I continue to wrestle with the idea of whether to try again. I just turned 38 and, if I do try again, I want to do it soon. I am sure that, if I said I wanted to try, my husband would agree.

I just can't shake this feeling, almost like a certainty, that, if I get pregnant, something bad will happen again. We'll end up with another dead child or a sick child. This feeling feels different than a fear that something will go wrong. It really feels more like a fact.

I guess it comes down to feeling like my last pregnancy was cursed and this curse will carry with me into any other pregnancy. If I didn't have this feeling, I would try again. I just can't shake it, though.

Is this feeling that a black baby cloud is hanging over me just a normal byproduct of babyloss trauma? Have any of you felt this sense of certainty that something will go wrong?

Steph - I know exactly how you feel. I feel like the Mother of Doom now.

I have no sage advice, but I do know how you feel. Cursed or marked or whatever. The only solace I find is that what K and I have gone through this year is terrible, and common, but not that common. We have hope that next time we'll emerge unscathed. I think it's a combination of willfulness and stupidity personally. :-)

I think it must just be that you become a product of your experience and recent experience is what you carry forward.

I have 4 healthy and well (more or less, give or take a birth defect or two) daughters but now, now that Freddie has been - and gone - I feel like babies never come home.

Yet I know that isn't true. I just also know it is.

Unfortunately, the by product of wonderfully supportive places like this is that you mostly read about dead babies. And going to hang out somewhere where babies live is not much of a viable option :( So you do end up with a skewed perspective on it all.

I have a friend who had 2 children lost to the same birth defect before her living one. She says that no indeed the joy of her child now did not make what she went through worth it and she has chosen not to do it again. But the living one certainly makes life wonderful. My guess, knowing her, is that had the third also had the same dreadful thing, she'd have gone on and on till she got a child to bring home.

I think though, in the end you have to discover if you can have a good enough life if you don't? We had Freddie because I knew I had to, he was definitely going to be my last. I had him to fix me, to make a wrong right, because despite the risks I knew there could be, I felt compelled to do it. My other half didn't, didn't even want another.

And now that exactly the worst has happened, we BOTH feel compelled to do it again. Go figure :(

I had a miscarriage at almost 11 weeks last summer, and I felt totally cursed after that baby. Seriously. I remember praying, just begging God to let the next one go right, and I really think looking back it's because I had some kind of intuition that it wouldn't. So when I got pregnant this last time, I was terrified. To the point that I lost all kinds of weight (and even when we lost him at 20 weeks, had only gained a pound) and could barely sleep and just felt all around like crap 24/7. And then look what happens.

But you know it's funny, and maybe this is just naivete or maybe it's because we know he had spina bifida and I'm on massive doses of folic acid now to help keep it from happening again, but I kind of feel like it has lifted. And even though the rational me knows that if I get pregnant again, the next one might work and might not but....it's just this sense that everything's going to be okay, no matter what. That feeling is very "not me", so I can't really explain it.

So, short answer long, I do think motherly intuition plays a part but I also think feeling cursed kind of comes with this awful territory we all find ourselves in. But personally (and farbeit from me to tell you what to do, I have no idea what I am doing myself), I do think I would maybe wait and see if that feeling passes after a while before you get pg again. Only because having gone through a pregnancy feeling cursed, and then having something bad happen in that one, it just makes me put the blame all that much harder on myself, like WHY ON EARTH DID I DO THIS when I just KNEW something like this would happen? And obviously I know it wasn't my fault, but you know what I mean.

I'm feeling a little disjointed this evening so I hope this post makes sense :) You will figure out what is right for your family, and I will be thinking of you and hoping that feeling of foreboding goes away soon.

For me, it comes and goes. Or came and went, I don't know. A few months ago, when my husband was firmly in the no, never again camp, I was weirdly certain that if we tried, it would be okay, that we would have a healthy baby and everything would be okay (except that everything can't be okay as long as Hector is still dead, but you know what I mean).

But now, I'm where you are, I guess. It feels like certainty, not just anxiety. It's over, there is no possibility of a healthy baby or any baby at all. I don't know if this is just the blues but it feels like conviction.

I know exactly how you feel- and I think it's completely normal considering what has happened to you (to us). We terminated at 13 weeks due to a trisomy 13 in Feb and I got pregnant again in June. I couldn't shake the feeling that something would go wrong again, and unfortunately, that feeling was reinforced when at 10 weeks I found out that the embryo had died at 8 weeks (missed miscarriage). Everybody says it's just bad luck but it sure doesn't feel like it. I definitely feel cursed and am convinced I'll never have a normal pregnancy. At least we are getting the chromosomes tested this time around too (I had a D&C specifically so I could do this) so maybe we can get some answers. But all we can really do is try again. It will be hard, but I think this whole experience has made me- made all of us- stronger. And we need to use that strength to get through it so we can have a child we so dearly want.