I take your point.

I still find Santorum’s behavior just a little creepy (he keeps a picture of the dead fetus on his desk and points it out to visitors). It’s hard to see it as a product of their feelings of anticipation as much as his constant insistence on dramatizing and politicizing everything having to do with his “pro-life” obsessions. (Would he really do that to his own family? He did it to Terri Schiavo, and there is literally nothing I would imagine is beyond his capacity for hatefulness and bad taste.)

But I can see that others would find that a way of honoring and acknowledging what they had been through. I didn’t mean to be insensitive to such feelings. Thank you for making that point.

“Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum and his wife took a miscarried fetus home in a box, named it, and made their other children hold it.”

I’m finding this rather out of place in your otherwise stellar-as-usual post.

I gather, from googling, this was very much a wanted pregnancy that was lost at 20 weeks – a stillbirth if past the 20 week mark, not a miscarriage. Many grieving families, whether the pregnancy has been ended through stillbirth or late-term abortion, choose to spend time with the lost fetus/baby/etc at this stage, and to name it. So long as the children were willing participants in this grieving process, I don’t find this at all abnormal or odd.

I would quite possibly go through a very similar process in the same situation (though without the Mass).