When is a fetus a person?

This is a deeply personal story for me, but one I wanted to share with my friends and anyone else who treats life as a rational standard of value.

Yesterday morning, my husband and I lost our future baby.  A loss of pregnancy is more than a loss of what's already there - a growing fetus, a baby that moves and hiccups and one I had a growing connection with.  It is a loss of what would have been, of hopes and fantasies, of little details I imagined, of the person we were planning on welcoming into our growing family.

In the end, I was ok.  A had to shed some tears as I was going through a live birth of a baby that would not be. Yet, this was a set back, just a delay of the happiness we were invested in and nothing in our present life was changed.  I was given excellent care at the hospital thus far and I was looking forward to going home, getting back to my life.

Then the forms showed up. First, I was astounded at the form which asked for the baby's name, race, parent information and led up to the question of whether to request a SSN for the baby.  "Seriously? That's a rather inappropriate set of questions given the circumstances," I thought and asked the nurse politely if I could refuse filling it out.  Then a big envelope came.  I was told that a social worker was going to come to talk to us.  Hearing those two dirty words, my husband reared up and started asking questions the nurse could not comprehend about the job of the social worker and what it was that she was planning to accomplish.  I interrupted.  "What my husband is saying is - I am not willing to talk to a social worker."  You may be wondering why.  What's so scary about social workers? I'll just say that if you have children and find out there is a social worker near you, your first instinct should be to flee.  They are certainly not there to improve your relationship with your kids, nor to make your life better.  They are there with a near-unilateral power to judge whether your ideas of parenting are the right ones and to act on their judgement.  I was at a loss as to what such a person might want with a dead fetus - but the principle remained - run - or refuse to speak.

Nor surprisingly, every busy-body in a 200-yard radius of our room showed up.  Turns out, a twenty-week fetus is considered a person.  Therefore we need to make a funeral arrangement and everything that goes with that.

"Why would you do this to parents?" I asked.

"Blah.. blah.. so sorry for your loss... Legally it's a person..."

"I do not consider a twenty-week-old fetus that has no capacity for life a person. Therefore I will not treat it as such.  However, if you do and would like to do whatever is appropriate, you are more than welcome to."

"Blah... blah... We are legally required..."

"OK, I am willing to do whatever it takes to stay out of jail.  What do I need to do?"

"J-j-j-jail???  Where did that come from?  How did you even get there???"

"You explained that there are some things required by law.  I understand that the implication is that if I break the law, I go to jail, is that correct?"

"Oh... well... blah... blah... I understand you have suffered a loss..." She put her arms around me and repeated "I am so sorry" over and over again, like her sympathy was going to change her mind.

It went on from there.  They explained that burial may be very inexpensive. That we don't have to give the baby a specific name, but Baby would do. I explained that I found this process offensive and would not condone it.  Eventually, my husband went through the forms and signed those that were unobjectionable - such as a release for an autopsy.  He also named the baby Miscarriage and signed some form where you had to testify that you were indigent and wished the county to dispose of the body - but crossed out the indigent part...  They took the papers they could get and ran.

I found the whole process offensive, ghoulish and cruel.  However, I happened to be particularly well-suited not to be emotionally impacted by it - thinking about naming the baby, burying it and so on was not going to increase the sense of loss. For many it would.  

How could it be ok in our culture to show up in a labor & delivery room, minutes after a dead fetus emerged from a woman's body to be carefully placed in a jar and taken away to be examined for genetic defects, and force the parents to think about whether they want it cremated or buried? And further insist when they decline any such option? How could it be ok to do that with a still-born baby that never took a breath of his own, let alone a fetus, barely half way through the pregnancy? 

This happened at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, not a religious hospital, but a normal secular facility where patients go in the hopes to avoid precisely this kind of harassment. I knew things have been going that way, but this one is surprising, even to me.