Stillborns on social media: confrontation or consolation?
Parents explain why they share a ‘private and personal time’. By Audrey Malone.
Photos of cute babies, posted by doting parents, are an everyday sight in most social media feeds.
But photos of stillborn babies are starting to appear on sites such as Facebook, as mums and dads seek solace for their loss.
Among them are Waikato couple Susan Coram-Stanley and Paul Coram, whose son Koby James died at 23 weeks in November 2011.
He remains part of their family and they celebrate his birthday every year, with cake.
They both believe it’s important that people should be able to use social media to commemorate their stillborn children.
‘‘I would have found it confronting before we had Koby, but now I think it’s a great thing,’’ Paul said.
For him, the grieving process has been a long, drawn-out period. Men ‘‘don’t talk about things like that’’.
Susan, who has dedicated her business to Koby, also found that people who did not know how to react simply didn’t talk to her. Others would say, ‘‘oh, it was meant to be,’’ and ‘‘everything happens for a reason’’.
The week after the funeral was a bittersweet time, and Susan spent 10 hours a day making a mosaic for their yard. She believes normalising the conversation around stillborn babies would help people such as her husband talk about it.
‘‘It happens. We love them and they are part of our family and our lives, why shouldn’t we be able to share images of people we love?’’
Others have responded that they don’t post photos of their dead grandparents on Facebook, and question the reasoning behind images of stillborn babies.
‘‘I always say, but you have photos of your grandparents when they are alive, why would you post pictures of them dead? This is all I have.’’
Post-mortem photos are a tradition dating back to Victorian times.
In those days, the infant mortality rate was high, and recently deceased children would be dressed up and posed for a portrait.
It was usually the only memento the families had of them.
Jen Christiansen of the Hamilton charity Angel Casts, who makes life casts of stillborn babies through to terminally ill children, says it can be therapeutic for parents to have a way to remember a deceased child.
‘‘I can see why it would be quite confronting to other people and why someone that’s not living in their world might look at it and think, ‘oh gosh, why are you showing that to the world’,’’ Christiansen said.
‘‘It is a very private and personal time. And they can be very private and personal photos, but to hide them is to almost hide the existence of your child. Whether this child lives for a minute or not at all they are still very much a part of your family.’’
She believes the practice allows friends and family to understand the enormity of what had happened.
‘‘In the case of social media, for people to come along and say, ‘don’t you have a precious wee baby, isn’t she gorgeous’, that’s just validation for them. That their child existed, was here and was loved and was part of the family.’’
At the end of the day, sharing a photo of a loved one they have lost would help with the grieving process, Christiansen said.
‘‘Just as anyone of us would post a picture of our child having an icecream as a profile picture, why wouldn’t you post the picture of the child you love as your profile picture, regardless of how it might look to the outside world?’’
Facebook said it did not have a specific policy relating to the posting of stillborn babies.
‘‘Facebook has long been a place where people share their experiences and raise awareness about important issues,’’ a spokesman said.
‘‘Sometimes, these are reflected through images that may be confronting to others. In many instances, when people share this type of content, they are raising awareness of the situation.
‘‘When people share anything on Facebook, we expect that they will share it responsibly, including carefully choosing who will see that content. If others prefer not to see posts in future, we provide options for hiding posts.’’