Links
for Carrying to Term
Other carrying-to-term support:
 Abiding
Hearts has lots of resources and practical help concerning
your state of mind and emotional help carrying to term. Very
very helpful site, highly recommended.
Abundance
of the Heart provides spiritual inspiration from a Christian
perspective. They also have a webring.
Waiting
With Love offers some stories, lots of links, and
sample birth plans.
Babycenter.com has a bulletin-board
for going to term after a poor prenatal diagnosis.
Prenatal
Diagnosis: Information and Real Life Stories is an ardently
pro-life site about prenatal diagnosis and your options when
the results are unhappy. Links to two excellent articles on prenatal
diagnosis and how it affects our societal views/tolerance of
disability in general. The site doesn't seem to have been maintained
in a year, and emails to its creator/maintainer bounce back as
undeliverable.
Kansas
City Hospice has a perinatal hospice. Perinatal
hospices are beginning to become more widespread but they
are still pretty rare (you can read another article about them
here).
Children's
Hospitals and Clinics network also offers perinatal hospice.
(If you know of a perinatal hospice in your area, please email me and I'll include
it here.)
Pregnancy Support:
The
Midwife Archives are chock-full of ways to make sure you
have the birth you want. Go there. Read everything. Discard the
stuff you feel is too off-beat for you, of course, but keep in
mind that some of these alternative approaches may make your
birth easier. At the very least, it will empower you to make
better decisions for yourself and your baby.
If you need to find another doctor
because your doctor relentlessly pushes termination and dos not
respect your decision, you can search the American
Associaion of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists for
someone in your area.
If you need to find another doctor,
you may also try Pro-Life
Maternal-Fetal Medicine.
You can also try One
More Soul to find a pro-life doctor of any speciality near
you.
La Leche League International
offers breastfeeding support. If your baby has a condition which
may make feeding difficult, La Leche League may have tips specific
to your situation. They aso have good information on how to donate
milk. Their FAQ has an answer specifically about nursing special-needs
babies.
The
Couple to Couple League is my resource for Natural Family
Planning information. Because they advocate large families, they
know a lot about pregnancy. They also offer support for
extended breastfeeding, nutrition, family beds, and homeschooling.
They get heavy-handed at times, but if you can ignore that, their
information is excellent.
Mailing List:
TheAgapeWay
is an egroups mailing list, with the description: "To provide
a safe haven for couples who are pregnant and are carrying their
baby to term even though they know their baby will most likely
die or if the baby has already died to discuss their feelings.
This is a Christian forum, and our faith will be discussed openly,
but anyone is welcome."
Anencephaly Support:
The
Anencephaly Support Foundation. If you're lucky, this is
the first place you went for information. They have some good
information, many personal stories, and photographs of well-loved
babies snug in their parents' arms.
Anencephaly
Blessings From Above (fondly called ABFA) is a Yahoo! group
which is specifically pro-life in its support of parents of anencephalics.
You have to be a member of Yahoo! to join, but it's simple enough
and it's free. Highly recommended. In fact, just go join right
now.
 Click to subscribe to anencephalyblessingsfromabove
Anencephaly
Support is a private, smaller Yahoo! group, again pro-life,
but it's also open to women who have chosen termination and now
regret it.
Mourning
Mommies is an MSN community. It's a mixed forum, so full-term
versus termination issues are not best discussed there. For the
most part, it's extremely supportive.
anencephaly.net
offers many links to personal stories, full-term sites, and pro-life
resources.
The
Anencephaly web-ring has many many personal pages about anencephaly,
most of them from the parents' point of view. In the case of
anencephaly, the parents have more information than most doctors,
so I found it helpful to visit the sites and learn for myself.
There are many babies' stories and photos, and many pages of
poetry as well.
This is an article
about what hydranencephalics (think anencephalics with closed
skulls) can perceive and feel. It gives you a good idea of what
your baby may be able to experience.
Grief Support:
The
National SHARE Office is a clearinghouse for infant loss
resources. They're great. In addition to hooking you up with
every applicable resource in your area and on the web, they have
an excellent bi-monthly newsletter
for parents suffering an infant loss. It's free (or used to be--check
what the current guidelines are) for the first year after a loss;
they were very kind and allowed me to start my free year after
the diagnosis, rather than making me wait four months. They will
also send you a catalog with all the best neonatal loss books
in print.
