Get your tissue box ready. Here is a truly heartbreaking story from David Hlavsa, who made the decision with his wife to give birth to their stillborn baby:

My first son was born some time in the gray dawn. In such cases, there is no rupturing of waters. The birth sac slips out whole and unbroken. The bag was a little bigger than my fist. The midwife put it on a towel and, with a small pair of scissors, carefully snipped it open.

She unfolded our son’s limbs, disentangling one from the other, unfurling him like a new leaf, talking softly to us all the while, describing him. He was about five inches long, she said. He was anacephalic, which means his brain and nervous system had failed to develop. He had probably died about a week earlier.

Gingerly, she handed him to Lisa, and though it was clear that Lisa wanted to hold him longer, it was only a minute or two before she passed him to me. Later, she told me she was afraid he would come apart in her hands.

Resting on my outstretched hand, he was thin, nearly weightless, his skin pinkish-gray and translucent. He seemed to me less like a small baby than a scale model of a stripling child. I cradled his head between the ends of my middle and ring fingers, his features peaceful, perfect, blank. His feet reaching nearly to my wrist, his toes were like mine and my father’s, the second toe longer than the big toe.

When we got back from the hospital, the epidural had not quite worn off, so Lisa did not have full use of her legs and clung to me as we staggered up the front steps. Thinking of ourselves as a public spectacle (How must we look to the neighbors? Drunk again!), we burst out laughing. Once inside, the bleak humor continued: Anacephalic? All right, so he won’t go to Harvard.

It wasn’t until I had settled Lisa onto the couch that my own legs quit working. I was in midsentence — something about an errand — teakettle in hand, halfway between the tap and the stove. A spasm went through me, I doubled over and I heard my own voice howling from far off, the full-throated cry of a child.

Pro-abortion advocates will tell you an unborn child is a fetus or a blob or a clump of tissue. Those who have suffered stillborns or miscarriages will tell you that it’s a baby. It’s their child.

I’ve never been pregnant, and so have never had to suffer the kind of pain that this man has.

But many of my friends have.

One friend, at nineteen, was married and pregnant with twins. The first one died, thanks to Vanishing Twin Syndrome. They lost the second in a car accident. Another friend of mine suffered five miscarriages before she finally delivered a healthy baby girl. And yet another friend made it to five months before losing hers. Each of these friends have cried to me when this happened. I’ve held their hands as they’ve expressed to me their feelings of emptiness and loss. Each of them have gone on to deliver healthy babies, but the feeling of loss does not go away. As one friend put it, “It’s like there are five empty chairs around our dinner table that will never be filled. The pain never goes away. I just pray and tell myself they’re waiting for me in Heaven.” The grief that they feel — both the mommies and the daddies — is one that I cannot begin to comprehend. I’ve dealt with loss, but this is different. And although they didn’t get to give birth to their babies, it never changed how much they loved their children. My friend with the twins, who just gave birth to a healthy baby girl last month, has told me before that she thinks of her sons every single day. She and her husband loved them. It wasn’t an empty medical term or a little meaningless clump of tissues. They were their children, and they loved them, even though they weren’t born yet. They named their children. They mourned them. And like this couple, the loss of their children was deep and painful.

Time can sometimes be fleeting. We don’t know why this can happen to some people, but all we can do is trust that God has a reason and cherish the time we do have, even if it’s just twenty weeks in pregnancy, or a few hours after being born, or a few days, or a few years. Tomorrow is promised to no one. But that doesn’t change the love we feel.

Love knows no bounds. Love has no limits.

Hat Tip: My colleague Bill Jempty at Wizbang