FUNERAL DENIED
FUNERAL
DENIED
ST.
CATHARINES, Ont.
When their stillborn baby disappeared from the hospital morgue the night before his burial, a Southern Ontario couple began pushing for an apology. When they discovered the same thing had happened to another family at the same hospital, they began calling for a system-wide change to the way the medical establishment regards its youngest, tiniest patients.
"It's awful enough having to deal with the fact that my son's heart stopped beating, but to have to deal with the fact that I don't know where his body is now is just too much to bear," says Debra Lynn Poirier, whose baby was stillborn on Dec. 2, 17 weeks into the pregnancy, then inexplicably lost even though his body had been tagged for burial.
The loss has devastated the parents and shaken public confidence in St. Catharines General Hospital. Further, it highlights conflicting attitudes about what should happen when parents lose a fetus early in a pregnancy.
It has been standard practice for a fetus delivered before 20 weeks to be regarded as tissue matter and typically disposed of along with the hospital's biomedical waste, but there has been a growing movement to allow parents more opportunities to deal with their loss.
Dr. Margaret Somerville, a leading Canadian ethicist, said the evidence shows the traditional attitude of denial toward this kind of reproductive loss often makes it more difficult for parents who have experienced stillbirth, miscarriage or infertility trials.
"It's about the lens that you put on and it's intensely personal," said Dr. Somerville, founder of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law. "If it's tissue that just didn't go right, you dispose of it in a way that doesn't offend anyone's sense of decency. But if you look at it as the loss of human life, then it requires something completely different."
In Ms. Poirier's case, the hospital did endeavor to show consideration. She was offered compassionate care by doctors and nurses when she had to deliver a baby she knew was dead; she was allowed to spend time holding the fetus, which she and her husband named Ethan; and she received helpful counselling from the hospital's chaplain, who performed a special blessing ceremony shortly after Ethan's delivery and advised Ms. Poirier she could hold a full funeral service later.
She said by the time she and her husband left the hospital, every nurse on the floor knew they wanted a funeral, so much so that when staff discovered the couple had not filled out the requisite paperwork, they called them at home late at night to come sign the forms.
Ethan was born on a Tuesday. His father, Leo Rochon, signed the papers to release Ethan's body at about 11 p.m. on Wednesday, but by the time the mortician showed up to prepare the body for burial on Thursday morning, it was gone from the morgue.
The St. Catharines General Hospital has assumed responsibility for the missing fetus and apologized to the family, but officials are saying little else because the matter is the subject of negotiations between lawyers for the hospital and the couple.
Dr. William Shragge, chief of staff for the Niagara Health System, the regional hospital authority, refused to say whether the hospital had determined what happened to the fetus or whether officials had completed the hospital's internal investigation into the matter. He said he could not comment because "the process was under legal constraints."
The couple's lawyer, Brian Banfield, said it is too early to know whether this case relates only to this couple's ordeal, or whether it indicates a broader failure "to deal with the needs of those mothers and fathers who feel that a burial is what they require."
He has heard from another St. Catharines woman who said the hospital did not heed her request that the body of her stillborn fetus be prepared for burial. The woman, who is now a 28-year-old social worker, said she was about 16 weeks pregnant when she lost her baby seven years ago and found hospital staff "completely disregarded" her wishes to see the fetus and have a funeral service.
"At the time, they almost seemed appalled that I wanted to have a burial," said the woman, who does not want her name used. She said there was some dispute about how far along her pregnancy was, but she made it quite clear to all medical staff that because she had miscarried before and because this pregnancy was the furthest along she had ever been, "I really needed closure on this one."
She said officials simply pushed aside her requests and attempted to shift her focus, and then, when she eventually asked about the remains, she was told there simply was not any fetal tissue.
When she read about Ms. Poirier's case in the local newspaper recently, she said she felt as if she were going to pass out.
"I just want the system changed so that people's wishes are given consideration," she said. "It has to change. More and more women are losing children [because of infertility and the rise in miscarriages], but the health system is still not changing."
In a recent book called Grieving Reproductive Loss, Kathleen Gray and Anne Lassance, health care workers and bereavement counsellors in Montreal, say there is growing evidence of the need for grieving time for people who experience these kinds of pregnancy losses.
"The grief associated with such reproductive losses is often minimized, denied and considered to be outside the normal grieving rules of society," they say in the book.
"Yet individuals who have suffered these losses can experience profound grief and emotional pain. Their grief needs to be acknowledged by themselves and by others."
Mr. Rochon said he and Ms. Poirier would never have pursued legal action if someone at the hospital had just explained to them what happened.
"We understand that mistakes are made. We just want someone to come before us and apologize ... to look in our eyes and say, 'I screwed up, it was me, I'm sorry.' "
© National Post 2004