JoNightshade

I'm sorry for your loss - I also lost my daughter at 26 weeks. I'm glad you can talk about it and I think it's good to spread awareness because this is the sort of thing people just don't talk about. I honestly think pregnancy losses would be more easy to handle, mentally, if there was a general cultural awareness of how common it really is. Once it happened to us, people I'd known for years started coming to me and telling me about their losses, and it was like, wait, really? How come I never knew this?

I look at it this way: the fact that pregnancy loss is so common just illustrates how incredible life is in the first place. It is so complex and so delicate that every baby is a miracle.

I'm so sorry for your loss. I think it's really hard to not have an explanation, but I was told for about 50% of stillbirths there is no obvious cause. I was actually grateful that after the autopsy and genetic testing they did have an answer for us - it was a random umbilical cord malformation that restricted blood flow. So she was okay while her need for blood was small, but as she got bigger it wasn't enough. Although it's terrible to think she had no chance from the start, it's also comforting to know that I couldn't have done anything differently, and also that there was no genetic cause that might happen again when we tried for another kid.

This question gets asked every single time someone with a limb difference appears. Here's the best answer.

::Raises hand:: I dunno if I had exactly the same thing as you, but yes - massive pain upon penetration, similar symptoms, etc. We managed to work on the whole thing very slowly and patiently and things improved, but I wouldn't have said sex was ever really super pleasurable for me. Then I had a baby. All better!

I think that's probably judging her too harshly. As a parent, you do the best you can. Even in an ideal situation, you end up screwing up somehow. You can't treat your children identically even if they are all bio kids. I cannot even imagine how much more difficult that gets when you add in children from all different backgrounds, some of them abusive. There's no "ideal" way to handle that. You just try your best and hope it's enough.