French parents can name fetuses

40 thoughts on French parents can name fetuses

1. Jill, are you familiar with what the laws abut this are in the U.S. I personally have no clue and would be interested to know.

   I am always so disappointed by potential lose-lose situations like this for women. Women have every right to grieve their losses and have their losses be recognized, but why does it have to be used against women then for their right to choose?! (Not a real question, but more like a ‘why does the world suck?’ question.)

2. i don’t think the legal intiative is coming from bereaved women and families. however, if they want some kind of recognition of their loss, why not look to the church? in 2000 years the catholic church has not created any special rite for women who miscarry, not that i know of, anyway.

3. The ability to register the miscarriage as a death seems sketchy as all hell. That having been said, it also seems sketchy that they can’t get the products of conception back for a private ceremony if they’re so inclined. I imagine having something to bury if they wanted would be helpful to women grieving a mid-term miscarriage.

4. Gosh, I have such a hard time with stuff like this. I have a close friend who had stillborn twins at 6.5 months. To her and her husband, she had just lost her children, and those of us who knew her certainly treated it like that. It was devastating to them and horrible for those of us who care about them. They (unofficially) named the twins and had a memorial service for them and everything. She is now really active in the movement to get birth certificates for stillborn children.

   And from her perspective and the perspective of parents who go through this, I tend to be really supportive. I can understand the need for my friend to have some “official” recognition that she had two kids before the two she currently has. I don’t think that any parents who advocate for this kind of thing are really trying to “redefine a fetus as a person” or anything like that. Hell, my friend who had the sillbirth is pro-choice. And I *do* think she lost children, and should have been treated as a grieving parent (which she wasn’t – she was told several times by relatives and strangers that it was silly to have a memorial service for a miscarriage). If some official recognition of the birth allows for parents like my friend to feel official recognition for their loss, I’m all for it.

   But…it freaks me out to think of how these laws could be misused by politicians and other nutty anti-choice advocates to further the “fetus as person” argument. So I don’t know where I stand. I guess maybe I think it’s okay if it’s a stillbirth, not a regular first-trimester miscarriage? I don’t know…still heading into tricky territory there…

5. I think a fetus has personhood if its mother chooses to invest it with personhood. For example, if a woman intends to carry her fetus to term, and an attacker stabs her in the belly and she miscarries, he should absolutely suffer consequences for destroying that fetus. If parents who intended to bring a fetus into the world as a child lose that fetus, of course they should have the ability to mourn the loss of the potential-child they’d been planning to bring into the world.

6. This is very tricky and I think a lot depends on how the law was worded if we were to bring something like that over here. This is a court ruling and not a new law so it will be interesting to see how it is legislated. This might be one of those cases where the cost of opening the door is warranted but we must make damn sure we watch it closely.

7. I don’t consider it a miscarriage every time I have my period. Some guys don’t consider it a miscarriage every time they beat off in a sock.

   However, SOME PEOPLE DO!!!!

8. Interesting hot tramp but how would we prove intent? Say the attacker stabs her in the belly and the fetus is destroyed but later, say at the hospital, she also dies, should the attacker be convicted of killing that fetus as can happen now if we dont know her intent? Intent is a tough thing to prove and it can also change, not everyone who intends on having an abortion, or keeping it to term, has finalized that decision at the moment the fetus is lost.

9. I am always annoyed when a legal system requires that we treat everything as black and white, even when nature so obviously paints in shades of grey. The sun doesn’t just go out in a flash when it becomes “night” — there’s a liminal period called dusk. Numbers don’t just come in integers, there are fractions and decimals to infinitesimal degrees, for a reason. New people don’t just spring into existence out of nothing at some point, fully invested with rights and records; it takes nine months for an organism to go from non-existence to fully independent life, and it pretty much always involves another human being’s participation. So there’s nothing weird or ethically off-base at all about saying, pregancy is a liminal period that results in a new person, and has different rules than either “personhood” or “no person, potential or otherwise.” It seems to me like treating everything as if it’s a whole kit-and-kaboodle is what results in these lose-lose situations. In an ideal would, should grieving couples with stillborn fetuses be able to name and bury them officially? Certainly, why not? Does this mean that other women should be forced to host another organism against their will? Of course not, and why should the two things be linked? You can give fetuses some legal recognition without granting them the full rights of personhood — for instance, because they are dependent on being attached to the body of a single human being, and only that single human being, for their continued existence. Anyone, fully human or otherwise, should be denied some rights in that situation.

