ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on the author's stillbirth experience in August 2019 and her specialization in human rights to explore "disenfranchised grief” (Doka) in the context of current environmental loss and of mourning related to the COVID-19 pandemic. In so doing, the chapter raises seminal questions about what is (non)-human, what is grievable, and how do dehumanization and denialism operate. This work outlines the main parallels between the disenfranchised grief of PAIL (pregnancy and infant loss), the eco-grief of environmental losses, and the grief currently emerging in the COVID-19 pandemic. This chapter explores how historically the grief of stillbirth was rendered taboo until even today. It then draws parallels to the denialism of grief in eco-grief and the COVID-19 pandemic, alluding to examples of dehumanization, disgust, repression of emotions, or techno-medicalization. The chapter investigates ways to counter these disenfranchising discourses by examining how PAIL groups resist this denialism and dehumanization. The chapter scrutinizes discourses of lamentation, embodiment, sentimentalism, and memorialization-to then probe their viability in a post-COVID world. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.