I'm Sorry for My Loss: An Urgent Examination of Reproductive Care in America

by Rebecca Little

As a society, we almost exclusively fixate on abortion and healthy, nine-month pregnancies and ignore how routinely and regularly things go south. That ignorance not only leaves out a huge swath of people, but it also helped lay the groundwork to overturn Roe v. Wade, and it is making life for pregnant people today more deadly and dangerous.

A Mrs. E.S., a married mother of three in Kansas, wrote, “Why can’t We poor people be given Birth Control as well as Dr’s & the Rich people… We need help to prevent any more babies.”6

In the words of feminist author Katha Pollitt, “it changed how women saw themselves: as mothers by choice, not fate.”4

Pregnancy tests made invisible miscarriages visible. This changed the way pregnancy was discussed, framed, and encountered on both a narrative and experiential level.

Women and people of color were systematically excluded from medical research until 1993, when the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s medical research agency, finally warmed to the idea that maybe women and men were, you know, different in big ways and mandated their inclusion in clinical studies.