If the couple experiences a reproductive loss requiring extensive interaction in the healthcare system, the trauma they suffer will be intensified if the social mother is treated as if she has no right to access her partner and/or baby. Goodridge (2006) described her experience feeling "illegitimate," after nurses prevented her from seeing her newborn daughter in the NICU. The nurses told her, "You can't be her mother," since her birth mother was in the operating room. Goodridge recounted, "I start to cry. I explain who I am...But they do not believe she is my daughter. Is this what it will always be like, I wonder: trapped in some linoleum purgatory, suspended animation, unable to touch either member of my family?" (p. 33). Nurses can either ease the trauma surrounding this type of loss with kind and sensitive treatment, or exacerbate it by unnecessarily limiting access of women to each other and their baby.