giving the church the wrong impression

I just realized this morning I probably gave my entire church the impression that I've had an abortion.

I tend to sort of ramble and stutter when I get nervous.

What happened is that I've been asking for years what the church teaches about children that die in the womb. All I ever got was some lay sister shoving a piece of canon law at me about how they can't be baptized if they're already dead. I asked again, because I have been asking for years. I just wanted a straight answer.

See, the thing is, my first child was thrown away as medical waste. I miscarried, they threw the baby away and did a D&C (for which I had to be sedated, probably because they weren't sure I'd hold still for it). A D &C means dilation & curettage - horrifying to any Catholic because it is the same way they abort fetuses.

Then, after my third child was born and died, I was going to go to nursing school to help moms like me. Yeah. While I was in, the story broke about the abortion clinic where they were chucking children's bodies out with the McDonald's bags, and the woman who found them and buried them was sued. Then a few days after that, I had to watch a detailed interview recorded with Margaret Sanger.

So, of my children, I've buried two and a piece of paper since the body was incinerated, in unconsecrated ground because I didn't know whether I could ask for them to be buried in a proper graveyard since they weren't baptized.

So I asked a rambling question that made no sense yesterday then realized this morning that I probably gave the wrong impression completely. But it has been something tugging at me for close to five years at this point, interfering with going to Mass, interfering with ways to answer my living son's questions, and stopping me from getting past my own guilt trip. I'm glad he gave me a straight answer, that helps way more than "you just have to have faith that..." or "you could have a mass said for them" or the sideways things that made it feel even more my fault that I couldn't carry to term.