Qualitative analysis explores how fetal naming impacts grief and recognition in Javanese Muslim women, highlighting cultural dimensions.
How do women make miscarriage memorable when pregnancy loss is common yet weakly recognized? Drawing on interpretative phenomenological analysis of 24 interviews with Javanese Muslim women, this article examines how fetal naming and non-naming shape grief, personhood, and moral responsibility. Naming sustained remembrance through prayer, family narratives, and ultrasound images, while some women refused it when biomedical language framed loss as absence or bodily cleansing. These practices were shaped by access to care, household relations, religion, and bureaucratic recognition. The article argues that naming constitutes a politics of memory across biomedicine, kinship, religion, and the state.
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Askuri et al. (2026) studied this question.
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