Interview with Małgorzata Bronka, mother of two children who died in the eighth and twenty-first weeks of pregnancy and three children aged 19, 17 and 6.
We recently celebrated the Day of the Lost Children. Did you turn on your kids’ lights?
Of course. As every year in the church of St. Queen Jadwiga’s Mass in Bydgoszcz, followed by a rosary. Prayer for both children and their parents who will struggle with the pain of the loss of their child for the rest of their lives. It is a moving sight when dozens of men and women walk down the aisle with candles lit to commemorate their deceased children. Sometimes carrying more than one.
You lit two …
Yes, for my two children: Raczek and Dominika. Raczek is my first child lost in the eighth week of pregnancy. We don’t know what gender it was. My two little daughters called him Raczek. Dominik died in the 21st week of pregnancy. This difficult experience was additionally aggravated by a hospital trauma, i.e. the circumstances of my stay in the gynecological ward of the hospital in Złotów, where a dead pregnancy was found and where I gave birth to my son in conditions that were offensive to human treatment. Such experiences are not easily forgotten.
You are not ashamed to talk about them.
I am not ashamed because losing a baby is nothing to be ashamed of! Unfortunately, in our society there is still a perception that miscarriage is not a topic to talk about. Women are advised to forget about this unpleasant incident as soon as possible. It is difficult to talk about it openly, even in the family or among friends. Meanwhile, the mother, after losing her child, experiences despair, regardless of whether she died during the eight week of pregnancy or when she was older. And the mourning of his parents for him need not be different from that of a child suffering from cancer or as a result of an accident. This despair cannot be measured, estimated or compared, that in early pregnancy, for example, it is smaller and then larger. These are individual but equally intense experiences. And sweeping the problem under the rug doesn’t help much. It only inflames the wounds that a woman carries in her heart for the rest of her life.
Miscarriage is discussed openly reluctantly, because what is this topic? The tearing down or the pieces of tissue that flowed out with the hemorrhage deserve a name and surname, a burial and a candle in the cemetery. Poland claims to be a great defender of human life from conception to natural death. It all sounds lofty in political and ideological declarations. However, when it comes to a specific situation of the child’s death, it suddenly turns out that he is no longer a worthy citizen of the country, but a piece of jelly of undetermined gender, about which hysterical parents make an annoying mess. Such reactions from those around them cause additional pain for parents.
Your second miscarriage was from a more advanced pregnancy.
Yes, that’s why I went through the hell of a stillbirth so known to many drowning women. I say hell because what often happens to women in such a situation cannot be called otherwise. From diagnosis to labor contractions or curettage, a traumatic process begins. When I unexpectedly got a hemorrhage during the summer vacation of 2006 and my friend brought me to the nearest hospital, first we had to wait a few hours for a doctor to see me. I bleed and pray for my baby to survive, but no one looks after me in the hospital waiting room, and during the ultrasound scan she becomes numb with terror, I listen to jokes exchanged between the doctor and the midwife, who carefully writes down medical terms that I do not understand. With a frantic heartbeat I wait for the diagnosis, which is: Dead fetus in the pelvic position, then the doctor leaves without a word.
I can’t express what I felt then except the excruciating pain. I was crying. The midwife gave me lignin to wipe my tears and helped me to the ward, where besides me there were women waiting for gynecological treatments and awaiting the birth of their children.
The next day I was given a labor induction drug. A few hours later my dead son was born. I wish I’d had the courage to see him, but I was too scared. I inquired about the causes of his death and the possibility of his burial, but the midwives shrugged at my insistence.
“Such things are not practiced,” they replied dryly.
I don’t want to believe when you listen to this …
I got used to the fact that both my story and the stories of hundreds of other women are perceived this way. With disbelief, skepticism, sometimes contempt. That it’s just tasteless and inappropriate. I am talking about it above all in order to provoke a social discussion about our attitude towards the mother of the aborted child and about herself. And to show other parents after the loss that they are not alone.
The miscarriage happens roughly 100 times each day. Isn’t that an important social problem? As are the difficulties of couples with getting pregnant, but also numerous miscarriages that make it impossible to have healthy and live offspring. I stayed in the hospital to have my dead son delivered, because what else could I do? It never occurred to me that being there could be so traumatic. I remember the midwife coming to the girl in the next bed and checking the fetal heartbeat every two hours. The beating of a small heart spread throughout the room. It was terrible torture for me. To hear this beating and to know that the child I carry under my heart is no longer alive… I ran to the farthest corner of the corridor so as not to hear it. Whenever I asked about the possibility of burying my baby, or if I really had to give birth to a baby in a room full of patients, I was treated like a hysterical, although I only cried softly into my pillow. During these few years the situation in many hospitals has improved, but it still happens that bewildered mothers are given dozens of papers to sign, such as the one that they give up their claims for the release of the child’s body. In such a difficult moment in her life, a woman has to make a decision immediately, and sometimes she is pressured not to fool with a request for a body or a death certificate, because this is not practiced, it will complicate the matter for the hospital and herself, and at the same time risking the family. on costs. The full awareness of the loss reaches us only after the shock of the first days has passed. There is a feeling that the child has been lost forever, that it was not a nightmare. The pain is then unimaginable. Mental pain, but also the pain of a sore body when the body is still full of pregnancy hormones. There may already be milk in your breasts, with which you do not know what to do now.
