The death of a baby, stillborn or living only briefly after birth, is a moral affront to the cycle of life, leaving parents without the life stories and material objects that traditionally offer comfort to the bereaved, nor—in an increasingly secularized society—a religious framework for making sense of their loss. For the grieving mother, it is also a physical affront, as her body continues to rehearse its part in its symbiotic relationship with a baby whose own body is disintegrating. Attempting to forge continuing bonds with her child after death makes special demands upon the notion of embodied spirituality, as she attempts to make sense of this tragedy in an embodied way. This paper, which reconciles the distinct perspectives of bereaved mothers and children’s doctors, proposes that the thoughtful re-presentation of medical insight into pregnancy and fetal development may assuage parents’ grief by adding precious detail to their baby’s life course, and by offering the mother a material basis to conceptualize her own body as part of the distributed personhood of her baby.

Dr Tamarin Norwood gained her doctorate in Fine Art as a Clarendon scholar at the University of Oxford in 2018, and is now a postdoctoral research fellow at the Drawing Research Group, Loughborough University, writing a book on metaphor and neonatal loss. She is also a visiting early career research fellow at the Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath, and researcher at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing, University of Oxford where she convenes the Lives in Medicine research network. Tamarin's scholarly publications focus on representation and loss in drawing; her related prose fiction, poetry and artwork have been published and shown widely including with the BBC World Service, Art on the Underground, ICA Philadelphia, MOCCA Toronto and Tate Britain. Much of her work is interdisciplinary, most recently as part of Hubbub, the inaugural Hub residency at Wellcome Collection, London.

Dr Tamarin Norwood gained her doctorate in Fine Art as a Clarendon scholar at the University of Oxford in 2018, and is now a postdoctoral research fellow at the Drawing Research Group, Loughborough University, writing a book on metaphor and neonatal loss. She is also a visiting early career research fellow at the Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath, and researcher at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing, University of Oxford where she convenes the Lives in Medicine research network. Tamarin's scholarly publications focus on representation and loss in drawing; her related prose fiction, poetry and artwork have been published and shown widely including with the BBC World Service, Art on the Underground, ICA Philadelphia, MOCCA Toronto and Tate Britain. Much of her work is interdisciplinary, most recently as part of Hubbub, the inaugural Hub residency at Wellcome Collection, London.

Declaration of interestsI am collaborating (unpaid) with Held in Our Hearts, a baby loss charity based in Edinburgh, UK, to help develop creative writing resources for parents bereaved at birth. I convene the Lives in Medicine research network at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, University of Oxford, UK. I declare no other competing interests.