On a mild spring day, I paced back and forth in the newly green grass while on a phone call. A friend’s words stopped me in my tracks. She spoke of a mutual friend: “She’s been trying for a baby for ten years. At least you can get pregnant.”
I had lost three babies in a year, with none in my arms, and these words, though spoken to encourage, sent a shock wave of pain to my heart. I was weary of these kinds of statements from fellow believers: “At least it was early” or “You’ll have another baby.” For those of us who have miscarried, these comments feel as if someone has crumpled up the lives of our babies like a piece of paper and thrown them in the trash. Their words diminish the value of our unborn children and invalidate our grief.
But how did we get here? How did we as evangelical Christians, with our predominantly pro-life stance, overlook the way our words undervalue babies lost through miscarriage? We can begin to answer these questions by looking to history.
We often forget that for many centuries, people were left to guess about the happenings in the secret place of a mother’s womb. As far back as the time of Aristotle (384–322 BC), it was widely believed that a baby gained a soul at the quickening—the moment a woman felt the baby’s movement (typically between 16 and 24 weeks’ gestation). Augustine and Thomas Aquinas believed this was also the time of “ensoulment.”
A baby lost earlier in pregnancy was considered a false conception or a “potential” child. Some still held to this belief even into the 19th century, as we see in one woman’s letter to her husband after her miscarriage: “The imaginary Number 10, whom I had already begun to love, is not a real entity as yet.” But at that time, Western culture had a sharp turn toward another belief.
Around the late 17th century through the late 18th century, many people believed in preformationism—the belief that a miniature, preformed human was in either the woman’s egg or the man’s sperm. Because they thought a fully adult person resided like a Russian nest doll inside one of the sex cells, many began to believe the soul existed at conception. German biologist Oscar Hertwig disproved preformationism when he discovered the process of fertilization somewhere around 1875–1878. This new discovery caused renewed confusion among scholars about when life truly began.
Today’s scientific and technological developments have led nearly all biologists, including those who consider themselves to be pro-choice, to agree that life begins at conception. Fetal doppler monitors detect a heartbeat as early as 8–10 weeks’ gestation, and the ultrasound allows us to capture the heartbeat of a preborn child as early as 5 weeks: a heartbeat that thumps with the truth of life, its rhythm an anthem of praise to the Creator.
Many of us have heard our babies’ heartbeats or witnessed their wiggling on screens. But the fetal doppler monitor was created only in 1964. The ultrasound wasn’t routinely used in American hospitals until the late 1970s. Many women, including my mother, didn’t receive this care even in the late ’80s.
Still, even with all the knowledge we have today, many choose to ignore—and even attack—the personhood of the unborn. We would be amiss to deny the impact this has had on our language around children in the womb, including inside the church.
I shudder to remember my own mistakes in this area when a friend of mine experienced a miscarriage. My thoughts then revealed a wrong view of children in the womb. It seemed to me as if she had lost a dream. But my friend didn’t lose a dream; she was grieving a life, a relationship, the severed connection to her baby. It wasn’t until my own losses that I recognized my ignorance.
When a woman receives comments from fellow believers about her miscarriage, like “You’ll have another baby,” “At least you have other children,” or “It’s so common,” what she hears is “Your baby doesn’t matter,” “Your baby wasn’t real,” and “Your baby isn’t worth grieving.”
Though most Christians uphold the sanctity of life, many of us still speak of babies lost to miscarriage as if they were almost babies. Women are grieving real children whom they carried in their bodies, and we address them as if they have merely lost an aspiration. But God does not view preborn babies this way.
In scientific terms, the loss of a preborn child before 20 weeks is considered a miscarriage, whereas a loss after 20 weeks is classified as stillbirth. When we read about stillbirth in Scripture, however, the Hebrew word nephel includes both stillbirth and miscarriage. The word shakol, often translated to “miscarriage,” means “to be bereaved, to miscarry, to lose children.”
It appears God does not differentiate between types of infant loss. To say to a woman, “At least it was early,” is to align ourselves more with the world’s understanding of personhood than with God’s.
Scripture affirms both the humanity and the personhood of every baby conceived in a mother’s womb, regardless of how long the baby is there. Psalm 139 declares that God forms babies’ “inward parts” and that even before they were ova, zygotes, embryos, or fetuses, they were known by our Creator—their days numbered by him (vv. 13–16, ESV). Ensoulment as Augustine and Aquinas considered it is false; babies have souls from the moment they are conceived. Not only that, but they are also created in his image (Gen. 9:6, ESV). They have intrinsic value that can never be stripped away.
Where the Unborn Are People
Views about life in the womb and personhood in the culture and past centuries have influenced the way many Christians speak of babies in the womb today. But we of all people should refine our speech surrounding miscarriage to align with the view we find in Scripture.
When our gut reaction is “You’ll have another baby,” we can instead say, “I’m so sorry for the loss of your baby.” Rather than dismissing the pain of this great loss with “At least it was early,” we can say, “Every life lost—no matter how young—is valuable and worthy of grief.”
By my first Mother’s Day post-miscarriage, I had lost two babies. A friend walked up to me at church bearing flowers and said, “You are a mother. Happy Mother’s Day.” She exemplifies how we might acknowledge infant loss.
Instead of treating women as if they’ve merely lost pregnancies, we can comfort them in the grief of whom they really lost—their babies. After all, women are not only grieving their babies; they are also grieving the loss of getting to kiss them or look into their eyes. These women carry the grief of never seeing who their children would have become. They’re grieving an entire future they had already planned.
In past centuries, even before technology could prove it, some Christians understood that every life conceived was a person with a soul. There’s a poem by Mary Carey, written in 1657, where she shares about her own early miscarriage.
“What birth is this; a poor despised creature? / A little embryo; void of life, and feature,” she begins. She had lost a baby early enough that the baby’s features were indiscernible. Yet she also says,
I also joy, that God hath gain’d one more;
To praise him in the heavens; then was before:
And that this babe (as well as all the rest,)
since ’t had a soul, shall be forever blest.
Carey knew her baby, though “void of life, and feature,” had an eternal soul and was a child. And she grieved her child. She wasn’t the only one. Sir William Masham wrote to his mother-in-law in 1631 that his wife was “young with child and hath miscarried this day.” He continued: “It is the greater grief to us, having been thus long without; I pray God sanctify this affliction to us.”
May we, too, learn to uphold these young lives who are tragically lost as the image bearers they are, through our words and actions. And in doing so, may we allow women in our church pews to grieve their babies.
Brittany Lee Allen is the author of Lost Gifts: Miscarriage, Grief, and the God of All Comfort.
