“I'd failed to produce a baby and I'd failed to notice when the baby was in distress”: The social construction of bereaved motherhood

"Just forget about it and move on": Stillbirth ruptured and repaired narratives beyond expectant futures

The critical sociological literature has explored social prescriptions on women's reproductive lives, trajectories, outcomes and aftermaths. However, little attention has been given to how these prescriptions are expressed through temporal negotiations. This article delves into the narratives of Jewish-Israeli women who have experienced stillbirths. In their narratives, these women contest expectations directed towards them in interactions with professionals, family and friends. Within these expectations, a form of dictation over their future comes into being, where a new pregnancy should quickly precede the stillbirth. The focus here lies on how these women navigate and contest these temporal expectations, carving out space for stillbirth as a meaningful and painful event that should be granted attention and for alternative forms of remembering their stillborn and caring for them after their death. They reshape their narratives through what I call "thickening a present tense" and extend care to the stillborn in the aftermath of the stillbirth. This work contributes to scholarly inquiries into reproductive life and probing time as a socially prescribed mechanism for the value and social distribution of care.

Further Hierarchies of Loss: Tracking Relationality in Pregnancy Loss Experiences

The article extends Robson and Walter's concept of hierarchies of loss by describing further factors which afford differential social legitimacy to death-related losses. Drawing on our separate research with women in England who have experienced pre-viability pregnancy loss through different types of miscarriage and termination for foetal anomaly, we note that closeness of relationship to the object of loss does hierarchise pregnancy loss. However, other relational elements are also implicated, including ontological positions on what it was which was lost, in relation to other individually and socially experienced losses. Hierarchies are both imposed and agentially used by those who are implicated. This wider analysis extends the concept of hierarchies of loss so it can include experiences which do and do not involve grief and bereavement, and experiences of social recognition alongside those where loss is disenfranchised, marginalised, or ungrievable.