Miscarriage from a Christian perspective
by Bethany Kerr
Jill received an email recently from a woman who has written a book to encourage and support mothers grieving after miscarriage. If you have gone through a loss, this may be for you.
From the email…
“I wanted to share my personal story with you and hope that you will help me in sharing it with others.
This year (2009) didn’t start out to be good for our family. On February 6th, I suffered my second miscarriage in less than two years and lost a baby girl at almost 3 months from an extra x chromosome problem 47,xx, +15 resulting in trisomy and not capable of fetal survival. After going through the darkest hours of my life for several weeks, I prayed for God to heal my heart again.
Then the strangest thing happened. I got the “calling” at 1:30 in the morning and knew that God was talking to me. I started writing privately for myself and, at the same time, felt a need to reach out to others. I wasn’t sure how that could be possible considering my life was turned upside down.
This book will help parents who have lost children through miscarriage, those who have died after birth, infertility and supporting family members including the heroic husbands that see their wives through this. It talks about our story, loss, recovery, hope and healing. I wanted to “pay it forward” to help others in positive memory of the two babies we lost. It is like a hug from a stranger who cares and understands their pain and sorrow. There are limited resources available and I would like to make a difference in this area for families.
It is my (long-term) goal to donate as many free copies as possible to miscarriage support organizations, pregnancy care centers, hospitals and other places that I am researching. When new parents leave most hospitals, they are sent home with new infant care bags. Often, with the loss of a child, the families leave empty handed with nothing, as I did on both occasions. With giving them a small gesture such as a book, they have support from someone who has walked in their shoes.
The front cover has some wooden ABC blocks pictured and the title “Surviving Miscarriage From A Christian Perspective.” The back cover is more symbolic than I ever imagined. They say that different things can symbolize babies who have passed such as butterflies, dragonflies, snowflakes and rosebuds that haven’t opened. I found a design that had two butterflies stacked on top of one another. It was exactly what I was looking for.
Miscarriage From A Christian Perspective can be previewed/purchased at www.lulu.com. Please type in Lisa Lindley or the title. In a few weeks this will also be available at online retail outlets such as Amazon.com and a few others. My ISBN# 978-0-578-01853-9
Surviving Miscarriage From A Christian Perspective is a heartfelt account of one mother’s experience coping with miscarriage, loss, recovery and spiritual awakening. This book was written to comfort those in need and to offer hope, strength and healing through a Christian viewpoint.
“Faith in God is what helped me to survive this experience. I hope that my story will touch your life or someone that you love and give them healing.”
– Lisa Lindley
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. – Matthew 5:4
Thank you!
My website: www.smallestwingsofhope.faithweb.com ”
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
Sweet.
Thank you for sharing this with us.
Thanks for sharing this information. Perhaps libraries can pick this one up too. I will see about my organization purchasing a copy once it becomes more widely available.
If you want your library to obtain a copy go and ask them to purchase it! If you don’t ask, often times Christian books will simply not be ordered.
Having never had a miscarriage myself I can see this book being of use to those of us who haven’t experienced the tragedy of losing a baby but have friends and family who have.
God bless
What a sweet book written from a grieving mommy’s heart! Thank you!
angel,
I am still waiting for my library to order abortion recovery materials!!
I am still waiting for my library to order abortion recovery materials!!
Posted by: Carla at May 2, 2009 7:36 AM
Carla, then go bug them and make sure they have in fact ordered the books
It should only take one month or so to get the books in.
The American Library Association spouts a great deal about intellectual freedom and that patrons are entitled to access to ALL information. Call them in on this – the gays and holocaust deniers do so!
Libraries are responsible to all their patrons. They allocate money to fill majority requests first. If you are the only one requesting, it may well be more cost efficient to use interlibrary loan.
Libraries are not there to push your agenda by stocking propaganda materials.
Abortion recovery resources as propaganda? Who knew?
Carla,
Feminism, a belief once woven tightly into the fabric of our “progressive” society, is unraveling at the hands of social and political conservatives.
restrictions on women’s reproductive rights grew into a fight not about women’s rights but about pharmacists’ religious beliefs
Those quotes are from the Amelia Bloomer Project web page, which is a link on the Feminist Task Force page of the Social Responsibilities Roundtable of the American Library Association. It comes as no surprise that Barack Obama was the keynote speaker at the 2005 ALA Annual Conference.
libraries shouldn’t have pornographic material either, librarian. Yet, they carry trashy romance books and I am sure there are a few public libraries that carry the disgusting book “Its Perfectly Normal” which P.P. likes to hand out to children as young as 9 or 10.
librarian: I don’t know what system you are in but my library doesn’t do inter library loans for new books.
