In 2020, a woman walking in a Catholic graveyard in Rome came across a tomb with her name and surname written on it. The date carved on the wooden cross was the very same of the day she got an abortion in a Roman public hospital: that day, a Catholic organization took the foetus from the hospital and, thanks to the information given by the hospital itself, buried it with the name of the woman. Set aside the human aspects of the case, from a scientific point of view the matter opens a wider range of issues, of different kinds and regarding different research fields and scopes. The paper aims to highlight a part of the several issues this episode draws attention to. It intends to present them from an historical point of view, focusing on the historical aspect of the phenomenon of foetuses burial and trying to retrace the origin, as well as outline the development of this practice which culminated in the accident that is the object of this study. By doing this, it will briefly trace the history of abortion in Italy, to offer a clearer understanding of the case study here presented. Even though the historical nature of the paper, it will also try to reflect on the complex question about the reason for this fact: how could it happen? What does this accident show about the approaches to death before birth? All these are problematic questions, difficult to respond to and for sure impossible to answer with a single paper, but they certainly raise doubts and above all offer a glimpse of where church and state often still collide: the matters of life and death.