Pregnancy & Infant Loss is Equivalent to Infant & Child Death? (Rant)

Really? I just found out that the Miss foundation is campaigning to re-name October "Infant and Child Death Awareness Month". They apparently take issue with using the euphemism "loss" instead of saying "death". I agree with the principle. I don't like euphemisms either. But I have still a problem with the title "Infant and Child Death Awareness Month": it avoids a very important issue--the issue of babies that die during pregnancy. The general public will see this title and stay in their comfortable fantasy where two pink lines always result in a healthy baby 9 months later. And the 1 in 4 women who have at least one miscarriage will no longer have a month to say, "I am a Mother. My child died before it could be born. Please honor me and my grief."

As a mother who has had two pregnancies that each ended before 4 weeks gestation, I feel excluded from the term "Infant and Child Death". My babies were real to me. But that doesn't mean I think they were equivalent to infants. In my mind, an infant would be big enough to hold, developed enough to look human. Many people will hear or see the word "infant" and think of a baby born alive. My babies were probably too small to see without a microscope, and in reality, they probably did look like a cluster of cells. Much of what I grieve for is the potential that was lost. Yes, "lost". As in "gone" or "unable to be found or recovered". They also died, but life can be re-conceived. What I can never recover is those two precious individuals. They had the potential to become full people with personalities and characters all their own. They were individuals. I also grieve the loss of my dreams. When my babies died, I lost my dreams of motherhood, and they lost their potential as developing humans. For me, the phrase "pregnancy loss" is pretty close to the truth.

Of course, I could be uber accurate and say something like "embrionic death", or "fetal death". Accurate, yest, but cold and sterile sounding. On the other hand, I could say something like "pre-birth death", but that sounds like an oxymoron. I understand why people have a problem with the word loss. One reason is that it implies that the survivor misplaced their loved one. My babies certainly weren't misplaced, but my dreams were. My hope was. My innocence was. Those things are gone, and I doubt I'll ever find them again. So the ending of a pregnancy does involve loss. Especially when it ends very early. I'll stick to calling October "Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month". For now. Until someone comes up with a euphemism-free title that is still explicitly inclusive of the death of a baby at any point in pregnancy.