One of the first things I learned about a new acquaintance of mine is that she has three children. I recently had abdominal surgery, and by way of telling me about her surgery recovery experiences she mentioned that she has had four C-sections. Since I knew, and she knew I knew, that she had three children, I felt I needed to ask "four? Did you lose one of your babies?" The moment I said it, I thought, good heavens, that was a very insensitive thing to ask!
Fortunately she calmly said, "oh, everyone asks me that. I was a surrogate one time." Whew!
Should I have just ignored the discrepancy between the two pieces of information? Am I right in that it is always an awful thing to ask someone (especially someone you don't know very well), if one of their children did not survive?