Daleth

Thanks, diana and livius. I hope I phrased that well. It's a thought that's floated around my head for a long time, but I've never tried to express it before.

LadyShea, don't I know it.

Thank you as well, Opera Nut. It's been a long time now. Hard to imagine I'd have an 8 year old son and a 5 and a half year old daughter today. Different life completely. I don't do the candle thing, because I prefer my cats unsinged. Planting a tree didn't go so well, either. What I ended up doing was spending a long time working for support groups for people dealing with infertility and miscarriage and also working in animal rescue.

Dal

ETA: You're right, diana. I'm glad to say I'm past the mourning by now and I had no intention of turning this thread into something personal about me. So no, not cold of you.

Loren Pechtel

The babies with a brain stem but no brain are not persons, any more than a brain dead adult is. No brain function = pull the plug.

As for why it should be a standard:

Consider: What is the *ONE* real difference between man and beast? The mind. There's no other feature possessed only by people. Thus the definition of personhood must lie in the brain. Therefore, if there is no functional brain there can be no personhood.

HelenM

I know Christians who had stillbirths and/or miscarriages who believe as a result they have children in heaven that they will see again.

I think that to some extent what people say to you will reflect your own beliefs/nonbeliefs (or so I'd hope).

I agree with you that there's a huge difference between losing a person you know, compared with losing someone you don't know.

But I think some women feel as if they 'know' their baby, through having carried the baby for months and having felt the baby. And then they will see their baby and hold their no longer living baby, quite possibly - and may well name the baby. And I could understand some deciding to have a funeral. I'm not trying to argue against your own experiences/beliefs/convictions - only to say that I think some women may feel differently from you about stillborn babies.

Anyway, the point about knowing someone - this is something that has occured to me and bothers me about the pro-life movement, because - here you have a woman, who is a known person, and the pro-life people want to argue that her unborn baby has 'equal' rights. I think even if the mother's life is at risk some would want to chance it and see who survives. Yet the mother is known and the baby is not and that seems fundamentally wrong to me.

I hope you don't take offense at anything I wrote. Regardless of what your beliefs are, I would imagine that stillbirths are difficult experiences to go through, emotionally and physically too. I'm glad you have two children now. Yours are just a little younger than mine...

Helen

Rhaedas

My wife and I have had two boys, and two miscarriages. While we were sad at the loss of potential for both of the miscarriages, we never had a notion of lossing a "child", only the sadness of what could have been. Now they were both very early stages, so I think that's always a big factor as well.

This is exactly why early term abortion should be totally up to the individual...there is and may never be a clear dividing line of what is a fetus and what is an unborn child. I personally agree with the survivability outside the womb as one guideline. Would I encourage an abortion (being that it wouldn't be in me) at say 6 months? I don't know...it depends on a lot of things, and why the abortion is in question.

You more accurately mean, do they cease being a person. And I think there's a connection there between fetus-person and braindead-person. If a person needs machines to eat and breathe, but are aware of their surroundings, they are certainly a person. But when you begin debating the conditions where euthenasia and/or turning the machines off because the "person" is truly gone, it's the same issue really. And I think it should always be a personal family thing, never written in stone, black or white by a law.

And certainly either subject should never be dictated by others who want to preach from their book on what's right and wrong for you.

Good thread.

cheetah

Dal,
I just want to add my thanks to you for sharing this. It is a unique perspective and very informative.

Daleth

Not really. People react to death, any death, based on their own beliefs. So you get a lot of "God's Plan" (which I can rant about for ages) and "in heaven" and reincarnation (especially in the case of someone who was never born, a surprising lot of folks seem to think they are recycled). Basically people don't know what to say about any death, and when it's the death of someone abstract, someone who never quite got a chance to be, they are even more dumbstruck. Can't much blame them.

Oh, I did! I really did, and I still do. I have pictures that I cant show anybody or hang on a wall because they are morbid. To me, it's a person the moment I find out I'm pregnant, but that person is in my mind, and I found out the hard way that that person exists only to me. I knew I was carrying a dead fetus on Mother's Day and my (Jewish) family didn't understand how much it hurt me to be dragged to that Mother's Day dinner. I'd never been a mother. I wasn't a mother carrying a dead child. Except to me. I guess that's sort of the distinction I'm trying to make. A fetus may be a child to the parents, maybe even to the grandparents or a close friend, but it's not a person to the world at large, and it's not even the same person to the people who feel they know it. It's a person in their minds. It's not a person yet in reality. A person has or once had, among other things, a personality.

Not at all. I just wanted to clarify, because sadly these 2 events have had a lot to do with defining me. I do not have any children now... I think you misread what was a "would have been". So far too scared to try again, being as tests have been inconclusive and I only hope I know how to treat the problem.

Dal

HelenM

Oh, I'm so sorry I misunderstood/misread what you said about children now

Yes, I can understand why you wouldn't want to risk another pregnancy, after two stillbirths and not having a definite reason for thinking the next one will go differently.

Thanks for sharing more about how it was for you. I think - I hope - I understand what you meant a bit better now.

Helen

Jewel

Daleth,

I'd like to chime in and thank you for sharing your experience. You've given a truly unique point of view to this very emotionally charged debate -- and I thank you.

I do hope it helps ex-xian with some of his questions.

-Jewel

Ronin

Originally posted by Daleth ~

I can't recall ever posting to an abortion thread, however, I am curious as to why you are scared to try again if the baby is not a person until it is 'born'.

Secondarily, I am also trying to understand why you have experienced some form of consolation regarding your miscarriages at all.

How far along were they?

What element is it that allows the actual birth (vaginal or c-section) validate sentience or human worth?

The reason I ask is that I've recently worked an unfortunate case of an infant death of a six day old that was sleeping in the bed with her mother and accidently smothered. The infant had been born a week early and the family treated the death like the death of a person.

I cannot help but allow for choice up to a point, however, like many others in this emotional debate, still maintain that a potentially self-sustaining life is a human being worthy of equal rights.

Laci

However, what two other things can become a human being? No other things----
So you can't separate them. And they are not JUST a sperm cell and an egg cell. Not when they've already joined to form a human being.

:boohoo: And everyone wonders why I use this avatar. Because I think it's cool.