Mother to State: Remember My Baby

It might sound like an easy question, but it's sparking a nationwide battle between mothers of stillborn infants and reproductive rights activists.  Mothers say their children should be acknowledged by the state. Activists say it infringes on abortion rights. 

A Personal Story
For nine months, LeKeyah Quinn planned on the birth of her baby. But, all her plans came to an abrupt and tragic halt when her son, Donovan Collinwood Wilson, died in utero, January 10, 2007.

Donovan was at 39 weeks gestation, considered full-term. He weighed 8 pounds, 4 ounces, and measured 22 inches long.

Quinn carried him another three days before labor began. 

"At the time I was still having contractions and what the contractions felt like was the baby was moving and I thought, 'OK, they've had to have made a mistake. I feel him kicking; I feel him shifting.  I know he's OK. I know he's OK.’" she said.

But he was not alright. Still, Quinn said, in some ways, the hospital treated her baby like any newborn.

“They took footprints. They weighed him, measured him,” she said.

However, the state of New York treats stillborn infants different than those born live. Instead of getting a birth certificate, families receive a fetal death certificate.

Quinn wonders why.

“Thinking about it later on when they were doing the footprints and coming home and looking at the footprints, you think about all the little keepsakes you have on the day that you deliver and I was thinking to myself, ‘We'll never have a birth certificate. We'll never have a birth certificate.’  It's almost saying that this baby never existed,” she said.

A support group, Mothers in Sympathy and Support (the M.I.S.S. Foundation) has written a “Missing Angels" bill that would allow parents to request a birth certificate for stillborn, full-term babies.

Fifteen states have now passed the bill, but it has been held up in the New York State Assembly's Health Care Committee for four years.

The Committee’s Chair, Assemblyman Richard Godfried (D, Manhattan), has refused to agenda the bill. 

In a letter to his fellow committee members in June 2006, Godfried urges them to oppose it again. He maintains the bill treats a fetus as the legal equivalent of a baby who is born

"While the bill is not meant to have anything to do with abortion, it would dangerously blur the important legal distinction between fetus and person, which would undermine reproductive rights,” the letter says.

Quinn says the distinction lies in the fact that her baby was at full-term and just because he never took a breath, doesn't mean he was never born.

"It just hurts that society doesn't see him as a human being alive enough to give him a birth certificate," she said.

Members from the M.I.S.S. Foundation will meet with Godfried later this week, the first time since the bill was originally proposed in 2003.