Louisiana has approved a law that will alleviate the emotional and financial burdens for bereaved families. The rest of the US should follow suit
By Joni Hess. Published 7-26-2021 by openDemocracy
Illustration: Inge Snip
I drove an hour and a half to the Louisiana state capitol building in Baton Rouge, on 26 April, to tell legislators about my daughter Eliana.
On the journey, I kept thinking to myself: would I be able to do this? I had rarely spoken about what had happened. Now, I was about to do so before strangers who had the power to vote ‘no’ on a bill that could help many other women like me.
Eliana weighed 5 pounds, 4 ounces when she was born on 8 February 2019. In my hospital bed, I held her tightly, fighting back tears so they wouldn’t cloud my final views of her face. Sometime that morning, she had passed away in utero. We never found out why.
