Lives worth remembering

The loss of a stillborn baby or a miscarriage would once have been disregarded. Today there are signs that the Church is showing greater sensitivity to parents? grief

My father, a late convert to Catholicism, enjoyed fishing in the remoter backwaters of Canon Law. One evening, after a lengthy trawl, he informed us that in certain circumstances babies could be baptised in utero. After a moment?s astonished pause, his exasperated sister-in-law exclaimed: ?Well, really! As far as you are concerned, it?s not a religion: it?s a hobby?.

Sometimes it can seem like that. As research into genetics and reproductive biology accelerates, any discussion of the spiritual needs and status of an unborn child can become so academic as to seem far removed from the reality of ordinary experience. The miraculous promise of a little child is described in terms such as zygote and blastocyst; the moment of his or her ?ensoulment? is vociferously disputed and the importance of the embryo is ever more closely identified with viability.

In a recent article in The Tablet (?Is the foetus a person??, 28 February), Clifford Longley touched on the problem. ?Foetuses?, he wrote, ?have never been given any recognition as human persons.? And he continued: ?A woman who miscarries is left to her private grief, often cruelly so. A foetus cannot receive a sacrament. Funerals for miscarried foetuses are unheard of and no Church has a rite for them in its official liturgy. Prayers are not said for its soul.? To some extent, in the context of comparatively recent history, he was not wrong, but the article provoked many letters disputing his views.

On the question of whether or not a foetus may receive a sacrament, my father clearly had a point. The idea of very early baptism has long been important to Christians, as several correspondents reminded us. Sister Francisca of the Poor Clares, for example, wrote to tell us of an Irish rite dating, probably, from the ninth century, in which a pregnant woman whose life is threatened undergoes baptism on behalf of her child. Several other examples were offered of the dignity and even the dynastic significance attached to unborn children throughout history.

There is a view that an unborn or a new-born child, being incapable of sin, has no need of baptismal graces. But the same argument might well apply to any infant baptism. And although it is widely agreed that a stillborn child should not be baptised, where there is life ? however brief its duration and even when it is totally dependent upon the mother ? baptism is sometimes, and properly, given.

The treatment of such a child is, of course, inextricably bound up with that of the bereaved mother. Consider the case of a friend of mine who, some years ago, became pregnant despite having an intra-uterine coil fitted. She already had five children and had decided that she wanted no more but, against the odds, a baby was conceived ? and was then born, crying, but too early to live. The doctor in charge, at a leading London maternity hospital, was pragmatic. ?I?ve found your coil,? he said to her, ?and I?ve put it in your bag.?

His was a strictly logical attitude: the coil might be used again; a child had not been wanted and this tiny boy could not survive; what was there to worry about? The fact that the baby uttered cries was neither here nor there. He was put into a kidney-dish beside his mother?s head, where he died.

Logic, however, is an unreliable guide. Though the mother might not have wanted another child, her every instinct, once she was aware that she had conceived, was to protect and nurture the new life within her. Her distress at his death would have been insupportable, had it not been for a nurse who remembered those words of the penny catechism which provide for a lay person to administer the sacrament ?in case of necessity when a priest cannot be had?. She took the dying infant and, gently, she baptised him.

There is no record of what happened to his body thereafter. The likelihood is that the hospital ?took care of it?. As for his mother, she was transferred to a ward full of new babies, where uninformed staff assumed that she too had a live child and repeatedly told her to find and feed him. Distraught, she discharged herself within a few hours.

The good news is that such an unsympathetic attitude is far less likely to prevail today. One of the letters to reach The Tablet came from Jane LLoyd and Declan McConville. Jane is a canon in the Church of England while Declan is a Catholic deacon and together they form the full-time chaplaincy team at Poole Hospital in Dorset. It is one of the largest hospitals on the south coast of England, with 800 beds and an average of 4,000 births a year. It also has specialist paediatric and neonatal intensive care units.

