POLITICS ON THE HUDSON
June 20, 2008
Parents seek special birth certificates
Families of stillborns who are pushing for state legislation that would provide them with a special birth certificate are concerned that the legislative session will end next week without final passage. Parents of stillborns around the country have advocated for birth certificates as a means of acknowledging that they carried a baby to full term or close to full term, and to bring them closure. All they can get now in New York is a certificate of fetal death.
The bill was approved by the Senate in March, but it has been stuck in the committee process in the Assembly. The Senate passed the bill last year too, but the Assembly did not. People who are against the legislation said it creates a slippery slope that could result in a loss of reproductive rights for women.
The bill was changed in 2007 to include protections against that, advocates said. It received support from powerful Assembly Health Committee Chairman Richard Gottfried, D-Manhattan, which was expected to help its chances of passage.
“There is no way possible that there can be any confusion between reproductive rights and rights for mothers of stillborns,” said Jeff Tieger of Staten Island, whose wife, Lori, gave birth to a stillborn in February 2007.
“It really serves the parents and that’s all that it serves,” he added.
There are about 30,000 stillbirths across the country each year. There were 1,785 stillbirths in New York in 2004.
“There’s not a day that goes by that we don’t think of our son,” Lori Tieger said of Daniel, who was born at 39 weeks gestation. “As time goes on, it (getting the birth certificate) actually becomes more important.”
“There’s no political agenda here. It’s a women’s issue, just as any of the other issues that are women’s issues,” she said.
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