Dead Baby Moms

One of my favorite shows right now is Criminal Minds. It's about a group of FBI agents who work to profile criminals in order to stop them from committing anymore crimes. Most of the time, they go after serial killers. I like the show so much that I debating about going into criminal profiling instead of counseling. I doubt I will do it, but I do find it very intriguing.

The one thing I really dislike about the show is its depiction of dead baby moms. I know of at least three episodes in which the criminal is a woman whose baby was either stillborn or died soon after birth. Criminal Minds isn't the only show that has done this either. In fact, on almost any crime show, the unsub (what the criminal is called) is usually a dead baby mom when it comes to children being kidnapped or missing. Lifetime has several movies that depict this very scenario.

It isn't just limited to fictional television shows either. While I was on bedrest, I watched a true crime show, and a baby was kidnapped. The police officer said they were looking at women who had recently lost a baby to see if one of them might have done it. It isn't just television either. Real life people do it all the time. Several months ago, a baby was kidnapped from an area hospital. My own aunt said she bet the woman who did it had recently lost a baby.

This attitude kills me. When I lost Jenna, I was grief-stricken. I wanted my baby back. I would have done just about anything to get her back, but I'll say it again, I wanted MY baby back. I didn't want someone else's baby. I didn't want to go out and kidnap another baby because it wouldn't have been Jenna.

I also would never have kidnap or killed someone's baby. For one, I would never want to put someone through what I was going through. For another, I wasn't crazy, grief-stricken, yes, but not crazy. Depressed, but not psychotic.

Over the past year and a half, I've met many, if not hundreds, of dead baby moms. None of them have been crazy. None of them have been psychotic. One of the most overwhelming common denominators we all have is that we wish no one would ever have to go through the pain of what we did.

I am sure that it has happened before, where the kidnapper or killer was a woman who had lost a baby, but maybe these poor women had some sort of mental illness beforehand. Maybe they were prone to it, and the death of their child just threw them into a psychosis. However, even though I know it has happened, I don't think it's as common as television makes it out to be.

I wish everyone, especially television writers, would realize that us dead baby moms aren't crazy. We aren't going to go out and kidnap babies. We don't need to be stereotyped in that way. Most of us are just sad, not psychotic.