What right do they have?

I was reading a blog post from an L&D nurse. She closed comments for the post on her blog so I have to post my comment here. She was talking about a case where the baby died in utero and was delivered still born. The mother didn't want to see the baby, so the nurse took him away. She had to do all the normal weighing and measuring and footprinting even though the baby died.

Then she and another nurse took it upon themselves to "bless" the baby and pray over him. Did the mother give them permission to do that?

It really would have pissed me off if it had been my child. The nurse also couldn't resist mentioning the fact that the mother had previous abortions, and being the right-to-lifer she is, a negative attitude toward the mother really came through. She implied that she had honored the baby's life more than the mother who didn't want to see him.

A lot of people prefer not to see their loved ones dead - they want to remember them the way they were alive. The mother wanted that baby and carried him for 40 weeks before he died. Why would she want to remember him the way he looked dead? The nurse herself mentioned that he wasn't in good shape.

I wouldn't have written this much about it if she hadn't closed comments. More than likely, I would've just said, "Did you have the parents' permission to conduct your own religious ceremony over the body of their dead child?"

If you want to pray, go home or go to church and pray. It's disrespectful to impose your beliefs on someone else's dead baby.