Yes, you are allowed to bury a baby after a miscarriage or after birth, and the law also counts on it. However, it is important that you inform the hospital as soon as possible, within 96 hours at the latest, that you will be burying the child. If you don't make it, the child will be cremated and placed in a common grave (just like adults where no bereaved can be found). However, if you want to get his ashes, it will be very complicated, maybe impossible.

Whether your baby died before birth, during it, or anytime after birth, you can have him/her buried. However, you only have 4 days, more precisely 96 hours, from the notification of death to arrange the funeral. If you do not arrange the funeral within this time, the baby's body will be cremated and placed in a common grave. Retrieving the ashes afterwards is difficult and often impossible.
Please note that the funeral law unfortunately does not take into account the fact that a baby may die before birth in the mother's womb. The mentioned 96 hours run from the moment of notification of the baby's death to one of the parents. However, the birth may still be far away, the mother may also be under anesthesia at that moment, the father upset. And contacting the funeral service is the last thing that parents would be interested in before or during the birth of their dead baby. If you belong to the family or friends of the parents, offer them help with arranging the funeral, they will most likely appreciate it. 

Whether you decide to cremate the baby's body or place it in a grave, it is necessary that you contact a funeral service within 96 hours of the death. We advise not to go to the first one you come across, but to study the reviews of the services you are considering. Think about whether you want to give preference to cremation or placing the body in a grave. As parents, you can also talk about what the ceremony for your baby should look like before contacting the funeral service. You can choose both a traditional ceremony in a crematorium or church in the Czech Republic, as well as a more alternative way of ceremony in nature or in any place you like. 

Then feel free to call a few funeral services and find out if they have experience with burying babies. Trust your intuition and how the funeral service staff treats you. Do they listen to your wishes? Are they trying to accommodate you? Are they not manipulating you into anything? Are they empathetic? If you have any doubts and have not signed anything yet, you can of course back out of the existing agreement and turn to a funeral service that you will be satisfied with.

The state will contribute 5000 CZK towards your baby's funeral. You can get it even after arranging a funeral for a baby after a miscarriage or a termination of pregnancy for health reasons. You can apply for it at the Czech Republic Labour Office, which will not examine your income or any debts you may have. If you arrange the funeral with us, Pohřební průvodci, we will apply for the funeral allowance for you (if you wish).

After a miscarriage or termination of pregnancy, you will not receive a birth or death certificate for the baby. In the case of a stillborn baby, only a birth certificate will be issued, and you can have a note added stating that the child was stillborn. You will receive both documents with your baby's name if they died shortly after birth. They are issued by the registry office in the municipality where the baby was born, and they have 30 days to process it.
If you don't feel up to dealing with these matters at the registry office, you can ask a family member or friend for help. The registry office may already have all the necessary documents from the hospital, so they may send you the birth certificate by post. Because we know from our own experience that not all registry office staff are empathetic, you can also contact us, Pohřební průvodci, and we can arrange these matters for you. 

After a miscarriage or termination of pregnancy, it is not possible to claim maternity leave or maternity benefits. Mothers of stillborn babies and babies who die shortly after birth can take 14 weeks of maternity leave and receive maternity benefits. We recommend consulting your specific situation with the Czech Social Security Administration and your employer. 

After a miscarriage or termination of pregnancy, the baby's father is not entitled to paternity leave. Fathers of stillborn babies or babies who die within six weeks of birth can claim 14 days of paternity leave. More information and conditions can be found at the Social Security Administration. 

After the birth of a stillborn baby or after the death of a baby shortly after birth, the father or another member of the household can stay at home and care for the mother or other children up to the age of 10 for up to 9 days. The gynecologist or other attending physician decides on the entitlement to caregiver's allowance. 