10. I’m a cold hard unfeeling person, who also happened to have FOUR miscarriages before I was able to successfully give birth to my only daughter. I have a great sympathy for the loss, but honestly, they did not need government paperwork to mourn the loss. They could have named the child themselves, they could have held a memorial service. I do agree that if they wanted the products of conception, the hospital should have given them to the family. I know I can’t speak to other people’s grief, but a miscarriage is different than the death of a living child. This has such potential to do harm to abortion rights and I think it is a dangerous and wrong decision

11. The ability to register the miscarriage as a death seems sketchy as all hell. That having been said, it also seems sketchy that they can’t get the products of conception back for a private ceremony if they’re so inclined. I imagine having something to bury if they wanted would be helpful to women grieving a mid-term miscarriage.

    Yeah, I’m not real happy with the idea that a child not born alive should be considered a legal person, or that there should be a death certificate. But I do agree that the body should be returned to the parents for burial if they so choose.

12. I am always annoyed when a legal system requires that we treat everything as black and white, even when nature so obviously paints in shades of grey.

    There are just some things that require a bright-line rule, though, and given that there are all sorts of consequences to granting personhood (which is a legal, not a natural, concept) to someone who never drew breath (and not just in the bodily-autonomy context; estate law is full of things that could be borked if we started giving personhood to fetuses), it seems reasonable to draw the line somewhere. But as I said, there should be some opportunity for the parents to grieve and acknowledge the loss.

13. I’m wondering how this is different than in the States. In California, for example, you are issued a death certificate in case of a stillbirth. They now have an option so you can also get a Certificate of Still Birth, which is unofficial and must be specifically requested in writing. The death certificate you get automatically. I’m not sure what the line is between “miscarriage/spontaneous abortion” and “stillbirth,” though.

14. What about issuing a stillbirth certificate? It would be neither a birth nor death certificate, but it would give the parents something.

    I also think the whole personhood argument is the wrong one. I think the stronger argument is that every one has the right to decide if they want to be the life support system for a growing parasite for 9 months (I say that with some affection, having had my own little parasite)

15. I would tend to say that any time a fetus is destroyed and the mother did not explicitly say she wanted it destroyed, we could assume that she intended to carry it to term. For the purposes of punishing assaulters.

    But I’m not a legislator, thankfully. 😀

16. “I’m not sure what the line is between “miscarriage/spontaneous abortion” and “stillbirth,” though.”

    I think it’s usually “viability with modern medical support.” If the fetus dies before then, it’s a miscarriage; if after, it’s a stillbirth. I imagine it varies slightly by region, though, since there’s something like a four-week difference in the fetus that we have kept alive in one or two instances with truly heroic intervention and no complicating ailments and the fetus that we have a reasonable expectation of keeping alive on a regular basis.

17. I think the best way to approach stillbirths and assaults is that rather than depriving the fetus of a life, they deprive the mother of her choice. That choice is guaranteed by her right to bodily integrity and privacy and it deals with a profound and human process. So a fetus being destroyed is grievous not because it deprives the fetus of its future, but because it deprives the mother of hers.

    So I’m not sure why a stillbirth before viability can count as a human death unless the fetus counted as a human life. Then again, France doesn’t allow abortion after 10 weeks, so I suppose it’s at least somewhat consistent.

    It’s true that the parents should grieve, but there have to always be limits to how much the state helps someone grieve–a fetus (up to 10 weeks) is not a state-recognized human being in France, so the state shouldn’t treat the end of its existence like the death of a human being. A couple who privately recognizes their fetus as a human being can go ahead and privately treat the end of its existence however they like.

18. @16. Oh. I totally didn’t realize there was a distinction at all. I probably just embarrassed myself by using them interchangeably. Oh well.

19. “Oh. I totally didn’t realize there was a distinction at all. I probably just embarrassed myself by using them interchangeably. Oh well.”

