Answered by Ustadh Tabraze Azam
Question: Salams, I was 24weeks pregnant and had a sudden delivery and my baby died. I want to ask how many days should I wait for praying to make my Prayer?
Answer: Wa alaikum assalam wa rahmatullah,
I’m deeply sorry to hear that your baby passed away shortly after birth. May Allah Most High increase you in steadfastness and facilitate your healing and recovery. Insha’Allah, you shall be reunited with your baby in the next life where you will find an infinite reward for your sincere faith and submission. It’s moving to see somebody so concerned about their relationship with their Lord after such a tragic event.
The blood which exits from the uterus after the birth of a child is legally considered to be lochia (nifas). The maximum period of such bleeding is forty days, but keep an eye on it to see if it stops before then. If it does, you should perform the full, ritual bath (ghusl) and then begin praying your prayers as usual. Similarly, you may fast, recite the Qur’an and engage in other acts of devotion after your bath.
Marital Relations After Childbirth
If you have a lochial habit, that is to say, you have had a child before and the lochia lasted a certain length of time, then it would not be permitted to engage in sexual relations with your spouse until the completion of this period. For example, if your bleeding lasted thirty days last time, and this time it stopped after twenty-five, you would need to avoid such relations until you reach thirty days.
Note that you can still be intimate with your spouse at any point during your lochia, yet without any direct, skin-to-skin contact between your navel and knee.
However, if the bleeding continues and reaches forty complete days, you may not engage in any sexual relations during this time and up to this point, even if your lochial habit finished much earlier. Further, you would consider all blood after your lochial habit to be irregular (istihada). Accordingly, you would need to perform a ritual bath and then make up the prayers from the end of your habit and until day forty, and then continue to consider yourself ritually pure thereafter.
If there are issues in calculation or any other problem arises, it’s worth reaching out to a reliable scholar to ask for assistance.
(Birgivi, Dhukhr al-Muta’ahhilin wa al-Nisa’; Shurunbulali, Maraqi al-Falah, with Tahtawi’s Gloss)
Please also see: How Can I Know the End of My Menstrual Period? and: When to Resume Prayers After Having a Child
And Allah Most High knows best.
Wassalam,
[Ustadh] Tabraze Azam
Checked and Approved by Shaykh Faraz Rabbani
Ustadh Tabraze Azam holds a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Leicester, where he also served as the President of the Islamic Society. He memorized the entire Qur’an in his hometown of Ipswich at the tender age of sixteen and has since studied the Islamic Sciences in traditional settings in the UK, Jordan, and Turkey. He is currently pursuing advanced studies in Jordan, where he is presently based on his family.