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Download fileReconciling the uniquely embodied grief of perinatal death: a narrative approach
journal contribution
posted on 2021-12-06, 11:25 authored by Tamarin NorwoodTamarin Norwood, John BoultonThe death of a baby, stillborn or living only briefly after birth, is a moral affront to the cycle of life, leaving parents without the life stories and material objects that traditionally offer comfort to the bereaved, nor—in an increasingly secularized society—a religious framework for making sense of their loss. For the grieving mother it is also a physical affront, as her body continues to rehearse its part in its symbiotic relationship with a baby whose own body is disintegrating. Attempting to forge continuing bonds with her child after death makes special demands upon the notion of embodied spirituality, as she attempts to make sense of this tragedy in an embodied way. This paper, which reconciles the distinct perspectives of bereaved mother and children’s doctor, proposes that the thoughtful re-presentation of medical insight into pregnancy and fetal development may assuage parents’ grief by adding precious detail to their baby’s life course, and by offering the mother a material basis to conceptualize her own body as part of the distributed personhood of her baby.
History
School
- Design and Creative Arts
Department
- Creative Arts
Published in
ReligionsVolume
12Issue
11Publisher
MDPI AGVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The AuthorsPublisher statement
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by MDPI under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Acceptance date
2021-11-02Publication date
2021-11-08Copyright date
2021ISSN
2077-1444Publisher version
Language
- en