Leigh Stuckey

My latest ethnographic research project centers on “loss moms” and the rituals that families experiencing pregnancy loss have developed to memorialize losses. While scholarship on miscarriage and stillbirth has documented maternal desires to make losses “real” by creating tangible and durable memorials to imagined and developing infants, less attention has been paid to the ways that those experiencing the loss of wanted pregnancies conceive of their memorialization practices as “mothering.” This follows long-documented trends in American childbirth of giving attention to fetuses and infants and erasing the experiences of pregnant and birthing people. My research examines miscarriage rituals, including those supported by an emerging cadre of “pregnancy loss doulas,” in order to uncover models that better support and affirm “loss moms” and others who see miscarriage an experience of motherhood/parenthood, rather than a stalled rite of passage that forecloses motherhood/parenthood.