When sudden tears I’d never shed streamed down my face after a photo of my fetus fell out of a book I pulled from my shelf, I realized my need to mourn and say some kind of prayer for my lost, unborn child.
When I spoke to my rabbi, asking if there was any ritual or Kaddish for a miscarried child, I was told there wasn’t one.
Although I know  (from my own experience) some abortions or miscarriages are not at all sad or regrettable, I feel that this loss can often be an important piece woman’s lives that is ignored or brushed aside, especially if she has other children (as I did) at the time of my miscarriage.
I suggest a simple women’s ritual in which we can light a candle with a simple Barukh (blessing) like the blessing we say on Friday night. Then you can take about a few minutes and watch the candlelight burn down and create a a personal Kaddish prayer or poem for our lost child. You may want to invite your mothers and grandmothers spirits and the spirits of all our women ancestors who may have also experienced our sadness to join us. You may also want to take time to gather a group of women and co-create a collective prayer using a sentence or phrase from each woman’s writing.
This is the poem/prayer that I wrote for my lost child:
KADDISH FOR ROSHIE
10/7/1981-12/16/1981
You weren’t just a no-one
You were a special someone
Whom we’d never know
Arriving with the New Year
We thought you were a curse
Then accepted you as blessing
And then you went away
In our amniotic shadow
Where it seems a boy is smiling
Fetal being forms his mouth
So I hold your faded picture
Dates of entrance
And of exit now are
Scribbled on the back
For I’d saved it like a postcard
Or a talismanic promise
From a love I longed to know
Still a rush of blood and water
Took your shadow and its smile
For you were but a tourist
Never destined to come home
Now these twenty-eight years later
Feel you hover at my shoulder
In the home of ghosts and angels
Behind my purposed present
You are waiting for forever
In time’s errant shifting mirror
As I hold your only picture
Is it you for whom I mourn
Or just the death of summer
And
All I’ve lost unborn?