The mailing list Cristin's
Prayer is part of the Hopeful
Women group. The women there are extremely supportive and
helpful. The other groups are Hopeful Conceptions, Hopeful Pregnancies,
and Hope Parenting Patners, each of which addresses issues specific
to bereaved parents.
HAND
is a recent find for me--and I highly recommend it! In fact,
I wish I had found it when I was still pregnant and newly-bereavaed.
Helping After Neonatal Death is a resource network of parents,
professionals, and supportive volunteers that offers a variety
of services throughout Northern California and the Central Valley.
Of course, regardless of geography you can reach their web site,
which has a lot of good, solid information about the grieving
process and life after loss.
The Midwife Archives has an area specifically
for pregnancy and neonatal loss, and I found it interesting to
read about myself-generalized from a professional point of view.
The
Compassionate Friends are a professional organzation dealing
with neonatal loss. They come up frequently in the grief books
I've read. I've heard that some local chapters won't be either
compassionate or friendly until after your baby dies, but I've
also heard that when they're good, they're very very good.
M.I.S.S. is good for parent-to-parent
support, and in addition to lots of information about the grieving
process, they have a newsletter, information about getting active
in your community, and lots of links.
Tear
Soup sells a book of the same title, and then lots of grief-related
products. I'll refrain from making a sarcastic remark about some
people making money off anything nowadays. I didn't buy anything
from them; I did get some ideas, though, and implemented them
on my own.
Centering
Corp. is another professional grief-mill, but they have good
info.
A
Place To Remember has generalized grief support; you will
find MANY links
about pregnancy loss, but be warned in advance that they
also have a line of products they sell.
Milk Banking:
This
article on milk banking discusses everything you ever wanted
to know about donating milk. Their website explains the process
of becoming a milk donor, locations of milk banks, how the milk
is used, and more. I highly recommend milk-banking.
Funeral Information:
Funerals
and Ripoffs: This page is a bit...well, crazy...but I think
in some respects they've got a point. (Further down the page
they didn't go quite so crazy with the formatting.) Funerals
and burials don't have to bankrupt a family. You might as well
know the ways they'll try. They also provide a list of questions
to ask the funeral director and some interesting information
about how protective-seal caskets are the worst possible thing
you can buy.
Here's a link to the
Federal Trade Commission's guidelines regulating the funeral
industry. I found it helpful.
I don't necessarily recommend
purchasing a casket online, but you may want to print off the
info from the online sellers just to have onhand. If the local
funeral home tries to charge you $500 for a baby-sized casket,
you have proof that they're overcharging you. One site I found
was Casket
Royale. The infant casket on this page is the Minaret II,
and I was told it costs $80.
Random:
Please don't think I'm being flippant, but every so often
you'll need a reprieve from dealing with the pain. One advantage
of knowing so far in advance is that it doesn't hurt to slip
into denial every so often. So if you want to look over a couple
of really fun sites, take a break from being a bereaved parent
and visit some of my favorites:
Diinzumo is the single reason
this site ever managed to get online in the first place, and
she helped m e with a lot of the technical
details of getting the pages not to look like garbage. (Any garbage
in the text is my fault alone.) Visit
her awesome website and learn about her nine years living
as an American in Japan, her adventures getting her pilot's license,
and her obsession with her favorite animated show (and mine too--check
out her Condor
shrine <sigh>) She's also an excellent artist!
The night after we got the diagnosis,
I said I couldn't sleep, that I wanted to play Solitaire
'Till Dawn. My husband said, "I won't be able to sleep
either." I said, "No, that's the name of the game."
It's shareware, and it is very addictive when you're in crisis.
If you're more into puzzle games, try Snood.
 The
other animated guy in my life is Vegeta from Dragonball Z. (Yes,
he's a villain and totally arrogant. Swoon...) You can
read all about him and visit the Shrine
of Vegeta at the site that used to be called Vegeta Insane
(from which I stole...I mean, borrowed his picture) but now is
"Ginga GIRI
GIRI!" You'll have to visit to find out what that translates
as...
Please email
me to pass along other organizations
or websites, or to tell me of any broken links.
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