Once private, a loss is now shared

JONATHAN ABEL
Published October 1, 2006

Christy Duprey's baby weighed 6 pounds, 7 ounces. She named her Makayla.

Duprey put a photo of Makayla on MySpace. In it, the baby lies swaddled in blankets, a rosary draped over her tiny hand.

Only the gray of Makayla's cheeks lets you know that she was stillborn.

For Duprey, posting the picture was a way of recognizing Makayla as a person, and of sharing news she couldn't bear to discuss.

"I wanted my friends to understand what I was going through," she said. "I couldn't talk to people, but I didn't have to talk to the computer."

Stillborn babies used to be pushed aside and forgotten. Doctors shielded mothers from the sight of them. Parents were supposed to get over the loss, have more children, forget about it.

These days, parents of stillborn children are increasingly seeking recognition of their loss. Dozens of Web sites display hundreds of pictures of babies just like Makayla. They are posed with teddy bears and A-B-C blocks.

And this year, Florida joined 13 other states in granting birth certificates to stillborns.

It's all part of the changing expectations about what constitutes life and how we are supposed to grieve when life ends before birth.

"The whole concept of this being public is a very new concept relative to the history of childbirth," said Michael R. Berman, an obstetrician and professor at Yale University School of Medicine. "Up until the 1970s, babies that were stillborn were buried in unmarked graves and families weren't allowed to grieve. That was thought to be a protective mechanism."

Ignoring stillbirth is not a salve for Duprey or other modern mothers.

Duprey's story is sad and straightforward.

The 23-year-old from Oviedo, northeast of Orlando, went to the doctor in April, two days before her due date. She had all the signs of labor except she wasn't dilated and she had blood in her urine.

The nurse said everything was fine.

Duprey returned the next day to find that her daughter didn't have a heartbeat. On Good Friday, she gave birth.

"I couldn't wait to feel what it was like to have a child. And I did," she said. "I was so happy. My family was there. They pushed for me. They hollered for me."

Duprey shot photos of the baby and text messaged them to her friends. When she got home from the hospital, she posted Makayla's pictures on her MySpace page.

The Internet is an anonymous space, but it is also a public forum for mourning.

"What we're saying is that the death is something that belongs to the whole community," said Kathleen W. Jones, a social historian of medicine at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. "Web sites and tombstones are incredibly public rituals."

Among all the Web sites out there, the most striking belongs to Richard Olsen.

He says he had 3.5-million visitors last year to www.missingangel.org

The front page is white with an innocuous hyperlink: "View Our Angels." That takes you to a picture of Will, a stillborn baby dressed in a white gown and matching cap. One more click and you come to an index of close to 500 babies with their dates of stillbirth.

Olsen's daughter, Camille, is the first on the list.

She died Aug. 17, 2000. Her skin is pale with a lavender tint. Her hands clutch a pink rose. The picture is haunting; Olsen calls it beautiful.

The Phoenix-based real estate broker and developer is one of the loudest advocates of rights for stillbirth parents.

"Our goal," writes Olsen, 66, "is to assemble enough pictures to be able to demonstrate that yes, these were really B-A-B-I-E-S."

And what of the people who shudder at the sight of dead babies?

"So what?" Olsen says. "They're dead babies. That's life. Nobody seems to have trouble watching Arnold Schwarzenegger kill people."

Olsen's and other Web sites form the tendrils of a grass roots political movement to get greater legal recognition for stillborn babies.

In June, Florida passed Katherine's Law, which awards a birth certificate to any family that requests one. The only qualification: The baby must have reached 20 weeks of gestation.

It used to be that families were given only a death certificate. By receiving a birth certificate, they also receive acknowledgement that they are parents.

"Truth be told, there was probably a logical schism in the law," said the bill's sponsor, Rep. Juan-Carlos Planas, R-Miami. "How do you acknowledge a death without acknowledging a birth?"

Planas also sponsored a bill to make the killing of a pregnant woman double homicide, but he said the birth certificates are not a back door into the abortion debate.

Yet the stillbirth and abortion debates are connected. Over the past three decades, experts say, the public debate about women's reproductive rights made it possible to talk about other reproductive issues.

Changes in technology, like the introduction of the sonogram, are also responsible for the evolution in the way we think of stillborns.

"Now that we can see something prior to birth," said Jones, the historian, "it gives a reality to it that it certainly didn't have 50 years ago. . . . If you have a picture of it, then when it no longer exists it has died. It's more than a miscarriage."

At the same time, a dramatic decline in infant mortality has made people less accustomed to early deaths.

"You don't die until you reach 70 or 80 or 90," said Robert V. Wells, a historian at Union College in New York who has written extensively on the history of death. "So the death of a child becomes all the more horrifying."

We expect babies to be born alive and live a long time, he said, so there is more of a need to recognize the loss.

The recognition of stillbirth is also becoming commonplace at hospitals. Large hospitals like St. Joseph's in Tampa and Bayfront Medical Center in St. Petersburg take pictures and assemble memory boxes for the stillborns they deliver.

St. Joseph's has been shooting photos for about 10 years, according to charge nurse Jen Clark.

Some parents say they don't want to see the pictures, but nurses take them anyway. "If you don't want them, you can throw them away at home," Clark tells parents.

Many of these photos eventually make it onto the Internet, but sometimes it takes a while for the family to feel comfortable.

Tina Fox, 27, of Orange Park, outside Jacksonville, built a Web page for her stillborn daughter, Victoria Anne, but waited 18 months to post the pictures.

"When you put something on the Internet, there's ways for people to search for it and find it whether they wanted to or not," she said. "I didn't know how others would perceive it."

Now she has come to terms with the people who don't want to see her pictures.

"The thing I tell them is that she's my daughter just as much as the other two are," Fox said. "If she were a 10-year-old or a 20-year-old they wouldn't just throw pictures of them away."

Reach Jonathan Abel at jabel@sptimes.com or (352) 754-6114.



HEART-RENDING GALLERIES

Christy Duprey's MySpace page is at www.myspace.com/mothersofangels

Richard Olsen's Web site is www.missingangel.org

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