In 2018, Sharran Sutherland was pregnant with her son Miran when, during an ultrasound, doctors discovered that his heart had stopped beating. The pregnancy had proceeded normally until then. As she later recounted, they recommended that she undergo a dilation and curettage procedure, but she asked for another alternative because she wanted to be able to see and hold her son.
On April 23, Sharran underwent an induction and eventually gave birth to Miran. After the loss, she and her husband Michael decided to preserve the baby’s body in a saline solution inside a container for several days.
“We had him for almost a week”, Sharran recalled. During that time, she was able to take photographs of him, make handprints, and say goodbye to him before burying him in a flowerpot where they planted a hydrangea.
The images the family took show Miran, who measured approximately 10 centimeters and weighed 26 grams. Sharran was especially struck when she saw him and described his tiny features: “His ears, his tongue, his gums, his lips”. She also recalled that his face seemed similar to that of one of her other children. For her, that moment was very different from what she had imagined based on the drawings that usually appear in books about pregnancy.
Over time, Sharran decided to publish the photographs and speak publicly about her experience. Her story also took on an anti-abortion activism component, something she herself expressed explicitly in her posts. Beyond that position, the case circulated images of a pregnancy loss and opened a conversation about the ways different families experience grief after a miscarriage. Sharran, for her part, maintained that being able to preserve Miran, photograph him, and say goodbye to him was an important part of her own grieving process.