Publication details
Untimely Death: Perinatal Loss and Its Perishable Materiality
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| Citation | |
| Description | The timing of the loss plays a significant role in the very recognition of humanity and socially legitimate grief for parents experiencing prenatal or perinatal loss. The presentation is based on an ongoing qualitative inquiry (in-depth interviews with representatives of key involved institutions) in the Czech Republic into the practices related to the event (including last rites) with its implications for delimitation of the life itself. The significant clash in authoritative (expert and lay/lived) definitions of the timing of “humanity” (the moment of becoming a human baby – a subject) poses ethical and moral questions on current practices in prenatal and perinatal loss that are relevant for critical social science reflection. Powerful key social institutions form the ground. The Church, biomedicine linked to the legal setting, lived experience of the families affected – they all rely to a varied extent on time in their definitions of “conception” of life, possibility to “die” and in consequent care. The untimely loss is viewed and interpreted very differently depending on whether they situate humanity to the moment of conception of the egg and the sperm in case of the Church, follow the legal definition informed by biomedical practice measuring and calculating gestation weeks and weigh etc. demarcating a miscarriage of a foetus (or a cluster of cells regarded as human waste) or a birth of a (stillborn) child, the legal possibility to die only when there was the first breath etc. Yet, there is also a set of parental perceptions of their baby-to-be human existence, thus setting their own understandings of time in relation to human life and death. |
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