Make America Happy Again

The Men Who Lost Their Babies, Rule-Following Decadence, Lowering the Maternal Mortality Rate, and Jesus

File: In the Conservatory.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

As I was scrolling along this week through the Tiktok feed of Alex and Jon, and listening to snatches of their podcast, Give It To Me Straight, I came across the heartbreaking announcement that they had lost the baby they were expecting last year. So I poked around, as one does, and it appears that the pregnancy was high risk from the beginning. And I succumbed to that very ancient sensation of wanting to find out more and also feeling very bad for prying. I don’t know them, and yet they are living their lives, to one degree or another, in the public eye. There is the grief itself, and then there are the deathless content production decisions about how to share tragic news with one’s accumulated fan base. Everyone wants to know what happened, and that is so hard when you want to climb into a hole and die.

I only bring this up because I happened to read this long piece from the Free Press last week, about the grief fathers feel when their children die before they are born, either on purpose, by abortion, or through miscarriage. It’s quite long and I commend it to you. It’s called “The Men Who Lost Their Babies: ‘It’s not my body. I understand that, but it’s part of me.’” There are a lot of distressing sentiments articulated all through. Like this one:

Once, flipping through a dusty basket of mid-century stationery at a flea market, I came across a 1940s greeting card, meant as a gag gift fro expectant fathers. It read, “The stork brought it. Your wife carried it. The doctor spanked it. The nurse swaddled it…”—and inside, above an illustration of a disheveled-looking man smoking and pacing alone in a hospital waiting room, the accusatory punch line: “What did you do?”

And this one:

Even now, that a man might actually feel a profound emotional connection to his unborn child as it lives—or dies—inside someone else’s body is not a truth we’re especially comfortable with. “My body, my choice,” the longtime rallying cry of abortion rights advocates, emphasizes exactly whose body and whose choice it isn’t. In the public imagination, men’s feelings on this topic are of no consequence; some find it inconceivable that they even have feelings at all. When I told a friend, a millennial mother of two, that I was writing a story about what men think and feel about pregnancy loss, her response was the same as the implied punchline on that old greeting card. She raised an eyebrow: “You mean… nothing?”

It is interesting how calloused, how coarse the “conversation” about something so essential as fatherhood and even motherhood has become in spite of continual reminders that we need to be kind, to ourselves most of all, but sometimes even to other people, like marriage partners or children.