This project is a book-length spiritual memoir that will delve deeply into the theological significance of carrying, giving birth to, and surviving the death of child with a poor prenatal diagnosis, explored through the narrative of my own and my husband’s experience of receiving a fatal prenatal diagnosis for our first-born child at 20 weeks’ gestation. This book will be easily accessible to Christian women who are seeking spiritual sustenance in the midst of or following an experience of reproductive loss.

Pregnancy, childbirth, and caring for a newborn are often profoundly life-changing and spiritually revelatory experiences in the lives of many women. Although they are often hidden and unspoken, experiences of reproductive loss are startlingly common and equally or even more defining experiences. At least one in five pregnancies end in miscarriage and an additional 6 per 1,000 pregnancies end in death shortly before or after birth. The death of a child often shatters a parent’s theological framework, resulting in profound spiritual disorientation, trauma and grief, and raising a whole range of the deepest human questions about God’s presence or absence in suffering, about what determines the value of a life, about the role of prayer and faith in healing, and about life after death. Yet few resources currently exist to explore the theological meaning of pregnancy and childbirth, and even fewer that illuminate the experience of mothering through perinatal death.

I plan to weave together theological reflection and memoir, drawing on diverse sources of wisdom such as Jean Vanier’s writings and life, Julian of Norwich’s writings, and narratives of lament and companionship in grief from the Gospel of John. I also plan to read extensively in the fields of trauma theology, bodily ways of knowing, theology of disability, and theology of reproductive loss, looking for ways to deepen the theological roots of this book and of my own understanding.