"Put My Little Shoes Away", or why people do not dress fetuses in shoes

I think one reason people assign the same value to a fetus as they do to a child is that they do not know what it is like to lose a child. It doesn’t happen that much anymore, here and now where most Americans live. People think that all the children they know will live to adulthood, or at any rate none of their own children will be lost. Since odds are their own children will not die young, fetus lovers are free to concentrate their hysterical energies on fetuses.

I don’t know how someone could claim to love their miscarried fetus as much as they love their 5 year old child. I do know someone who does. And I think “poor kid” and I mean the living one.

People weren’t always so blasé about the deaths of children when it happened more often. Look at all those 19th century folk songs about dead and dying children. The quote below is from a fairly well know folk song where the narrator is the voice of a dead child singing to the mother:

“Tell my loving little playmates
that I never more shall play
Give them all my toys, but Mother
Put my little shoes away.”

Why does this wrench our hearts? Why do I remember it when I heard it sung once, 15 years ago at a folk song festival? What exactly are the elements of pathos presented here?

A. The child knows. She is a conscious being, and conscious of her own death. She has to leave her mother, and she knows her mother will cry.
B. The child has shoes. He has a recognizably human form.

Why are there no songs about dead fetuses? A fetus does not wear shoes.

A fetus does not know it will die. It does not know it has a mother. You can’t dress a fetus. Well, maybe you can put a bit of white cloth on it before you bury it and pretend it made it all the way to being a baby. But you can't put shoes on it. Baby shoes are for babies.

A child is a part of human society, a fetus is not.

The death of a fetus may be a private tragedy, but to equate it to the death of a child is insane – as insane as putting little booties on a poor stillborn creature. Or a creature that does not have feet.

Go into any 19th century cemetery. Look at the stones for the dead children.
Sarah. Age 6 months 5 days.
Nathanial, aged 4 years, 3 months, 2 days.
Mary. Four days.

Lives so short they counted the days. Lives so short, but part of human society long enough to get a stone. If it was a child it got a stone. If it was a miscarriage it did not. I know this because my grandmother had 13 living children, one stillbirth, and a bunch of miscarraiges, and there was only one stone. Her miscarriages were unfortunate, private events, not births of children. (Even my father didn't know, it was my cousin who found out from an Aunt. My father says he comes from a family of 13 children, even the stillbirth doesn't quite count for him, though he is anti abortion and claims to value fetuses as much as babies). 19th century parents were not crazy. They knew the difference between a fetus and a child, and they did not dishonor their children by pretending they are the same thing.