The emergence and effect of hospital protocols for perinatal loss in Canada

Abstract The 1980s and 1990s saw the remaking of the meaning of perinatal death in Canadian hospitals from that of the silencing to the recognition and attention to women’s grief (Davidson, 2007). By the mid-twentieth century both birth and death were increasingly removed from the home and placed in healthcare and funeral facilities (Aries, 1981; Walter, 1994). Beginning in the 1950s when hospital birth had become the general social norm, death around the time of birth became a new institutional concern. Using a symbolic interactionist approach, I document how this new standard of care emerged as perinatal bereavement protocols in the Canadian context. Situating the emergence in its historical context, it is examined here through the time-relevant literature – that is, the literature that influenced the changes from the 1960s through the early 2000s. Then, examined through more recent literature, I illustrate how the protocols continue to work for one extended family after their experience of stillbirth in 2012.