Attacked For Their Hope: Spiritual Abuse After Pregnancy Loss
Content warning for Spiritual Abuse and Pregnancy Loss.
I am acquainted with the unique grief of having something, someone, die inside of you. I miscarried my second pregnancy at eleven weeks gestation, a brutal ordeal in a Walgreens bathroom. I left the drugstore that night traumatized; both from the loss of little Zuzu, and from the violence of the physical experience. But I was spared from spiritual trauma, which is more than some can say.
October is Pregnancy Loss Awareness Month, and it’s important to acknowledge the breadth of pain that may be felt in this experience. There is a specific strain of Spiritual Abuse perpetrated against bereaved women and people with uteruses when they’ve endured a reproductive loss. Whether it’s a miscarriage, a fetal demise, a stillbirth, or an infant death, if there's a conservative Christian in the mourner’s midst, there’s a high chance the victim will be told her baby may not have gone to heaven.
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It happened to my friend Margo. She and her family were part of the Reformed tradition, a subset of Calvinism which holds that God is sovereign over absolutely everything, including salvation. One’s eternal address is predetermined by God’s perfect will, the theology goes. The “elect” are saved and the condemned are, well, condemned. It is frequently implied in the Reformed world that questioning the supposed perfection of God’s will is sinful. And when you do question it, you will receive a pat answer like, “God’s ways are higher than our ways,” which is a biting reorientation to one’s post. Your job is to have faith, not answers. The sentiment is relayed with a smile at first, even with empathy. But if you don’t accept this as comfort, their tone will harden. “Stop trying to know the mind of God. Who do you think you are anyway?”
Thomas Paine said that belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man. When you believe that God dispassionately saves some and destroys others, you may become comfortable committing acts of destruction yourself; particularly around mourning people. Mourning is the ultimate expression of not accepting that God’s ways are higher than our ways. Thus when Margo miscarried her pregnancy, her mother shamed her for believing that her baby was with Jesus.
“She said it was prideful to claim that my baby was in heaven, because we don’t know who God chooses” [to let live or die], Margo shared with me. “I went to the Internet to see what my trusted teachers, Tim Challies and John Piper, had to say, and both confirmed this in their own teachings. It compounded the grief. I felt torn between being faithful to the theology I trusted and the love I felt for this tiny being that was being flushed out of my body.”
When we are already suffering deep pain, the last thing we need is to be shamed for how we cope. And it is absolutely abusive to attack a grieving person’s belief that God might be kind, and suggest instead that God is hateful, assassinating the bereaved’s character in the process.
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Another friend of mine, Brigit, lost her sweet son to SIDS at a month old. So many well-meaning people took the spiritual bypassing approach, telling Brigit that she and Silas would meet again. That in heaven, having resurrected bodies, she and Silas would pick things up right where they’d left off. Jesus would hold her son during the wait. As if Silas had just gone on a simple outing with a nanny, and the nanny just got stuck in a bit of traffic on the way home. “I don’t want to wait fifty years to see my baby again!” Brigit told me. “That’s not good enough.” She said it with a sense of I know I should be thankful for heaven but I just thought she sounded sane.
Her Reformed mother-in-law questioned Brigit’s faith that Silas was actually resting in the loving arms of Jesus. “You don’t know that he was part of the elect,” she told my sweet friend. On the afternoon of her grandchild’s funeral. This comment stems from the same toxic theology that Margo’s mother employed. Perhaps your child was created by God just to be quickly destroyed in hell’s everlasting fire — this too brings God glory!
These abusive comments are also leveled against women experiencing infertility. In these cases, the focus isn’t on shaming women for the loss of a baby that might not have been “chosen,” but rather on degrading you for your attachment to a dream. You’re not supposed to want what you want. You’re supposed to want what God wants. Still can’t get pregnant? God is trying to tell you something and you aren’t listening.
In our society, the loss of a pregnancy is viewed as private pain. It’s sad, but we don’t really want to hear about it beyond the first few days after it happens. The world just relentlessly carries on in spite of your personal world being ravaged. That was certainly my miscarriage experience. For a while, I stopped spending time with friends who were pregnant or who had newborns. I stopped following them on social media, too. I retreated from the childbearing world because participation in it was too painful. I made my world smaller because the real world wasn’t big enough to hold this pain more thoughtfully.
My breath catches in my chest when I contemplate how much worse it would have been if someone had suggested that my Zuzu was in hell and I’d better carry on praising God regardless. The broader cultural discomfort with the grief of miscarriage, fetal demise, and stillbirth compounds the isolation experienced by those who are abused in the wake of their losses.
If you know someone who’s lost a pregnancy, and that someone, or their partner, has conservative Christian parents or in-laws, or belongs to an evangelical church, you need to check on them more than you might think you do. If anyone in her circle preaches God’s “justice,” she may be spiraling not only from the loss of her baby but also from the barbs of Spiritual Abuse.
Talk about your own losses. Tell your story. Acknowledge Pregnancy Loss Awareness Month on your social media and in your conversations. Fight back against the forces that want to keep women silent and contained by shame. Model the legitimacy of pain for those who are being abused for their own grief, and attacked for their own hope.
Halley Kim is a former evangelical pastors wife and later a pastoral assistant herself in the United Church of Christ. She has also worked as a nurse, doula, lactation consultant, and activist. Halley is writing a book about her experience of deconstructing her faith as a pastors wife, and both the cost and joys of freedom on the other side. She lives in St. Louis with her partner and three children.