In addition, there is a suite of rooms known as the ?Spring Unit?. The acronym stands for ?Supporting parents and relatives in neonatal grief?, and the rooms are reserved specifically for miscarrying women and the families of children likely to be stillborn.

Such families are offered sensitive support by the chaplaincy team of Jane LLoyd and Declan McConville. They are a very impressive pair. Together with doctors, midwives and, often, a radiographer who might first have detected the problem, they offer whatever help seems most useful. Sometimes, this means the bereaved parents want to be alone with their child, sometimes many more people come in. ?It starts as an incredible tragedy,? says Declan, ?but it can become rather wonderful, and healing. Everyone can get to see and to hold and to bless the baby and then, if they want it, we?ll go to their homes and help them prepare the funeral.?.

Although both chaplains are at pains to point out that official funerary rites certainly do exist specifically for stillborn children, in practice their funerals tend towards the unorthodox: ?We go with a blank page. Many of the people we?re involved with aren?t ?churchy?, but it becomes a way of letting them express their pain and their loss and of saying goodbye to the child, celebrating a short little life. To plan it themselves gives them a sense of ownership and, as far as we?re concerned, it?s whatever helps them. A lot of people have a residual faith, even if they seldom practise it, and often there is a feeling that something must be done.?

Each bereaved mother leaves the hospital with a tape-measure, cut to the length of the baby?s body, marked with the circumference of its head. These days, the baby will have been dressed and put into a cot, its handprints and footprints recorded and photographs taken. These stay with their medical records for at least 20 years: traumatised parents know they can return, whenever they like.

It would be impossible to exaggerate the importance of these things. Many years after the event, parents ? generally mothers ? will drift back to the hospitals where their children were born and died. Jane LLoyd remembers a woman who turned up 40 years after the death of her son. As is so often the case, her husband had wanted to spare her the pain of a funeral but she finally acknowledged that she needed some kind of formal ritual. Astonishingly, Jane was able to help her find and decorate the little boy?s grave, and then his funeral was held ?exactly as if he had died yesterday. She was overjoyed.?

In the hospital chapel at Poole, a welcoming place lit with brilliant stained-glass rainbows, there is a very special book of remembrance which is kept locked away most of the time. In it, parents may preserve photographs of their children, or poems about them, letters and drawings from siblings, birthday cards and tiny, heart-rending hand-prints. It is, far and away, the most moving book I have ever seen.

Some of the letters in the book are from women who had had abortions. These were seldom easy decisions, and those who wrote appeared to make their decision based on the belief that they would spare the child pain.

As to the thorny question of the age at which an embryo becomes a person, Jane is familiar with the arguments and wants nothing to do with them. ?I have conducted a funeral for a baby lost at nine weeks ? although in practice most are for babies of 19 weeks? gestation and beyond. But even a mother who miscarries at six weeks will be treated as if she has lost a baby, as indeed she has.? And she adds, with emphasis: ?It is, in fact, written into our policies: a baby is a baby at whatever stage of gestation.?

Many of those who wrote to The Tablet felt the same and there is much encouraging evidence that chaplains, hospital staff and funeral directors are moving towards the high standard of care offered at Poole. As for Clifford Longley?s assertion that no prayers are said for the souls of these children, he is right although such an omission is no oversight. A priest in South Australia, Fr Kevin O?Loughlin, writes: ?When I pray with the parents and families I reassure them that their child is with God and so is with them always. I reaffirm that truth when, at the baptism of the next child I acknowledge the life and death of their little one. Where I work, the born and the unborn are essentially the same.?

Declan McConville agrees: ?Why should we pray for the baby, when we believe that he has gone straight to heaven?? and he adds that this attitude was shared by a Muslim family for whose stillborn child he was recently asked to conduct a funeral.

We should not, perhaps, be surprised at this last piece of information. In their grief, parents may well forget their religious differences and turn with gratitude to a ready source of comfort. ?Whatever their faith,? says Jane, ?they need to feel that, somehow or other, somewhere, their baby is safe. It really is a tremendous privilege to be allowed to help.?