SINGAPORE: After their twins Abigail and Lara were stillborn, all Ms Mandy Too and Mr Aidan Hoy had to remember them by was a document titled “Notification of a Still-Birth”.
On each document were details such as the hospital where they were born, their weight and their parents’ names.
But missing was a detail that the grieving parents had hoped for – their daughters’ names.
Instead, handwritten by hospital staff on the top right-hand corner of the documents were the words “Twin 1” and “Twin 2”.
“It felt wrong that there was no space for their names,” said Ms Too.
“You’re basically saying it doesn’t matter what their names are, it doesn’t matter who they are. They’re dead, who cares, you know?”
The notification documents, issued after Abigail and Lara were stillborn in August 2021, were meant matters such as funeral arrangements. If Ms Too and Mr Hoy wanted to keep the documents, they had to make a copy for themselves.
“It was so cold. It just felt like okay, they want to know how much your baby weighed, but doesn’t matter who they are. We just want to know how heavy they were when they died,” said Ms Too. “It was so upsetting.”
Parents of newborns now get digital birth and death certificates, which were introduced in May last year as part of the government’s efforts to streamline and digitalise services.
But parents of stillborn babies get digital stillbirth certificates where the children’s names are not listed.
“Even though they were not officially alive or officially born … we lived with them for eight or nine months and we could see their personalities starting to show,” said Mr Hoy.
“It’s all about affording dignity to their life.”
FOR THE PARENTS
So Ms Too wrote to the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA), which oversees birth and death registration services, hoping she could get the twins’ names included in their stillbirth notification documents.
“I was so desperate for some kind of official recognition,” she said.
Even if she couldn’t get it for her twins, she hoped the authorities would do it for future stillbirths. “Then anyone else who has a stillbirth after us, at least that would help,” Ms Too said.
ICA’s response to her was that names are only registered for children who are born alive, so that they are “identified accordingly in the provision or use of government services throughout their lives”.
“I got really frustrated … I know you don’t need it, it is not for you to make use of the name. It is just for the parents, for the families, to have something that records their child. Because to us, it matters.”