, too, that soon my two-year-old sons will want to know what “natural” means. That funny, irrepressible Ben and serious, cuddly Sam will wonder if they are a burden to me due to the thoughtlessness of others.

When people ask, “Do twins run in your family?” (the fraternal twin question to “Are they natural?”) in that I-would-shoot-myself-in-the-head-if-it-were-me voice, I tell them I’m adopted. Although they are asking for personal information, it seems that when they get some they don’t expect, people shut up – at least long enough for me to make a getaway. But what’s next? Perhaps they’ll want to know if I plan to find my “real” parents someday.

image: Angela Vincent

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