Perinatal Hospices: Supporting Psychosis

If pregnancy had a warning label it would be "May cause psychosis". And this unique brand of psychosis is not limited to the parents. From the fetus fetishizing fucks of the religious right to the couples who have a miscarriage and forget that they can make another one fetuses and babies make people dumb. This article on MSNBC delves into another component of the pregnancy psychosis: the Perinatal Hospice.

A Perinatal Hospice is a hospice for families who know that their baby will die shortly after birth. You see, when a fetus is diagnosed with a fatal condition which ensures its death shortly (within a few days) after birth some couples suffering from psychosis will decide to continue the pregnancy. When this happens a perinatal hospice can be found through sites such as perinatalhospice.org which will help foster the parent's delusion by cutting a lock of their baby's hair, making hand impressions, and bathing the body in warm water to stave off rigor mortis. Perinatal hospices exploit the delusions of parents.

"It was clear I was taking him around to say hello and goodbye" said one father of his taking his soon-to-die son to "meet" friends and relatives. “My big hope was that his life, however long it was going to be, would be full and not painful," said the same father of his soon-to-die son. Another couple who learned three months before its birth that their baby would die soon after birth adopted another approach:

"We weren’t going to get to keep him, but this was our time with him. We think of it as our summer with Gabriel. We took him fishing. We had a family portrait taken. We took him to a baseball game. We picked out his casket. All of those were ways of parenting Gabriel.”

All of these approaches, all of these manners in which parents deal with the inevitable loss of a fetus or death of a baby contain a degree of psychosis, of a "loss of contact with reality". And while some may sympathize with the parents and see this as a beautiful way to confront a tragic loss the error in this thinking can be made plain in one simple statement:

YOU CAN MAKE ANOTHER ONE YOU FUCKHEADS!

And not only is the truth that children are a renewable resource useful in this conversation but also the fact that fetuses are not people; that babies are not people. The father who was "taking him around to say hello and goodbye" is suffering from psychosis. The baby is not saying anything, is not in any way engaged in the act of hello or goodbye. The couple who took their still-in-the-womb fetus fishing, who took a family portrait of their selves, are suffering from psychosis. Both the baby and the fetus, in these examples, were basically inert objects, themselves less functional than retarded kittens.

But these psychotic parents, these delusional idiots, embrace stupid and abandon reality. Rather than discard the failure and try again they coddle the doomed pregnancy and refuse to let go as they confuse nobility with petty clinging, reason with psychosis.

It is not wise. It is not noble. It is not beneficial. It is not healthy. It is not good. Perinatal Hospices do not behoove anyone. Perinatal Hospices profit off of delusional, weak parents seeking an outlet for their grief who refuse to accept reality and instead harbor a grand delusion that their dying fetus is anything more than a dying fetus.

"We picked out his casket. All of those were ways of parenting Gabriel."

Think about that.

I can appreciate that it would be difficult to discover five months into a pregnancy that the fetus was flawed in such a way as to ensure its demise shortly after birth. Presumably those five months would have been filled with hopes and planning, dreams of the future of the child and excitement over raising the being.

The problem is that parents confuse the being which is with the being which may be; they confuse the illusion child in their dreams which the being which actually exists. They get ahead of themselves and think of the fetus as a child which could go fishing, attend ball games, think, and feel. Certainly it would be difficult to lose the child in which one had invested such time and cultivated such memories.

But you aren't losing the illusion child in your head. You're losing the sickly fetus you've never met which exists in reality. You're confusing what exists in your mind with what exists in reality.

And that is psychosis.