    A lot of people don’t seem to realize that there’s a distinction, but it’s kind of a technical thing with some wiggle room, and I imagine most everybody gets the gist of it no matter which word is used. So long as nobody’s trying to apply “stillbirth” or “miscarriage” to what’s actually a neonatal death, I think we’re all on the same page, just maybe at different paragraphs.

20. There are just some things that require a bright-line rule, though, and given that there are all sorts of consequences to granting personhood (which is a legal, not a natural, concept) to someone who never drew breath (and not just in the bodily-autonomy context; estate law is full of things that could be borked if we started giving personhood to fetuses), it seems reasonable to draw the line somewhere.

    Well, I get that there have to be bright lines, but do they have to be bundled in such a clump? If it would be unreasonable for a host of reasons to consider fetuses to be persons for the purposes of estate law, then they’re not. If it would be unreasonable to consider a fetus to be entirely a non-person, an organ of a woman’s body, for the purposes of assault that does more than just harm one woman’s body, then for those purposes the fetus is something else. These divergences are reasonable in my mind because “being alive” and “being a person” are not simple binary on/off states. Fetuses are “sort of” alive and are “kind of potentially” people etc, so they can be treated like people for some purposes and not for others; they don’t get full human rights, aren’t counted in censuses, etc. etc. and so on and so forth.

21. Well, I get that there have to be bright lines, but do they have to be bundled in such a clump?

    Well, yes. If you’re a person, you have certain rights and others may have certain obligations towards you. There might be things that occur on operation of law just because you’ve come into being.

    Personhood, as a concept, really can’t go halfway. The line has always been drawn no earlier than at birth, always. If the line gets drawn any earlier, then you’re opening up a whole can of worms wrt to conflicts with other people’s personhood, and the settlement of estates, and what have you.

    And if you draw the line back far enough that a wanted miscarried embryo is a person, how do you say that this embryo deserves personhood because it was wanted, but that one doesn’t, because it wasn’t wanted? If it’s someone else’s decision whether to grant you personhood — rather than the simple fact that you were born alive — then we get into the idea that personhood is something that can be taken away from you.

    But, again, personhood is a distinct concept from humanity. And it seems that what is missing from the French way of dealing with miscarriages and stillbirths is an acknowledgement of humanity and loss.

    If it would be unreasonable to consider a fetus to be entirely a non-person, an organ of a woman’s body, for the purposes of assault that does more than just harm one woman’s body, then for those purposes the fetus is something else.

    Actually, one of the problems a lot of pro-choicers have with fetal-assault laws is that they do confer special status on the fetus in a way that is not necessary to address the crime. If you’re going to assault a woman sufficiently to cause her to miscarry, you’re doing *her* harm. That you may have intended to do injury to her fetus as well is secondary to the harm you have caused her. It’s one thing when these kinds of crimes are treated as assaults upon the woman with enhanced sentences to acknowledge the special harm done to her or the intent of assaulting her *because she’s pregnant*; the problem I have is with the statutes that treat the fetus as a separate victim. Because they always, always require the fetus to be considered a person, and they always, always, are put forth by anti-choice legislators who are trying to chip away at reproductive rights.

22. Hot Tramp, I’m with you. Personally, I believe the whole deep, dark existential problem the anti-choicers have is: It is always up to a Woman!!!! to decide whether a particular conceptus is a longed-for, precious baby or an unwanted parasite to be expelled. A woman decides when a person is to be born, and a woman decides when a pregnancy is to be aborted. It’s not up to men; it’s not up to God. It’s always, and ultimately only, a woman who decides. Because it is not some man’s Magical Sperm that creates life, it is nine months of a woman’s hard work and dedication of all her resources, physical, mental, spiritual and emotional, that turns a cell with a new genome into a baby. That is precisely what anti-choicers cannot stand to face.

    So, if a woman loses a fetus she eagerly welcomed and was hoping to dedicate nine months of her life to turning into a new little person, we should honor her pain and loss, while at the same time, if a woman finds herself unhappily, unwantedly, unexpectedly pregnant and wants an abortion, we should respect and support her desire not to take on the awesome project of being pregnant and turning a genome into a human, which should always be a joyfully welcomed project and not slavery.

