Birth deserves regard

By RUTH SHEEHAN, Staff Writer
Published: Dec 6, 2004 - © Copyright 2004, The News & Observer Publishing Company

Karl Huber is holding it together pretty well. And so am I.

We are discussing the laws regarding the treatment of stillborn babies in North 
Carolina and across the country. We're discussing how they've been changed, or 
are under consideration, in more than 25 states. We are discussing how Huber 
might draw attention to this issue here. It is a conversation about facts and 
strategy.

Then he pulls out the photo of Raphael.

That's when he loses it. And so do I.

With his pink cheeks and contented smile, Raphael looks like any newborn sleeping 
the sleep of angels.

But Raphael isn't sleeping.

He's dead.

Raphael was delivered stillborn 11 days before his due date in December 2002.

He was perfect in every way, except for the knot in his umbilical cord. The doctors 
think the knot was first made, loosely, during the second trimester, when the baby 
was turning somersaults in a roomy womb.

By the end of the third trimester, however, Raphael was big and space was tight.

All it took was one wrong turn to cinch the knot. To cut off Raphael's lifeline 
to his mother.

Jennifer Huber told her husband that she thinks, in retrospect, she felt his 
last move on Sunday, Dec. 15.

On Tuesday, her doctor had a hard time locating a heartbeat. He suggested an 
ultrasound, "just to be sure." Turns out the heartbeat was Jennifer's. The baby 
was no longer alive.

The next day, labor was induced.

After six grueling hours, she gave birth to her fourth little boy.

The nurses and doctors were wonderful, Karl Huber told me. They left him and his 
wife to hold the baby for nearly four hours before turning him over for the burial 
arrangements.

Karl told me how he sat there, holding his son, staring into the child's round face. 
Suddenly he realized that he was rocking the boy. In many ways, that is the most 
painful memory. That moment of realization that this baby wouldn't be coming home.

But there is something else that rankles Huber. Even after two years, even as he 
and his wife are looking forward to the birth of another baby in January -- this 
time a girl-- he cannot let this go. When they left the hospital, they received 
a fetal death certificate, the state's only official recognition of Raphael.

Huber, who lives in Burlington and works as a consultant for IBM in the Triangle, 
has no problem with the death certificate. But how can there be a death 
certificate when there was no birth? "It makes no sense," he said.

It doesn't acknowledge his wife's labor and delivery. It doesn't acknowledge his 
son's entry into this world.

That's why Huber would like North Carolina to join a movement that began in the 
late '90s in Arizona. There, one woman's crusade led the state legislature to 
create a new classification of birth certificate: certificate of birth, resulting 
in stillbirth.

What Huber hopes is that a lawmaker here will take up this issue during the next 
legislative session. He doesn't want it to devolve into a debate over when life 
begins or when a fetus is considered a baby. He just wants the law to acknowledge 
the stillborn infants for what they are.

He told me, "Raphael was stillborn, but still born."

Ruth Sheehan can be reached at 829-4828 or rsheehan@newsobserver.com.