Also our libraries pretty much honor every request for new books, unless they are costly textbooks.
I wonder how many proabortion, self-abortion, sex technique and gay sex books your library carries librarian? Do you carry the book Labor of love by Thomas Beatie? Do you carry books on abortion rights? Might those books be “propaganda”?
According to the ALA, libraries are to carry materials which represent ALL POV, not just your liberal humanist ones, much as you’d like to think that’s what the policy reads.
I’ve noticed that the word “propaganda” is often used as a sort of doublespeak meaning “information that questions or contradicts my beliefs.”
God forbid a woman would request information on recovering from a traumatic experience. Carla, how can you be so selfish as to want women to have access to information when you know it might cast abortion in a negative light? (that was sarcasm, of course)
Librarian: Spare everyone the intellectual dishonesty and admit that you have a personal distaste for pro-life literature. I highly doubt a librarian just happened to pop in to a pro-life blog to objectively explain how a library operates.
Sorry for sounding so harsh; I’m just finding it hard to tolerate silly comments today.
Show me an after-abortion support book truly supporting all feelings a woman might feel, including relief, and I’ll show you a book that deserves to be in a library. The rest are propaganda tracts.
Oh yes. Relief. That lasted a couple of days.
All of the resources I have read list relief as one of the feelings a woman might feel. Your point?
Human abstract: Since when do all books contained in a library undergo a screening process to determine if they are completely unbiased? Are you proposing that libraries employ censorship as some sort of Orwellian means to protect the public from certain perspectives?
Again, where is the intellectual honesty? Why is it so hard for people to admit that they have personal objections to a point of view instead of acting like they are speaking for the common good?
Jannette,
Well said!
yor bro ken
Carla, this is as good a place as any to thank you yet again for the book you sent to me. :)
Human abstract: Since when do all books contained in a library undergo a screening process to determine if they are completely unbiased? Are you proposing that libraries employ censorship as some sort of Orwellian means to protect the public from certain perspectives?
Again, where is the intellectual honesty? Why is it so hard for people to admit that they have personal objections to a point of view instead of acting like they are speaking for the common good?
Posted by: Janette at May 2, 2009 1:32 PM
Yes Janette.
And there is nothing wrong with having a point of view or having books with a point of view!
It’s by reading or listening to other points of view that we can sometimes discover how to better understand our own position on a topic.
And it’s good to try to understand how people who don’t have the same belief have come to their position.
This is why libraries don’t ban books. People need to have the right to access ideas.
And of course this leads to the question that who bans which books? Who would decide which books to ban on abortion for example?
I would be interested to know if women who have experienced miscarriages have a reluctance to go to the hospital?
My friends who have had miscarriages have been most reluctant to go, in part due to the fact that they felt hospital staff trivialized the loss of a “baby”. Or they felt they would lose the body of their very young baby.
I intentionally avoided the hospital when I had my miscarriage (an ultrasound indicated that I was going to miscarry, so I knew ahead of time). I felt that losing the baby was a very personal experience, and I really didn’t want to spend my last moments with my child in an impersonal ER.
During my next pregnancy, I experienced a threatened miscarriage while out of town, so I went to a local ER. The baby was fine (and is now almost a year old!), but the doctor definitely trivialized the situation. He practically rolled his eyes when I mentioned my previous miscarriage and was dismissive of my concerns. His reasoning was that even if I had another miscarriage, the odds were in my favor that I would have a baby eventually, so losing a few babies along the way was no big deal (!?).
I have no problem with biased books, so long as they’re clearly marked as such. Intellectual honesty includes admitting bias, which the vast majority of “post abortion” books have and don’t mention. Ditto sites like abortionno.com. If a book was written detailing the range of emotions a woman might feel, positive along with the negative, I’d welcome it.
It all has to do with whether source of information is willing to admit bias. Example: I do not personally like Jill, for a number of reasons, nor do I consider her a reliable source of information. HOWEVER, she admits, right there in the header for all to see, her point of view. I came onto this site fully expecting that point of view for that reason. There is no force in the world that can convince me to agree with it (I literally cannot conceive of a future where I would be anti-abortion), but there is also no force in the world that could ever persuade me a blog like hers shouldn’t exist.
