“So far we have not been able to register our children and now it is important to be able to do so, because if the loss of a child is difficult to record always, not recognize it, it increases pain and anger. Legally, they are no longer ‘dead fetus’ or ‘abortion residue’, our children will occupy a place, and that helps a lot in the grieving process, an ancestral claim,” explains Eider Otxoa. Otxoa lost the baby and is a therapist and member of Esku Hutsa.

However, he adds that this is the first step and that the law should take two further steps: on the one hand, the possibility of registering children who have not reached the six-month administration and, on the other, the possibility of registering children who have died in the family book.

After such a death, we asked Otxoa if parents should not receive a leave of several days to not go to work and discuss maternity and paternity leave: “What we live is motherhood and paternity, and that’s why we need that time for our grief, for our pain and for putting our children in place.”

Wigs and balloons at the Hernani cemetery

Perinatal death is the death of a baby, a newborn baby or a child of a few days, which was inaugurated in the Hernani cemetery last February. Esti Zeberio, the initiator of the initiative, tells us that “those of us who visit occasionally see more and more asterisks with the names of the children. And not only that, but also in anniversaries or special moments, you can see that it's being a meeting point, of feeling, of remembering, because occasionally hairstyles, balloons and other memories appear. As we said at the inauguration, the fact that our children have their place in society is very important for parents who have suffered that loss, and both the great change that the new measure has brought, and the fact that they have their space in the cemetery, contribute to alleviating this suffering, make us see the existence of our little ones.”