Reassurance for parents who struggle with anger, guilt, and despair after a miscarriage, stillbirth, infant death.

“Bereavement after the loss of a baby is often quiet and lonely,” writes Christine O’Keeffe Lafser, who has twice lost a child to death. “There is no wake or funeral, no grave site, no memorial to our baby’s life or death. . . . Since there are no real memories of our little one’s life, people have a hard time comprehending the depth of our love and grief.” In these reflections, Lafser offers grieving parents the empathy and courage that can come only from one who has walked the same difficult path. “Chris expressed so many of my thoughts and feelings and made me feel so normal. . . . The greatest gift is learning that God does not desert us in our time of need.” Linda Davis, Compassionate Friends, after miscarriage and stillbirth “The juxtaposition of a Scripture text with each reflection is inspired. Some of the texts are breathtaking in their beauty and appropriateness. This book is a ‘must’ for anyone who is ever touched by the loss of an infant.” Joseph Awad, poet and grieving grandfather “This book will be very helpful for parents who are mourning the loss of their child. It will also prove very beneficial to anyone who is ministering to a bereaved parent.” Robert N. Craig, O.F.M. Cap., hospital chaplain “These reflections allowed me to ‘be’ how I was feeling—not feel like I should be going through the stages of grief that other books described. With this book I was no longer a square peg trying to fit into a round hole.” Jeanette Siebels, after infant death

Tens of thousands of women and families every year lose a baby to miscarriage, stillbirth, or infant death. The statistics are sobering--between 10% and 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage, 1% in stillbirth, and nearly 23,000 babies die before their first birthday--but statistics alone miss the depth of the hurt. Each loss is personal and devastating. No woman is prepared to lose a baby, and caregivers are often unaware of how best to help. In Hope Beyond an Empty Cradle therapist Hallie Scott first shares her own story, as a mother whose only child, Abigail, was stillborn, and then leads readers through a healing process that makes space for heartbreak, despair, guilt, questions, and anger. Life is never the same in the wake of the loss, but a new normal is possible. The book will be a welcome resource for families who have lost a child, as well as for those seeking to care for them in their traumatic grief.

The author recalls the events surrounding the kidnapping of her newborn daughter.

Award-winning journalist and public policy analyst Longman warns that reduced fertility and global aging threaten world prosperity, jeopardize national economies, and will change the way of life for decades to come.

During the 1990s, Greece had a very high rate of abortion at the same time that its low birth rate was considered a national crisis. The Empty Cradle of Democracy explores this paradox. Alexandra Halkias shows that despite Greek Orthodox beliefs that abortion is murder, many Greek women view it as “natural” and consider birth control methods invasive. The formal public-sphere view is that women destroy the body of the nation by aborting future citizens. Scrutiny of these conflicting cultural beliefs enables Halkias’s incisive critique of the cornerstones of modern liberal democracy, including the autonomous “individual” subject and a polity external to the private sphere. The Empty Cradle of Democracy examines the complex relationship between nationalism and gender and re-theorizes late modernity and violence by exploring Greek representations of human agency, the fetus, national identity, eroticism, and the divine. Halkias’s analysis combines telling fragments of contemporary Athenian culture, Greek history, media coverage of abortion and the declining birth rate, and fieldwork in Athens at an obstetrics/gynecology clinic and a family-planning center. Halkias conducted in-depth interviews with one hundred and twenty women who had had two or more abortions and observed more than four hundred gynecological exams at a state family-planning center. She reveals how intimate decisions and the public preoccupation with the low birth rate connect to nationalist ideas of race, religion, freedom, resistance, and the fraught encounter between modernity and tradition. The Empty Cradle of Democracy is a startling examination of how assumptions underlying liberal democracy are betrayed while the nation permeates the body and understandings of gender and sexuality complicate the nation-building projects of late modernity.

Beside the Empty Cradle points you to the paths of satisfaction that will help you regain the joy that infertility has stolen.

So-called ovarian transplantations, performed in the early twentieth century, foreshadowed the modern practice of egg donation, and the first experiments in human in vitro fertilization date back to the 1930s. Marsh and Ronner also tell the little-known story of free and low-cost clinics in the urban North where low-income women were treated for infertility beginning in the nineteenth century.

The author claims that up to 150, 000 children, the last as recently as 1967, were deported from British children's homes and shipped off to a "new life" in distant parts - in many cases to a life of physical and sexual abuse. In this book, she provides an account of her investigations.

Coping with Miscarriage, Stillbirth and Infant Death.