You have been active in the Parents’ Association after a miscarriage for many years. What problems do you face most often? What remains a source of the most heated discussions in the environment of parents affected by the loss of a child?
There are many problems: from the psychological nature, how to support women and families struggling with the loss of a child, to purely legal regulations. Parents benefit from our support in experiencing mourning, but most phone calls are asked for help in obtaining the documents necessary to register the child and bury it from the hospital. Although ministerial ordinances say that, no matter how long the pregnancy lasts, the child’s body should be treated with dignity after death, this is still not the case. And it seems to be even more complicated.
A new legal act on civil status records comes into force in 2015. The issue of stillbirths will be regulated in article 53. There is a point in it which states: The stillbirth card contains the data required in the birth card and the information that the child was born still. The stillbirth card is handed over to the head of the civil registry office within one day from its preparation. If it is not possible to determine the child’s gender, the stillbirth card will not be handed over.
What will this provision mean in practice? That hospitals will thus be able to resign from the inconvenient procedure of issuing a stillbirth card, which is necessary to register a child in the Registry Office. Already now, parents are frequently deceived that the law prohibits issuing a written report of a child with pregnancies less than one week, and it often even happens that no tissue has been found in the abortion material! How is that? The parents ask. My wife had a miscarriage and the doctor did not find the baby during the histopathological examination? Where is it then? Dissapeared? The truth is that the baby’s tissues do not have to be sent for such examination. Well, a lot depends on the diligence of the doctor’s work, who is after all tasked with examining the chorionic tissue, and the tissues of a few-millimeter child do not necessarily interest him anymore … Another thing is that everyone knows that this child did not disperse like a fog. Then what happened to him? Well, the terrified parent concludes, it must have been disposed of with other hospital waste.
The issue of determining gender is also bizarre, or rather the inability to determine it. Thus, a dead Polish citizen, with whom it was impossible to determine whether he had male or female sexual organs, does not deserve the dignity of a citizen. He is gender unidentified, so he is nobody and is not even entitled to his own name. Besides, what does “if the gender cannot be determined” mean? It can almost always be determined by cytogenetic testing of a fragment of the chorion. Unfortunately, this record does not mean that every time you have a miscarriage, the hospital will be responsible for collecting it and performing a gender test. It is still the parents who will have to fight to prevent their child’s body from disappearing under mysterious circumstances and will have to bear the cost of the tests themselves.
Determined parents already receive a written notification of the birth of a child, provided that they finance the research from their own pocket, which costs from 350 to 1500 PLN, depending on the hospital price list. In the face of such pressure, many parents are forced to give up, then struggling with remorse that they have let go, thus depriving their own offspring of their identity and failing to fulfill their primary duty towards their own child: they did not take care of the proper burying of his body.
They deal with it differently afterwards. The psychologist, whose advice I used after the loss of my children, told me that women over 50 or even 60 years old come to her office with the pain after the loss that has been dormant so far. He unexpectedly comes to life when a miscarriage affects, for example, a daughter or a daughter-in-law. Its power is then extremely destructive. Depression and suicidal thoughts appear. These are not stories drawn from the finger, which can be accompanied by the comment “Well, you don’t want to believe …”. These are specific real-life situations. Each loss of a child implies suffering not only for the mother, but also for other close people around her.
Some hospitals practice the burial of stillborn babies in a mass grave. These are the bodies of children that their parents refused to take.
They didn’t want to or couldn’t. Sometimes it is too much of a challenge to organize a funeral for your own child. Fortunately, in many cities, hospitals, municipalities and priests began to ensure that the bodies of deceased children were treated in accordance with the law. Every few months there is a mass funeral of the children and the parents know exactly where their baby is buried. They have nowhere to go to light a candle.
It is irritating when, while drowning in one hospital, you can be treated with respect, you can bury your child and get all the necessary documents, but not in a hospital in another city or on the next street. When one doctor easily writes a written notification of the birth of a child, the other one from a neighboring street will not do it, accusing the patient of frills or forcing to break the law. On the other hand, it is possible to violate the rights of parents after the loss of a child without any consequences?
In the Association, we organize workshops, support groups and training for doctors, midwives and also for priests, because they also play an important role in this chain of events. Certain standards should already apply.
Your children have a grave in the cemetery?
They have, but their bodies are not there, only paraffin cubes that have remained from histopathological examinations. After our son was born, we were lied to in the hospital that we couldn’t bury him. But I missed such a place very much. And I will always reproach myself for not knowing what really happened to their bodies.
The process of extracting their tissues from histopathological examinations and their burial is a separate topic. Now, thank God, we have nowhere to go to light a candle, I am happy to choose flowers in the spring that I plant there, or to think of what we will bring them for Christmas or Children’s Day. Only the burying of the children allowed me to close, in a sense, the process of mourning them. Their grave comforted me. Sounds scary? Please ask anyone who is struggling with the death of a loved one, and whose memory cannot be commemorated, because it is not known what happened to her body. This is additional suffering.