A book regarding feelings after abortion from an anti-abortion perspective would be fine, labeled as such. A book regarding feelings after abortion from an anti-abortion perspective, presented as though it was universal and The Absolute Truth, however, is not. I feel as though the majority of post-abortion works fall under the latter category.
H.A., “Thou shalt not kill,” is a universal truth.
We obviously disagree on what the universal truths are. You see the degree to which religion affects our identities; we don’t even share the same vocabulary. So I ask you: do secular humanists label all their works as proceeding from the secular humanist perspective? Of course not!
And postmodernists like to “discuss” everything (but everybody must adopt their assumptions, of course). President Bush understood that discussion with Muslim radicals, for example, will get us nowhere.
Alexandra,
You are welcome, sweets! :)
Angel,
I was told I would pass a plum sized clot. My doctor dismissed me and walked out the door. I begged my husband to take me home and I delivered my 10 week old baby into my hand. So very glad I did!! I learned the truth that day.
HA,
You and I will just have to wait for the “non-biased” books about abortion recovery. Something titled The Joys of Abortion, Abortion Pride or maybe Abortion Was The Best Thing I’ve Ever Done. Keep me posted. I would read them.
HA,
You and I will just have to wait for the “non-biased” books about abortion recovery. Something titled The Joys of Abortion, Abortion Pride or maybe Abortion Was The Best Thing I’ve Ever Done. Keep me posted. I would read them.
Posted by: Carla at May 3, 2009 6:21 AM
lol (if it was funny!)
Yes, HA, I’m sure the library will go around marking every book it can as “BIASED”. I’m sure that would include “Heather has two mommies”, “Daddy’s Roomate”, “Gay marriage, real life: ten stories of love and family” and “Abortion: A positive decision”
Unless by biased you mean Christian?
I have no problem with biased books, so long as they’re clearly marked as such.
So you would be fine with “It’s Perfectly Normal” being marked with a disclaimer on the front cover which noted it’s bias towards abortion?
(Oh, and maybe a warning for some of the pornographic material inside it)?
If by “biased” you mean it contains the author’s point of view, HA, well, yes, that’s the nature of a book. It’s the job of the reader himself to figure out if what he reads is true – not some bystander.
Jon @ 5:51 AM,
Excellent points.
My library keeps books with a Christian perspective with the ‘Christian’ books, rather than with other books on that topic.
A book about abortion with a Christian point of view would be shelved with all the other books about Christianity rather than with the books about abortion.
Georgia that is NOT how a library works. Having been a user of both public and academic libraries there is a difference:
Public libraries shelve their books according to the Dewey Decimal system. This means that books on abortion can be found in various areas depending upon which aspect the book treats. Books on abortion can consider ethics, social policy, politics etc. meaning they will be in different areas of the library.
Universities use the Library of Congress system which different again. And yes books on one general topic will be found in various parts of the library depending upon the aspect treated.
I think it wrong to place all Christian books in one area of the library. Should we place all Muslim books in a separate section of the library?
Georgia, there is always some difficulty in knowing where to put books. I am always fascinated to see how bookstores (which are more open to changes in layout/organization) arrange books. Do they have a “For Dummies” section — the equivalent of your Christian perspective section — so that the person seeking out beginner plumbing advice must know to look in the For Dummies area? Or do they shelve the For Dummies books by subject, so that “Plumbing for Dummies” is easily located by someone looking for plumbing, but not necessarily by someone who’s just browsing for easy DIY advice on common household problems?
I was recently looking for one of the books Primo Levi published on his time in and immediately following Auschwitz. I looked first in biography; then in history. Then in Judaica. I was shocked to find it under Christian Inspiration! I’d half a mind to complain to someone about that…
It seems to me that libraries, moreso than bookstores, should be organized in such a way that information is most easily found by those searching for it. Most libraries use the Dewey Decimal System (though I am somewhat partial to the Library of Congress Classification, myself*), which divides books into ten main classes. Religion is the 200’s; psychology is in the 100’s; and technology is the 600’s. Technology seems counter-intuitive for this subject, but the 610’s are medical sciences, and within that subclassification, the 618’s are gynecology.
So the question with books like this one is, is someone more likely to be searching for it for its Christian perspective, or for its post-miscarriage mental and physical health information? Obviously these are subjective questions. Not all women who have had miscarriages will find a Christian perspective useful; and not all Christian women have had miscarriages or find themselves in need of this book. I’m inclined to say that the book would belong with other miscarriage-related literature, which is most frequently found in the 618’s; and not Christian literature, because non-Christians who have had miscarriages are more likely to find this book useful than Christians who have not had miscarriages. That is to say, Christianity is the perspective, but miscarriage is the topic itself.
