Stillborns, their parents say, deserve birth certificates

By MICHELLE HAN
TRENTON BUREAU

Bergen (NJ) Record,
Thursday, September 25, 2003


Clare Paula Faith's name is etched on a stone column at a Paramus cemetery. Leafy trees provide cool shade. Surrounding headstones bear silent witness to those who come and go.

This is where Jennie Faith visits every once in a while to grieve for her stillborn baby girl.

Yet the burden that Jennie and John Faith carry from losing a child is compounded by a little-known aspect of state law that affects hundreds of parents statewide: There is no birth certificate for a stillborn like Clare.

Although the state requires parents to bury stillborns, it does not provide a certificate of birth. According to official state records, Jennie and John Faith's baby died and was buried, but was never born.

Their experience led the Ridgewood couple to join a movement to persuade lawmakers in New Jersey to allow parents like them to receive a "certificate of birth resulting in stillbirth." A bill being considered in Trenton would give parents a certificate if they want it.

"It would have been one more thing you would get," Jennie Faith said in a recent interview. "Because you don't get anything - you leave the hospital with a box."

For parents struggling to overcome the pain of a stillbirth, the certificate is one way to validate the experience of birth and loss. To bury an infant but be denied a document that records the birth, these parents say, only adds insult to the excruciating grief of losing a child they had hoped to raise.

A national effort has led to such laws in 10 states. Arizona was the first to pass a law in 2001, and it has issued 827 certificates of birth for stillborn children since then.

Jennie Faith was in her last month of pregnancy when, one Saturday, she no longer felt the baby kick. A visit to the doctor, revealed the unthinkable: The baby had died.

More shock came when the doctors told her she would have to go through labor anyway. "I thought they were insane," she said.

With her husband at her side, Jennie delivered a 6-pound, 11-ounce baby girl into a room full of doctors and nurses. It was silent. The baby's umbilical cord was tied in a knot.

The nurses cleaned and dressed the infant in a white outfit and baby hat, and handed her to the Faiths. The parents had already discussed names, and knew that if it was a girl, she would be called Clare.

Jennie remembers the way the baby's mouth hung open, and how her arm dropped out of the blankets to the side. And she remembers thinking, "That's a Faith. That could have been one of my other babies sleeping."

She left the hospital the next day with a pale blue satin box. It held a card where the nurses had taken a footprint of Clare in ink, the clothes and hats she wore, and Polaroid snapshots of Clare - mouth open and arm flopped over the side.

It wasn't until after the Faiths had Clare interred at the cemetery that they learned, through a support network of parents, that they were not entitled to any official document recording her stillbirth. All they could ask for was a fetal death certificate, which they opted not to receive.

"I said to myself, this isn't right," she said. "The state is acknowledging that she died but not that she was born. My body went through the exact same thing it did two times before - with a very different end result, but it did exactly the same thing."

Nearly a decade earlier, Joann Cacciatore-Garard faced the same realization when her fourth child died 15 minutes before delivery. That experience eventually led her to form the Mothers In Sympathy and Support (MISS) Foundation, a non-profit organization devoted to advocacy work and creating support networks.

An estimated 26,000 to 39,000 stillbirths take place in the United States each year. In New Jersey, there were 804 stillbirths in 2001, the last year for which statistics are complete, according to a Health Department spokesman.

By definition, a stillbirth is when a baby dies in utero after it has been in the womb for at least 20 weeks. A death before 20 weeks is classified as a miscarriage.

Some stillborns are delivered as early as 21 weeks, but most die shortly before their expected birth, according to the National Stillbirth Society, a group that was founded in 2001 and also advocates for birth certificates. In more than half of all stillbirths, the cause of death is never known.

The movement also reflects a social shift in the way the birth process is viewed. Technological advances now let expectant parents distribute their baby's very first photo - the sonogram - to friends and family via e-mail. And fathers, once expected to do nothing more than stand by nervously in waiting rooms, are now a common — even expected — presence in delivery rooms, often with camera in hand.

Over the years, federal and state guidelines have evolved to shape the way vital statistics are reported. In New Jersey, those parameters have not included provisions for stillborn birth certificates. The new category became an issue only after the bill was introduced last year.

So far, laws have been passed and implemented in 10 states, according to the MISS Foundation, which tracks the issue nationwide. Bills have been introduced in 13 other states, including New Jersey. But the effort stalled in two states, and in one of them, California, the issue became caught in the crossfire of abortion politics.

The California bill was withdrawn after the state chapter of the National Organization for Women and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists opposed it. Because the bill would allow the state to record stillbirths, they argued that the door could eventually be opened to mandatory reporting of late-term abortions, which would violate women's privacy. Cacciatore-Garard said that assumption was wrong because California does not require abortions to be reported.

"There's this impression that this is some surreptitious movement to reverse Roe vs. Wade," she said. "That's just not true. This is grass-roots, non-political women and sometimes men, who got together to pass this bill."

In New Jersey, pro-choice and antiabortion groups say they have not taken a position on the bill, and the chairman of the New Jersey chapter of the obstetrician's group says he was not aware such a bill was under consideration.

Still, one pro-choice lawmaker has already worked to keep the bill from igniting a debate over abortion.

"This is one of those small changes that the Legislature and the governor can do that can make people's lives a little bit better," said Sen. Thomas Kean Jr., a Republican who sponsored the bill in the Senate, which passed it 35-0 in June. "My goal with this legislation is not to impact [the abortion] debate."

But the bill was held up in the Assembly Health and Human Services Committee after members raised questions about its language and purpose during a meeting.

Assemblywoman Loretta Weinberg, D-Fort Lee, who heads that committee, added language that says the certificates would apply only to "unintended" fetal deaths to prevent the certificates from applying to aborted fetuses.

The amendments have yet to be adopted by the committee. Weinberg, who is pro-choice, said she plans to support the bill with the amendments in the Assembly, which is dominated by Democrats.

Cacciatore-Garard endorsed the change, saying that she and other supporters are just as eager to minimize unintended uses of the law.

Jennie Faith hopes the law will benefit other parents in New Jersey. She also thinks it would be a fitting legacy for Clare, who is depicted as an angel with wings in crayon pictures drawn by her two young daughters, Mary and Grace. "She has had such a profound effect on me," she said. "Maybe she could also make a difference with this, even though she was only here for such a brief time."

E-mail: han@northjersey.com

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