    No contradiction there at all, provided you accept the basic truth that it is always, and ultimately only, one particular woman who decides whether or not her particular fetus is a person. (If you’re glad you were born, thank your mother!)

23. I can’t have anything but sympathy for people who lose a pregnancy that they wanted. I can’t begrudge them much that helps ease their pain. But I can’t help but have this nagging, ugly feeling that their pain is being exploited by some people with hateful motives, and that the sympathy I (and most people) will feel is likewise being exploited for hateful purposes. And that makes me a little sick inside.

24. I find it amazing that folks are going around and around discussing the issue of life. I know this is a threatening topic to talk about among pro-choice crowds, but at some point we (and yes, I am pro-choice) have to talk the loss of lfe that occurs during about to be able to have an honest conversation about abortion and pregnancy.

    Parents say the ruling will allow them to deal with their loss. They say their loss has been compounded by their inability to register the death or keep the fetus for burial.

    What happens often in strident pro-choice circles that do not even allow discussion of life is that parents are not allowed to deal with their loss – whether through abortion or through a miscarriage because to speak of life in this circle is cause to have one’s pro-choice cred called into question, if not outright removed.

25. Because they always, always require the fetus to be considered a person, and they always, always, are put forth by anti-choice legislators who are trying to chip away at reproductive rights.

    Yeah, and I absolutely agree that this is an appalling tactical move that takes advantage of the “bundling” of personhood. In any case, you’re the lawyer and I’m not, so I’ll take your word for it that the “bundling” is inescapable… well, at least with our current notion of personhood.

26. “I also think the whole personhood argument is the wrong one. I think the stronger argument is that every one has the right to decide if they want to be the life support system for a growing parasite for 9 months (I say that with some affection, having had my own little parasite)” -Red Queen

    I couldn’t agree more! It’s not like we can go around harvesting blood, bone marrow, or parts of livers or a lung or something from one living person to save someone else’s life without the person’s consent. Why can’t pregnant women have this same right to make choices for their body as any person would have for another already-born person? What makes fetuses so damned special they trump all other kinds of rights? I think this kind of reasoning would solve both problems. Grieving parents could have more rights for grieving their losses AND it wouldn’t destroy a woman’s right to chose.

27. What happens often in strident pro-choice circles that do not even allow discussion of life is that parents are not allowed to deal with their loss – whether through abortion or through a miscarriage because to speak of life in this circle is cause to have one’s pro-choice cred called into question, if not outright removed.

    Perhaps you can point to some of these strident pro-choice circles that won’t allow anyone to talk about pregnancy or miscarriage. Because I’m not seeing that happening here.

28. So long as nobody’s trying to apply “stillbirth” or “miscarriage” to what’s actually a neonatal death, I think we’re all on the same page, just maybe at different paragraphs.

    Just out of curiosity, what is the difference between a stillbirth and a neonatal death? Is it the difference between death prior to birth and coming out alive before dying?

29. I lost a pregnancy at 20 weeks (really a miscarriage, since the fetus was not viable), and I was told by my rabbi not to give a name (there was a burial, with no ceremony or marker.) I really wish I could have given a name, though I didn’t really want a ceremony. To be honest, it was an extremely devastating event, and it’s hard to think about even now when it was years ago.

    At the time I wasn’t pro-choice, to be honest, though I later reconsidered that attitude. It’s still hard to think about how to work out how I feel about that loss with a pro-choice position, but my religion didn’t help much either at the time so it’s not like that’s the only issue.

    Anyway, I personally don’t see any need for government paperwork per se, especially if some people will want to twist that around to an anti-choice legal position. But I do understand families wanting the rights to the remains.

30. “Just out of curiosity, what is the difference between a stillbirth and a neonatal death? Is it the difference between death prior to birth and coming out alive before dying?”

    Yeah. A neonatal death is what happens when you have a live birth, and the baby dies very shortly (usually within one or two weeks) afterwards. Stillbirth is what happens when the fetus dies in utero. I don’t think there’s any place that issues birth and death certificates where you wouldn’t get both (and full burial rights) as a matter of course for a neonatal death.