If we sorted books by their perspective, really, we’d have like a billion libraries within every actual library.
Fortunately we’re no longer subject to the tyrannical, bureaucratic rule of the card catalog, so it’s easy for people to locate books even if they don’t know exactly what they’re searching for. Hooray for technology!
*I favor the Alexandra Is Amazingly Awesome system, really (seen, in part, here: http://tinyurl.com/d5cw2n) wherein each book has a specific location that depends chiefly on the books immediately to its right and left. Each book, consequently, becomes forever (and ever more strongly) associated with the books beside it, until it seems only natural that Never Let Me Go is shelved to the right of Prep, since I read them both during one very depressed summer. I am the only person who can find anything organized in the AAA system, so it also makes me an indispensable member of my own household, which is nice.
Fortunately we’re no longer subject to the tyrannical, bureaucratic rule of the card catalog, so it’s easy for people to locate books even if they don’t know exactly what they’re searching for. Hooray for technology!
Posted by: Alexandra at May 3, 2009 12:26 PM
Wrong as any cataloger will tell you! Catalogers still rule but they use technology to do their work. Where to do think all those numbers come from on the spine of your library book? And the card catalog is now electronic! :)
Human Abstract at May 3, 2009 1:27 AM
Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re saying that if you had things your way, a library would label all books with a sort of warning indicating if the books’ contents were not purely objective? Or are you only referring to books with abortion as the topic?
How the h*ll would that work? First of all, abortion is not some natural law accepted as self-evident. Abortion is a highly politicized and controversial issue. Aside from perhaps a medical textbook describing only the particulars of the surgery itself, how would it even be possible to accurately identify bias? When it comes to other books, who would determine bias? What formula would they use? You indicated that books regarding abortion recovery should include all feelings a woman might feel, but is including all perceptions and speculations an effective formula in eliminating bias? Could not a book still have a biased tone or theme while still including all perspectives?
Why not allow people to compare and contrast various literature (aka research) and determine which resources they find most helpful? If one is searching for the most objective book on a subject, why not let them use their intellect to determine which books best fit that description? It strikes me as a bit condescending to think that people cannot make their own inferences about an author’s intentions. Why do you think independent people should be coddled regarding their access to literature?
Wrong as any cataloger will tell you! Catalogers still rule but they use technology to do their work. Where to do think all those numbers come from on the spine of your library book? And the card catalog is now electronic! :)
angel, it’s much easier for patrons to find things now that they don’t have to use an physical catalog and can instead use the online public access catalog. Of course the call numbers come from somewhere.
Someone searching for miscarriage as a keyword on an OPAC would pull this book up quite quickly, which mitigates some of the problems inherent in classification.
Alexandra; absolutely! Thank goodness for computers! Or we would never be talking to one another.
I remember a time when I walked into a library and the catalog was on micro-fiche! Now that was a big turn-off.
OMG angel, microfiche. I was JUST barely at the tail end of common use of such archaic technologies. I remember learning how to look for the little cards in the catalog in elementary school, and I had a middle school project where we had to use microfiche to find old newspapers. At that point the internet was already common (though, tragically, as AOL) and I remember being like, “This had better all change by the time I’m in college.”
Woah, now that I think about it, things changed SO MUCH by the time I was in college.
Alexandra: microfiche and micro film are still used especially for newspaper formats.
Anyone doing genealogical research has to know how to use microfiche!
Also universities usually have one or two micro fiche readers on campus. I think Organic Chemistry supplements are on microfiche.
Hi there,
I am the author of this book. This really applies to anyone who has had a miscarriage. I just chose to write from a Christian perspective because my faith gave me strength to cope. It applies to most faiths. I am not talking about a specific denomination. I hope this helps!
Thank you very much!
Lisa
Oh, I know, angel. I’m just glad they’re no longer in common use! Libraries are so much more user-friendly as a result of technology.
Lisa Lindley,
Thank you for this book!! :)
I am the author of this book. This really applies to anyone who has had a miscarriage. I just chose to write from a Christian perspective because my faith gave me strength to cope. It applies to most faiths. I am not talking about a specific denomination. I hope this helps!
Thanks for offering that information, Ms. Lindley! I’m sure many women will find the book helpful.
Hi Lisa Lindley
I think there is certainly a strong need for your book. I intend to ensure the public library in my area purchases a copy (else I will provide them with one!).
I work in genealogical research, and yes, microfiche and microfilm are still fairly common.