Understanding baby loss: The sociology of life, death, and post‐mortem. By K.Reed, J.Ellis, and E.Whitby, Manchester University Press. 2023. pp. 246. £80.00 (Hardcover). ISBN: 978‐1‐5261‐6318‐9

Understanding baby loss: The sociology of life, death, and post-mortem by Kate Reed, Julie Ellis and Elspeth Whitby offers a nuanced and contextualised understanding of baby loss for both parents and health professionals who accompanied the journey of bereavement, as well as the decision-making and the practices of post-mortem. Understanding baby loss is derived from a qualitative study in the UK context, involving interviews with parents and grandparents who experienced baby loss and professionals. This book delves into a sensitive field of medical practices and a sensitive topic in social science studies—death and technologies exploring the cause of death. The researchers deployed the analytical tool of ‘sociological senses’—seeing, listening and feeling—to make sense of baby loss and to reflect on researchers’ feelings as well (p. 10). By introducing the ‘emerging technologies in practice’—MRI and CT scan—that have been used to perform less invasive post-mortem (minimal post-mortem, MIA) in recent years, the authors highlight the changing post-mortem practices in the UK. Set in this backdrop, Understanding baby loss explores different forms of baby loss and their sequential decisions on post-mortem examinations. The first chapter looks at ‘trauma’, focussing on the initial event of loss to explore the sociological dimensions of trauma, including parents’ reactions and responses to the shock of witnessing baby loss, as well as the physical and social spaces as a site of both the individual and collective trauma. This chapter brings the readers into the embodied feelings of baby loss by delineating parents’ shock and aftershock, and how baby loss is not a ‘one-off event’ but becomes a ‘new normal’ in their lives. The second chapter elucidates the decision-making about post-mortem by showing how individuals’ choices are embedded in the social structures. This chapter followed the sociological tradition of analysing the dynamics of agency and structure to explore the decision-making. It also traces understandings of reproductive choice from the feminist perspective to illustrate how both parents and the medical professionals make difficult decisions on discontinuing treatments and post-mortem. Chapter 3 centres on the technologies used in post-mortem to highlight the emerging technology of MRI in MIA. By doing so, this chapter fills a research gap regarding the key role MRI plays in both parental experiences of dealing with baby loss as well as clinical practices investigating the cause of death. MRI, as a visual technology, has shifted the one-way ‘medical gaze’ into more complicated forms of medical practice. In the case of post-mortem, parents proactively participate in the meaning-making process of MRI, which offers them a closure for their deceased babies without undergoing the standard autopsy that seems to be too ‘brutal’. Chapter 4 examines both the emotions that arise when encountering baby loss and health professionals’ emotional work to support the parents by balancing tensions between being caring and detached when conducting post-mortem. By illustrating the complexities of emotions in baby loss, this chapter shows a different facet of emotional labour when facing life and death. Post-mortem render the experiences of death as complicated emotions, including parents’ feelings of relief after knowing the cause of death and their feelings of a slight joy in the great grief when learning about the medical details of their babies. Chapter 5 explores the meanings of care by regarding that care is ‘an activity state, including care work, care task and care labour’ during the post-mortem (p. 118) practiced by health professionals. It highlights the hidden care work that is often overlooked, including attending funerals to support parents. The care work transgresses not only the professional boundaries but also the boundaries of life and death since the care is for both the bereaved and the deceased. The care work is a twofold job: the professionals aim to find out the cause of the death by conducting the post-mortem while providing support to the parents. In Chapter 6, the authors explore parents’ varied ways of memorisation facilitated by the professionals to ‘create a social identity and the ongoing connection with the deceased babies’ (p. 155). The process of making memories is significant both for parents, who have something dear to remember their deceased babies by, and for the social recognition of babies’ short but memorised lives. Through a relational lens, Chapter 7 attends to the social relationships of parents experiencing baby loss, as well as their multifaceted relationships with other people in their lives, including family members and the professionals. This chapter shows the importance to situate baby loss in a wider social and relational context to examine how social relationships shape the way in which people perceive, feel and navigate baby loss. Understanding baby loss attends to a wider question of how people understand death and render bereavement meaningful in the contemporary UK. It provides insights for both academics and clinical practitioners by analysing the decision-making patterns of post-mortem and reflecting on how people navigate these difficult decisions. This research study enriches multiple fields, including studies of reproductive loss, medical sociology and relational sociology, and brings insights to a broader audience interested in death at the beginning of life. This research study also invites health professionals to ponder on important issues, such as how to treat people’s loss with cautiousness and care, as well as the use of MRI as a potential tool for parents with hesitations about traditional post-mortem procedures. Nevertheless, due to participants’ refusal to reveal their ethnicities (p. 13), this study could not delve into the intersection of race, accessibility to post-mortem and feelings of loss, which might bring insights for the health practitioners when interacting with grieving parents from varied ethnic backgrounds. Understanding baby loss is a sociological inquiry into life and death, as well as what is in between—loss and bereavement, the people in the process of witnessing, sensing and processing loss, and the technologies probing into the limbo of life and death that bring not only the understanding of human bodies regarding the cause of death but also the comfort for those suffering from baby loss.