On the afternoon of Feb. 3, 25 people gathered in the chapel of Smiths Funeral Home in Sarnia, Ont., to honour the passing of Angel Lynzey Burden.
The community sent flowers and cards of condolence. Angel's ashes sat on a table up front, in a decorative urn half the size of a coffee cup.
It was a teary farewell, considering no one actually had known the deceased, so Pastor Jay Black could not offer the comfort of memories to be cherished. Instead, he described a future that would never be – no baby showers, no first birthday, no need for the newly bought bassinette, no frilly dresses.
Dresses, because, at the time of the service, everyone assumed Angel had been a girl. At seven centimetres in size and a mere 20 grams, not even the pathologist could be sure.
It was only days later, after the funeral and the wake held with sandwich trays and crudités at the Burden home, did lab results reveal that Angel was actually a 13-week-old male fetus, who, after he was miscarried, fit easily in the palm of his mother's hand.
“I tried to look, but there was nothing to indicate he was a boy,” said his mother, Tina Burden, who is glad she and her husband, Allan, picked a unisex name. “But … even at 13 weeks he had fingers, he had long feet, a mouth, ears, eyes, toes. To me, he was my baby and shouldn't be tossed aside like he was nothing.”
A few weeks earlier, an ultrasound had told the Burdens that they had lost the pregnancy. After that, on Jan. 25, Ms. Burden, 35, suddenly began to deliver while she and her daughters, 11 and 2, were visiting the children's grandmother. At the hospital, nurses told her about the hospital's group-burial service for early-pregnancy losses. But Ms. Burden said no: “I wanted my own personal funeral, to grieve my child in my own way.”
It's a sentiment shared by an increasing number of would-be parents. Miscarriages end roughly 15 per cent of pregnancies for women in their 20s and as many as one in four for women over 35. Most happen at home, behind a bathroom door, and couples grieve privately. Hospitals traditionally treat the “early products of conception” as medical waste, bundling them in biohazard bags to off-site incinerators. Under vital-statistics laws in most provinces, any pregnancy that ends before 20 weeks is a non-event – no birth or death certificate, medical investigation or formal burial necessary.
Yet across Canada and in other parts of the Western world, the modern miscarriage has birthed a new and potentially incendiary brand of perinatal bereavement.
A growing number of women and their advocates, many of them staunchly pro-choice, are pushing for the formal recognition of the miscarried fetus as a symbol of their grief and loss. In some cases, they're seeking out these rites even when, for medical reasons, they have chosen to terminate the pregnancy.
But the fetal funeral could be a Pandora's Box. Some graveyards and funeral-home staff have been reluctant to bury remains for which no burial permit can be issued. Medical staff worry it may push patients to dwell on losses they would rather forget. More profoundly, holding funerals for fetuses raises implicit, uncomfortable questions about when life begins.
Those who oppose abortion have long fought for the respectful burial of human fetuses in acknowledgment of their personhood. Can society simultaneously agree to mourn the early fetus and still sanction its destruction? Could the desire to recognize formally the death of a fetus – which has no legal status as a life – reignite the abortion debate?
“This trend of ritualizing grief … will be watched with enthusiasm and pleasure by those who want to restrict women's reproductive choices, and watched with concern by those interested in preserving women's reproductive liberty,” predicted Arthur Schafer, director of Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba.
“Anything that encourages us to view early-stage pregnancy as personhood could impact the law on the choice to terminate pregnancy and on embryonic stem-cell research.”
