The bill will make it clear that the unplanned end of any pregnancy by miscarriage or stillbirth constitutes grounds for leave for the mother and her partner or spouse, and that the duration of the bereavement leave should be up to 3 days.

Currently, the bereavement leave provisions of the Holidays Act 2003 are ambiguous in their application to miscarriage and still-birth.

But the proposed legislation states a person who has had an abortion would not be eligible for bereavement leave.

"It is important that we allow families time to grieve, and I know for a fact that this is a sensitive topic that affects many families in New Zealand," said the Labour member of parliament Ginny Andersen, the sponsor of this private members bill.

"The committee believed that the intent of this bill is to provide bereavement leave to those who experience a miscarriage or stillbirth, not for abortion," Anderson said when she presented the bill for its second reading.

Speaking in the debate, National's Agnes Loheni said there is underlying hypocrisy with creating a law which will undoubtedly lead to women having to lie about their abortion so that they can be considered for bereavement leave.

"It is an intellectual dishonesty by refusing to acknowledge that a woman who has had an abortion has lost a child," she said.

"They willingly concede that a woman who has had a miscarriage has lost a baby worthy to be grieved over, but if a woman has had an abortion—no regard for that loss. Nothing to see here, folks—move on."

Source

• parliament.nz
• parliament.nz
• healthcentral.nz
• Image: scarymommy.com

With these words, Karen O'Donnell opens the final chapter of Broken Bodies, her book on trauma theology.

"Months after my last ectopic pregnancy, one that cost me a fallopian tube and almost cost me my life, I lay, face down, on the cold wooden floor of the hallway of my home and screamed. I beat my fists on the floor, I bashed my knees. I made inhuman and unearthly noises. I threw things. I was so incredibly angry."

"Not at God. But at my body. I hated my body. It had let me down."

As O'Donnell names her own experience of trauma, she reflects: "Why did God let this happen to me? The theology I knew gave me no answers."

Her experience of surviving and healing from trauma led O'Donnell to examine theologies of trauma and prompted her to write her own trauma theology as a "survivor's gift that is offered as both a comfort and a challenge."

O'Donnell, a research fellow in digital pedagogy and theology at St. John's College, Durham University, England, directs her attention here not to violence perpetrated within the church itself, like ecclesiastical complicity in racism or the abuse crisis, but instead to a recognition of the many traumatized bodies within the body of Christ.

She hopes that the work can serve as a gift to those who have suffered trauma and can offer potential pastoral implications for trauma recovery in an ecclesial and liturgical context.

Theologically, the traumatized body is the body of Christ, which demands theological reflection.

The task of trauma theology is to reread the Christian tradition through the lens of trauma.

O'Donnell names this task: "If trauma is primarily concerned with rupture(s), then so too am I." Viewing the Christian tradition through the lens of trauma gives way to rupture within texts, doctrines and theologies, ultimately making "space for the construction of something that is new and fresh."

Given this approach, O'Donnell's work is both project of ressourcement, examining the richness of the tradition, and one of construction, prompting new ways of thinking about ordained ministry, the sacraments and Mariology.

The experience of trauma involves a rupture of bodily integrity, potentially as a feeling of being unsafe or as an experience of injury.

Also experienced by the survivor is a rupture in time, such as a gap in memory caused by a traumatic event or as the intrusion of the traumatic event into the present (experienced as flashbacks or nightmares).

A final rupture is one of cognition and language; the traumatic event cannot be understood.

Trauma recovery, then, involves a response to each of these three ruptures.

The survivor must establish bodily integrity.

The survivor must make sense of the experience by constructing and remembering a narrative of the trauma.

And, having been alienated from the surrounding world, the survivor must reconnect with society.

Trauma is carried as somatic memory, with the body, not the verbal part of the brain, holding the memory of trauma.

The healing processes of remembering in recovery must also, then, be bound to bodily experience.

What then is the somatic memory at the center of Christianity?

What are the ruptures in the experience of trauma in the church? Continue reading

• Image: Awkward Asian Theologian

Neither of us had imagined having a winter wedding, but we needed to marry by January in order to be posted together for our next assignment. We both work as diplomats, our lives divided into chunks of time separated by tours abroad.

The timing of the wedding was not a drastic change of plans; we had decided to marry within months of our first meeting. We were like two lumbering comets destined for one another all those years but stuck in the stillness of space - parties, other relationships, the passing of loved ones, bad jobs, all the experiences in between - before the romantic collision that was our first hello in 2010.

"Today I met the boy I'm going to marry," I confided (and almost sang) to a friend over the phone. "And if it doesn't work out, don't ever bring this up again."

We knelt at Immaculate Conception church, in my home town in New Hampshire, in a white-knuckled grip before the altar only a year and a half after I first agreed to have lunch with him. In front of us, we watched as Aaron's grandfather read from the Old Testament: Genesis 1:26-28, a reading I had picked out, being the more religious one.

He approached the pulpit dressed in a blue-checked suit, blue shirt and striped tie, an orchid pinned to his lapel. "Be fertile and multiply; fill the Earth and subdue it."

My husband had consented to a traditional ceremony, which meant hours of marriage counselling in Bahrain, where he was posted. I took the 30-minute flight from my post in Qatar, and we spent the entire weekend in a room full of Filipinos in an officially Muslim country, becoming certified to marry in a Catholic church. Continue reading

• Christen Decker Kadkhodai is a Foreign Service Officer at the U.S. Department of State

Ten NHS trusts have admitted burning foetal remains alongside other rubbish while two others used the bodies in "waste-to-energy" plants which generate power for heat.

The UK Department of Health issued an instant ban on the practice, which health minister Dr Dan Poulter branded "totally unacceptable".

At least 15,500 foetal remains were incinerated by 27 NHS trusts over the last two years alone, Channel 4's Dispatches discovered.

The programme, which aired on March 24, found that parents who lose children in early pregnancy were often treated without compassion and were not consulted about what they wanted to happen to the remains.

One of the country's leading hospitals, Addenbrooke's in Cambridge, incinerated 797 babies below 13 weeks gestation at their own "waste to energy" plant, the programme alleged.

The mothers were told the remains had been "cremated".

Another "waste to energy" facility at Ipswich Hospital, operated by a private contractor, incinerated 1101 foetal remains between 2011 and 2013.

They were brought in from another hospital before being burned, generating energy for the hospital site.

Ipswich Hospital denied knowing that foetuses had been burned on its site.

Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which runs Addenbrooke's stated that its disposal of foetal tissue complied with the recommendations from relevant medical authorities.

The trust said foetal remains had never been incinerated with waste.

Labour MP Jim Dobbin expressed his disgust at the revelations.

He said this "callous disregard for young humans is the fruit of 50 years of legal abortion in the UK".

"And it is no use pro-choice people wringing their hands about treating unborn babies as clinical waste when it is their relentless dehumanisation of unborn life that has led us to this point."

He called for a re-examination of how remains of aborted and miscarried babies are treated in medical facilities.

Sources:

• Daily Telegraph
• Catholic News Service
• Catholic Herald
• Image: New York Daily News