31. I couldn’t imagine the pain a parent goes through losing a child. May we all never know this. But this is a situation I wish greatly for any government to stay clear of. Registering officially should be reserved for more pragmatic pursuits, such as insurance, schooling, census, etc.

    IF they’d like to help grieving parents more, offer reduced rates and more availability for counseling. Push insurance to offer more mental/behavior health benefits. And improve conditions for pregnant women all over.

32. Does anyone know WHY French women aren’t allowed to keep the remains of a stillbirth? What is the supposed rationale? That just seems terribly callous, in a country that is generally pretty good on quality-of-life issues, and I can’t think of any good reason for it. And maybe there would be less push from grieving parents-to-be for this personhood stuff if they weren’t denied the opportunity to do whatever ceremonies/burial they consider appropriate.

    My mother had a stillborn daughter (at full term) before I was born, who has a small grave in the cemetary most of my relatives are buried in. When my dad died a few years ago and a double-plot was bought for him and eventually my mom, she specifically chose one with a little half-plot available next to it, and moved the body and marker from the “baby section” to be next to them. They had 2 healthy children after that, and didn’t dwell in an unhealthy manner, but I think the tangible evidence of something major that happened to them has been important.

33. um, that’s “2 healthy children after” the stillbirth, not after my dad’s death as my poor grammar would imply. Y’all probably figured that out, I imagine.

34. Can I name mine “Cleetus the Fetus” or something equally obnoxious?

35. I think the moment you give legal status to anything that isn’t a living person, it’s going to snowball into something huge and nasty for people. A death certificate is a legal thing. What next? Conception certificates? We can name and bury whatever we want, but issuing a death certificate to something that wasn’t technically born in the first place is going overboard.

36. Does anyone know WHY French women aren’t allowed to keep the remains of a stillbirth?

    My guess? Health laws.

37. “Does anyone know WHY French women aren’t allowed to keep the remains of a stillbirth? What is the supposed rationale?”

    It’s a little difficult to tell from the article, but sounds like they were allowed to keep a stillbirth (22 weeks or after for them, it would seem) for interment, but not the remains of a miscarriage. My guess on the rationale would be health laws as well. I recall something about French interment laws being somewhat strict, particularly in cities, which might have resulted in a catch-22 situation even if hospital staff was sympathetic.

38. A death certificate is a legal thing.

    As I pointed out above, in most states in the US, you are issued a death certificate after a stillbirth. And it is a legal thing — the hospital needs to document that someone went into labor but a live child did not result.

    The issue in France (though it’s hard to tell from this article) seems to be that people are asking for a death certificate after any miscarriage, not just one that comes after the point of viability.

    Issuing a death certificate in the case of a stillborn fetus is not something new and strange. It’s the asking for one to be issued for a pre-viability miscarriage that’s new.

39. As someone who suffered four early-pregnancy miscarriages and had no way “officially” to grieve, I have to say, I see this as a good thing. I probably would have handled my losses a lot better if legal writ said, officially, “yes you wanted this baby, you can name it and give it a burial and we’ll recognize this” … rather than, “whatever, it’s not a baby.”

    I can see how tricky this is to balance with abortion rights. I don’t know how we can ensure women’s access to abortion while maintaining the legal personhood of babies in utero. I don’t have any answers. I also don’t know how this would mesh with my stance on birth (as in, it should happen in the home with as little interference as possible)… as Mnemosyne mentioned, a *hospital* / authority must document what happened.

    :: ? ::

40. “I also don’t know how this would mesh with my stance on birth (as in, it should happen in the home with as little interference as possible)…”

    Probably badly. The trend seems to be that once other people decide that they have a stake in the pregnancy, their ideas about what should happen automatically supersede the pregnant woman’s. Her opinions and wishes become obstacles to get around. It’s unpleasant when the other people are relatives and in-laws, but they usually can’t do anything but badger her about it. The state, on the other hand, has the ability to legislate maternal choice out of existence and enforce their decrees through police action and licensing boards. The odds that they wouldn’t once they’ve got a legal foundation of fetal-citizenship don’t strike me as terribly good.

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