Thanks for this very helpful presentation.  I especially found helpful what Colleen said about allowing all family members to grieve in their own way without shushing them or forcing them to talk about it.

I do think there is a big difference between the support one will get if their baby dies after birth and the support for someone who suffers miscarraige.  For the first there seems to be more acknowledgement and help where as with the second support can be nonexistent.

It sounded like Colleen was at least fortunate to have found a lot of support amongst family, friends and Church to help her through her grief.  Unfortunately, after suffering a devastating miscarriage I did not get nor could I find any support even though everyone knew and went frantically looking for help.  If you don’t have a body to bury parishes around here don’t offer anything to families who suffer miscarriage, nor does the diocese, nor do any Catholic hospitals here.  Nor did my family or friends or husband (all practicing Catholics) acknowledge my grief.  I took this as society trying to teach me the cultural protocol that you are not supposed to grieve a miscarriage.  Even Church teaching doesn’t directly address miscarriage.  Colleen and Danielle said that the baby is in heaven but I could not find anything that said an unbaptized baby definitely goes to heaven.  If anyone can cite a reference I would love it.

I hope that in the future th Church will finally come to offer some kind of official help to moms and their families who suffer miscarriage.

While we can HOPE that an unbaptized baby lost either soon after birth or through a miscarriage is in heaven, we can never assume that they’re in heaven.  This is written by someone who recently went through a painful miscarriage.  As hard as it is to fathom, Our Lord set up certain rules, one being that without baptism one may not enter heaven.  Is there baptism of desire, water, and fire???  YES!!!  Can one be certain exactly how baptism by desire works?  I don’t know.  There is a lot of debate about unbaptized children and what happens to their souls after death.  I know the theological theory of Limbo is also widely debated, but for me…. it brings me comfort.  How it was explained to me is that because the child wasn’t baptized they are eternally separated from God, BUT they do NOT suffer the torments of hell either.  They are in a ‘place’ so to speak of happiness and contentment.  As much as it pains me to think that my little one will be separated from God, it is also a comfort to believe that they experience no pain and only happiness. 

I know this is a widely debated topic.  May we always respond with sympathy, empathy and love to anyone who has lost a loved one.  Whether through miscarriage, infant death, a parent, a sibling….....

Since you asked for official documentation, I thought you might find this helpful:

http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20070419_un-baptised-infants_en.html

Praying for you and your family, Colleen, and thanks to you, Danielle, and all the F&F team, for all you do to use the media for good as JPII hoped we would:
“In today’s world, housetops are almost always marked by a forest of transmitters and antennae sending and receiving messages of every kind to and from the four corners of the earth. It is vitally important to ensure that among these many messages the word of God is heard. To proclaim the faith from the housetops today means to speak Jesus’ word in and through the dynamic world of communications.”