The objective of this study was to investigate the maternal mood after pregnancy and premature childbirth after perinatal loss which is defined as the fetal death occurred in the last weeks of gestation or the newborn in the first few weeks after delivery. The study is part of the work executed during a phD course in Woman's Health (Fundação Oswaldo Cruz-Instituto Fernandes Figueira) using the qualitative method of research in health for the construction of life histories by means of techniques of opened, non-directive interviews, and participant comment. The field work consisted in accompanying of the double mother-baby during hospitalization and six months after discharge. The sample of the selected subjects was chosen from the relative criterion to the accompaniment by 24 hours of internments with equal or superior duration of 30 days. This article if relates one of four histories of constructed lives. The result was the production of knowledge on the state of maternal mood in mothers of premature babies after hospital discharge through the identification of emotional reactions characteristics of a work of mourning linked to specific perinatal loss in its relationship with the syndromes of the "baby of substitution" and "vulnerable child".
Baby of substitution; Vulnerable child; Perinatal death; Pregnancy of risk