Women who’ve lived through the pain of pregnancy and infant loss know just how overwhelming the grief can be—and that’s before fielding an array of insensitive, misguided or just plain callous remarks from strangers and loved ones alike. Sometimes even from doctors.
That’s exactly what happened to Dana Dewedoff-Carney, when she was 29 weeks pregnant with her son, Benjamin. She will never forget the heartbreaking moment when she was told his heartbeat could no longer be found. It was just the “wrong” baby, the doctor said. The wrong baby.
“Our hope. Our dreams. Our future,” Dana told Babble. “Baseball games. Diaper changes. His brother and sisters playing with him. Kisses and laughs and him being bad. And getting himself into trouble. All of that was gone. And the few months I carried him. The sickness I went through. And to be told he was the wrong baby. That was our son. The ‘it’ [my] body was getting rid of. Was Benjamin.”
The painful moment inspired her to start a movement called Project Benjamin, to honor her son and other babies lost too soon. She wants to change the way we talk about pregnancy and infant loss, she tells Babble. “The truth is, we aren’t really doing a good job at it,” she notes. “It’s still a really stigmatized subject.”
Dana recruited women to share the stories of their miscarriage or infant loss—and the painful comments people made afterwards—for a powerful photo series. The striking pictures show women holding up chalkboards with the stinging remarks, and were shared on the Facebook page for Rise for Women, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering women.
The photo series also illustrates that you never know what challenges others are facing. One mom, Michelle, says she’s often told she has a "perfect life." But she lost her daughter, Micah, in 2012, “a loss she struggles with every single day,” the caption reads. That’s why the campaign also uses the hashtag, #StruggleDoesNotHaveaLook.
And then there are the women who are already moms when they suffer their miscarriages and are told to be grateful for the blessings they already have—as if they aren’t. The campaign also uses the hashtag #theymattertoo, to remind people that babies lost too soon still matter so deeply to their grieving moms, no matter what.
The powerful message has resonated with women everywhere, with 44,000 shares and counting. “Because of our son and the other children named in this project, a bigger discussion happened,” says Dana, who cried “happy tears” when the project started racking up likes on Facebook. “It brings me a sense of peace. My hope is that going forward people begin to talk to each other about their struggles, too.”