This paper begins with a description of a perinatal disposal in a funeral parlour in an Australian metropolis. It delineates in some detail the preparing and viewing of the foetus/child, and then examines the eulogy written by a perinatal funeral director who acts as the celebrant. It asks whether the structure and purport of the eulogy, as a rhetorical device, is an attempt to construct a biography of a child that never lived, and, through such a narrative, to bring into being the ‘unborn person’? Or is the eulogy the narrative making of miscarried parents through a biography of their aspirations for the unborn in the mother’s womb? In the light of this, the paper speculates whether the contemporary making of the unborn person, through memorialisation and sacralisation, is not just a symptom of grief, but also a sign of acknowledging miscarriage, including abortion, by sacralising it. It then proceeds to trace the evolution of perinatal bereavement by situating the Australian story within a larger Anglophone canvas by looking at the role of religion and ritual in secular institutions like the teaching hospital in the United States and the United Kingdom. It shows that, unlike in India, it is through sacralisation in secular institutions that the foetus metamorphoses from being hospital waste to an unborn child with funerary rights. This sacralising, through religious and secular ritual by hospital chaplains and nurses, has resulted in the WHO to mandate a proper disposal if the foetus/unborn child is of twenty-two weeks’ gestation or 500 grams; has made it the person par excellence in the US; and has led some Church of England and Presbyterian priests in the UK to even baptise it, resulting in the theologically radical (and heretical?) move of offering sacraments for the dead.
