Ambivalent Parallels in Registration and Certification of (Live) Birth, Stillbirth, and Miscarriage

In this chapter, we explore the ambivalences arising around certification of miscarriages in the United Kingdom. By considering the strange space that a foetus occupies in the social imaginary, we interrogate the tensions found between a foetus’s legal status and social practices surrounding pregnancy loss and bereavement. We outline a range of practices mirroring more formal legal expectations accompanying death (e.g., registration and funerals), drawing on the ‘Death before Birth’ project (2016–2018) funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, United Kingdom. An exploration of the discourses, activism, and attempts at legislating certification (and even registration) of miscarriages reveals the stark limits of the legal framework governing pregnancy loss and the ambivalence of the materiality of this experience. Our analysis also shows ways in which the recognition of miscarriages relies on similarities with other kinds of reproductive losses, especially those whose official recognition is sanctioned by the state via a formal registration requirement. Specifically, certificates of miscarriage amplify parallels with officially recognised pregnancy losses. In this way, they attempt to cut across the divide between formal and informal recognition by highlighting the criterion of meaning of the pregnancy to those who lost it and by downplaying the criteria favoured by the state, such as the gestational age. In that process, a status is being conjured for a new kind of dead, currently invisible to the state, and a recognition of the experience of miscarriage.