A Doula's Guide to Infant Loss

Content warning: the story below depicts the birth of a stillborn baby. This story is shared with consent. If you would like to move ahead to the guide portion of this blog, please keep scrolling below until you see the heading "First, let’s begin by naming the different types of infant loss."

How do you move through loss as a careworker in a way that respects your capacities for grief while still holding space for the people experiencing infant loss? How do we witness or support our clients who are moving through a reproductive loss without thinking of ourselves as "bad doulas" for perhaps missing the signs of loss or feeling like if we had done a "better job" taking care of our clients, they wouldn't be experiencing loss in the first place?

We need to remember that we carry the grief of others in our body. Grief and loss work is a huge undertaking. In this blog post, I share with you my story of supporting an unexpected stillborn birth and the ways I moved through secondary grief as a careworker, as well as highlighting differing types of infant loss, the signs an stages of loss, and how we as doulas can support folks moving through infant loss and grief.

This post was written for Brood Care.