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Miscarriage: Mourning a Life That Never Was
Having miscarried two pregnancies, I realize that the event entails two kinds of death: the little being inside me and the dreams I had for its life beyond mine. Common wisdom, a fine example of an oxymoron, says, "Get on with your life, have another baby." But Judaism, which has a dense body of law and ritual concerning death, offers almost no words of comfort for this loss.
Recently, women rabbis have been writing rituals and prayers that recognize miscarriage -- in addition to stillbirth, early infant death and abortion -- as occasions for proper mourning. "If you had lost a parent you would be sitting shiva," says Rabbi Diane Cohen of Temple Ohev Shalom, in Colonia, N.J., and author of "Smikhat Horim: Providing Support for Parents Suffering a Miscarriage." "People would be in your house taking care of you. If no one is there, it's as if the death didn't happen."
According to Rabbi Cohen, whose first pregnancy ended in miscarriage, the women rabbis writing rituals are doing so as expressions of their own experiences. Theirs wasn't an academic or secular-feminist impulse, she said. Their own grief needed ritualistic expression.
In Jewish law, full mourning rites are not accorded to an infant who has lived less than 30 days. Rabbinical opinion has established a hierarchy of viability in which the fetus with "a human shape," the stillborn and the...