Certifying Pregnancy Loss in Australia: Registration, Recognition, and the Colonial State

This article critically analyses the recent move by registrars in most Australian jurisdictions to begin issuing 'certificates of recognition' for early pregnancy loss. Most immediately, these new certificates have arisen from advocacy by mothers grieving a pregnancy loss. Such advocacy reflects contemporary practices of grieving and memorialisation, themselves a product of social and technological changes in recent decades. In this context, grieving parents have called for greater legal recognition of pregnancy loss in various ways. In other areas of law and other jurisdictions their calls have been met with controversy and debate regarding the implications of such recognition. However, the new 'certificates of recognition' have attracted almost no public interest or concern, and have been initiated without any formal change to registration law or regulations. To understand registrars' willingness to hear and answer the call of these grieving mothers, this article traces the history of registration law vis-a-vis pregnancy loss in Australia. Historically, as a means to monitor and address the declining fertility rate of white women, expanded registration of birth and pregnancy loss has reflected colonial anxieties around population and race. Such anxieties became expressed in discourses and interventions focused on public health, and the 'saving' of infants valuable to the nation: by echoing the calls of grieving mothers, registrars are arguably speaking for and to this broader nation. Just like the reforms subject to greater debate and feminist scrutiny, then, registration law and practice contribute to new understandings of pregnancy and pregnancy loss, by telling us all what 'counts' officially as a birth, a loss, or a life.