After a miscarriage, termination of pregnancy, or the death of a baby, parents are not entitled to parental allowance or parental leave. If the baby died later after birth and the mother was not entitled to maternity benefits, she can receive parental allowance for the period the baby lived. If you need more information, contact the Czech Republic Labour Office directly, they will definitely advise you.

If you, as a mother, do not feel physically or mentally well enough to return to work, consult your general practitioner, gynecologist, or psychiatrist about the possibility of staying at home on sick leave.
And if you haven't found the answer to your question here, you can also check out the website www.perinatalniztrata.cz, where all situations are described in more detail. You can also write or call us directly and we will be happy to help you.

Yes, if you only have a little ash after the cremation of a baby, that's normal. Today's furnaces are set to a temperature of around 1000°C, and only 2-3 tablespoons of ash actually remain from a baby. This is how it works in the Czech Republic today, all crematoria operate similarly. The solution would be a small electric furnace designed exclusively for babies, which would not reach such high temperatures - we are working on it, but it will take some time.

After the cremation of a baby, very little ash remains, so the furnace operator at the crematorium often tries to "add ash" in good faith by scraping up what was left over from others... That's why some mothers tell us that the ash was heavier than the baby itself.
If we organize the funeral, we can communicate with the crematorium and arrange for this not to happen, so you only get the ash of your baby.

Babies have very delicate skin. It decomposes faster than in adults. This doesn't deter the mother, and often not even the father, because they simply love their child unconditionally, but it can surprise others. Therefore, we recommend saying goodbye to the baby's body in person as soon as possible and then only doing the funeral ceremony with the ashes from the cremation.

Babies usually go to autopsy. Although you can refuse an autopsy, doctors will try to convince you, and it may be the right thing to do - if there is no autopsy, you may never find out the causes of the health complications. Knowing them can be valuable in a possible future pregnancy.

Doctors sometimes perform a type of autopsy after which it is no longer possible to say goodbye to the baby's body. Therefore, if we know that you still want to say goodbye to the baby's body, we immediately call the doctors in pathology to perform an anatomical autopsy and in no case a biopsy. Don't be afraid of anatomical autopsies: the baby will look the same as before...

According to the Act on Health Services, a miscarriage occurs if the baby "does not show any signs of life and at the same time its birth weight is less than 500 g, and if it cannot be determined, if the pregnancy is shorter than 22 weeks." In all other cases, it is a stillborn baby. However, you can, may, and have the right to bury both.

At our ceremonies, we often meet thirty-year-olds who have never been to a funeral before, let alone seen the deceased. So, this might be a first for you.
If we can offer some advice, don't be afraid to look at the baby, stroke them... Death gives the body a special, almost sacred peace. We know that parents who didn't say goodbye to their baby's body often call the funeral home months, even years, after the baby's death, looking for at least a photo. On the other hand, we don't want to upset or traumatize anyone, so we recommend holding the funeral for a wider circle of the bereaved later on.

Try calling or writing to us, and we'll try to sort something out for you…

In the Czech Republic, it used to be common to baptize children immediately after birth, at the slightest sign of life, sometimes even a pretended one – so that the child would go to heaven, but also so that the midwife would not be accused of mismanaging the birth.
Today, parents wanting to baptize their child refer to the so-called baptism of desire. However, this method of baptism is at least debatable, if not impossible, for stillborn children.
A stillborn child goes to heaven even without baptism.
Thomas Aquinas defined the concept of limbo: a place for the souls of people who had not committed any personal sins, but had not had original sin removed by baptism. Typically, a temporary state of the souls of good people who died before the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And likewise, children who died before they could be baptized were, according to this concept, sent to a second limbo, the so-called "limbus infantium" or "limbus puerorum". However, theologians had long spoken of this as discrimination, and so in 1984 Cardinal Josef Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) expressed the hypothesis that limbo had never been part of Catholic theological doctrine, and in 2007 the Vatican actually abolished limbo. Limbo was also never a dogma. Those who died unbaptized in early childhood therefore automatically go to heaven.