Images of stillbirth: memory, mourning and memorial1

1. This article is based on a presentation to the IVSA 2005 Conference in Dublin.

Abstract

When a baby is stillborn, maternity units in the United Kingdom and USA encourage mothers, fathers and other family members to hold the dead baby, take photographs and gather other mementos. The rationale for these activities is that acknowledging the stillborn child helps the grieving process. In the context of conventional family photography, however, stillbirth images are contradictory. The body of the baby in the arms of his or her mother, whilst conventional in terms of pose, is unconventional in terms of content. This article explores the meaning and function of contemporary private and public stillbirth images, arguing that they help create a social identity for the baby, reconstructing the disrupted biography of the family to include the dead child, thereby allowing him or her to be remembered, mourned and memorialized; also that public stillborn images reflect the development of new mourning practices that help parents cope with a hitherto invisible loss.

Notes

1. This article is based on a presentation to the IVSA 2005 Conference in Dublin.

2. There is considerable debate around the issue of practices associated with creating memories of the stillborn and motherhood in the immediate postnatal period. Accounts of stillbirth from mothers value these practices and there is considerable support from charitable organizations and good practice guidelines encouraging professionals to help families in this respect. However, the longer term benefits have been challenged by Hughes et al. (2002), who argue that some of these practices may disrupt attachment to subsequent babies.

3. Recent mobile phone advertisements promote a certain sort of impromptu picture‐taking to show potential users the advantages of buying a mobile phone with an inbuilt camera that can send the resulting images to other phone users.

4. See Scheeres 2002.

5. Things have changed in recent years. In the United Kingdom birth certificates are issued for stillborn babies, whilst in the United States, MISSING has orchestrated a campaign to get all states to support Senate and House Bills requiring each stillbirth to be registered and issued with a Stillbirth Certificate and a Certificate of Stillbirth and Fetal Death respectively.

6. For practising Catholics, baptism is necessary for salvation and entry into heaven. Although never officially approved by the church, unbaptised infants, innocent of personal sin, if not original sin, are believed to be in limbo in perpetuity. Thus stillborn babies, never having lived, can never be saved by baptism, and never go to heaven. The 1992 Catechism offers the hope ‘that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without baptism’, and a forthcoming report is expected to reject the Limbo hypothesis, and recommend the formal adoption of a doctrine that allows all for children who die, to do so ‘in the hope of eternal salvation’.

7. BBC News. Undertakers go online, 18 June 2001. Available from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/1395116.stm; INTERNET.

8. I am indebted to Sandra Childs, a funeral director, for drawing my attention to this new service.

9. BBC News. Mourners pay virtual respects, 6 March 2006. Available from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/humber/4780332.stm; INTERNET.

10. Although this information is available to anyone via the Internet, these websites have been treated as one would treat interview data. Website owners have consented to the inclusion and use of their website in this article. In one case, despite considerable efforts, the website owner has not replied and appears not to be contactable through the various email addresses linked to her from the site. If the owner of this website comes across this article, he or she should contact the publisher of Visual Studies. In the case of all the website material used in this article, however, anonymity has been preserved by using pseudonyms. In addition, URLs are not cited, and in illustrations, names have been replaced with pseudonyms. Screenshots have been cropped deliberately to avoid displaying the URL. If readers wish to consult these sources, please contact the author for details.

11. The World Wide Web is littered with abandoned websites, including memorial pages. How one can understand these websites in terms of their intended function, to commemorate and communicate, and the context within which they were created, is beyond the scope of this article. However, this is yet another question arising from studying memorial websites, that has both specific and more general relevance to our understanding of the ways in which the Internet is used to reflect private lives and in this most public of spaces.

12. Quotations from personal email correspondence dated 17 August 2006, used with permission.

13. Web rings are collections of websites associated with particular interest groups and link together sites with similar themes. Web rings are maintained by their members and constitute virtual communities. They allow people to get in touch easily with others interested in the same topic. Rings are also intended to increase traffic to the sites involved because people are actively seeking information about the topic concerned.

14. A father has constructed a website and written of his experiences of the stillbirth of his son, Leo, in ‘Living with Leo’, accessible at http://www.uk‐sands.org/index.html.

15. huffnmouth. 2004. “Should mourning be a public spectacle?” 12/11/01. Available from http://www.portalofevil.com/single.php?poeurlid = 11483; INTERNET (accessed 28 June 2004).