Prayer for Historic Pregnancy Loss

Post Author: Reverend Stephanie Hunter

Sadly, miscarriage and pregnancy loss are an all-too-common reality all around the world, and I can count myself among that number. In hospital chaplaincy I have found people like me who have felt that pain and emptiness – some who have been able to nurture a living child, and some who have not. Regardless of what they have weathered further down the line, often the story is of lasting grief. 

My story is of repeated early losses in the midst of enduring infertility that echoes the story of my mother before me. I know that I carry some of her grief with me: I particularly remember a day during my early childhood that I begged my mother for a sibling, like it was something you picked up from the shop. I was a lonely child and painfully shy – a sibling seemed to me to be an ideal solution. I was too young to understand the birds and the bees, and so I had no concept of infertility or ageing. All I knew is that my parents had been married for 19 years before I was born and were both in their forties: I was their miracle child because they had been told that they would not be able to have children. My naivety pushed insistently causing my mother to erupt into grief-stricken sobs.

Pregnancy-loss butterflies created in response to the author’s own losses.

Now, I am a chaplain in a general hospital. My everyday patient does not present with pregnancy or child loss, but meeting people who have lived with that grief and heartache for many years is a regular occurrence. After one such occasion I wrote this prayer and realised that it was my prayer. I offer it here because it may be someone else’s prayer too, especially for the October 15th Wave of Light, a time to honor and remember babies who have died during pregnancy, childbirth, or infancy:

Creating God, you were there when new life sparked in my womb,
and you were there when my motherhood was stripped away.
You were there when I released that primal wail that only a devastated mother knows,
and you were there when I silently sobbed myself to sleep.
That time was so long ago,
but I still remember what that spark of hope meant to me.
I still carry so much hurt with me,
because the scar tissue around my broken heart makes it difficult to breathe.
Flood me now with your Holy Spirit:
breathe new life into my soul and make me a new creation,
through Christ your Child and my Saviour.

Amen.