The maternity ward isn't always a happy place

It’s one thing to talk about death at childbirth as a societal phenomenon, but, it’s a totally different thing to experience it.

We’re going to bring you the personal story, now, of a woman who was touched by this tragedy. Commentator Katlyn Marchini from Mills College brings us her story from the day she found herself mourning death in the place where most people celebrate life.

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KATLYN MARCHINI: I was expecting to come home with a new baby brother last April. We were at Dameron Hospital when we found out that my stepmother delivered a stillborn child. When this happens, you don't get a "It's a Boy!" pin from the nurses to flaunt your newest sibling.

While everyone is holding a warm baby, you are holding a cold one. You're baby doesn't cry or scream, but you do. And the nurses don't know what to do with you – you're 17, too old for them to take you into another room to rock you to sleep. So they avoid eye contact, and when they do accidentally make eye contact, their looks of pity can barely cover their anxiousness for you to leave and become someone else's problem. They keep the lights off in your room – not to keep the baby from waking up, but to keep you hidden from the happy families. But those families know anyway because they can hear the sobs and they are just thankful they aren't their own.

The nurses look at you nervously, not quite knowing what to do, wondering if you are mentally stable enough to be around others. It is a sick paradox: you don't belong there, but you don't belong anywhere else, either. The happy families don't want to see you, and you don't want to see them, but for the nurse to move you out of the maternity ward because you lost your baby would be cruel. Yet, to leave you there is also cruel, because the maternity ward is no place for death certificates.

Women have been losing their babies since the beginning of time, and hospitals have been around for hundreds of years, so you would think by now someone would have thought of a solution. But they haven't. So families and nurses continue to awkwardly sidestep each other, pretending that the maternity ward is always a happy place. Maybe one day that will be more than just wishful thinking, for now, the maternity ward just isn't as shiny as it appears to be.