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January 30 - February 23, 2025
Today, we have a different cultural silencing method—the trendy lexicon of “the journey,” which short-circuits any rage or sadness by insisting it was all essential to get you where you are today. That every loss has a silver lining, every misfortune is worth it, even if the ensuing road is a hellscape.
The helplessness and loneliness so many of us feel after pregnancy loss are not a coincidence. They are the result of a culture that is deeply uncomfortable with grief, particularly female grief.
American English doesn’t have a good word for a prebaby entity with some emotions attached to it. Linguists call this a lexical gap—when a culture has the concept but not the words to describe it.
Some in Rebecca’s own family vehemently disagree with this and say, “I do not consider what you had an abortion.”
the procedures that clear out the uterus for miscarriage and abortion are the same, something most Americans don’t realize, and the physical experiences are often exactly the same.
Who decides? (Hopefully not Ted Cruz.)
Nazis credited America’s brutal eugenics policies as inspiration for the Holocaust.
Birth control has always to some extent been about who is allowed to control fertility. That through line remains consistent today.
This sense of failure made Americans more secretive about their losses, and that secrecy made loss invisible.
Instead of being antiabortion, anti-women’s lib, anti-women’s work, they became “pro-life,” “pro-chastity,” “pro-motherhood.”48 The New Right itself became “pro-family.”
Stigma is a powerful tool of social control, and it was masterfully executed.
“After legalization, the opposite of ‘pregnancy’ was ‘abortion,’ and miscarriage became invisible, an event that simply was not supposed to happen.”
Women and people of color were systematically excluded from medical research until 1993,
So to be clear, Seinfeld was already on the air by the time scientists were ordered to include people of color and women in federally funded research.
Central Massachusetts–based Emy C. told us she had uterine fibroids—noncancerous growths that appear during childbearing years.26 They range in size from tiny undetectable specks to masses that can swell the uterus and leave a woman doubled over in pain. (They’re very poorly understood, and it’s not clear why some women get them and others don’t, in part—wait for it—because they’re not studied very much.)
Dr. Jamila Perritt, an ob-gyn, reproductive justice advocate, and president of Physicians for Reproductive Health, said part of the dissonance around reproductive care comes from doctors themselves, who have over the years held medical knowledge hostage while eschewing a person’s own lived experiences.
“We, doctors, scientists, clinicians have essentially conspired to keep knowledge, research, and practices around reproductive health, including contraception, pregnancy, and the menstrual cycle, out of the hands of the community,” she said. “Essentially, we have strategically organized to take that information away from our communities and then blame them for not understanding how their bodies work or not managing their own health and well-being in the way we think they should.”44
“No matter how educated somebody is, no matter how many kids they’ve successfully been able to give birth to or the losses they’ve had, everybody is looking for the thing that they did,”
The one thing miscarriages have in common is how common they are and how that fact makes exactly zero people feel better when it happens to them.
In What to Expect When You’re Expecting and Great Expectations, two popular prenatal books, any negative reproductive outcome is segregated into its own section in the back. Loss is an appendix, not part of the main story.
Some of those we spoke to believe pregnancy loss should be integrated into school health classes, gynecological exams, prenatal education, and childbirth classes. “When all sex ed focuses on is that you shouldn’t get pregnant, here’s how to prevent it, it sends the message that when you want to be pregnant, it’s easy and it all goes well,”
pregnancy loss and the statistics should be mentioned at every exam—even if it’s long before the patient is even thinking about pregnancy and not just for those who identify as female.
fewer abortions is going to mean more pregnancies, and more pregnancies will mean even more miscarriages,”
Miscarriages, stillbirths, and other types of pregnancy loss were hardly considered or even discussed during the creation of this type of legislation.
“It was like I was being physically and financially punished for not having a healthy pregnancy.”
One hospital told a caller “that a pregnant patient’s body would be used as an ‘incubator’ to carry the baby as long as possible,” according to the report.
A University of Colorado at Boulder study has estimated that it’s going to get even worse following the end of federal abortion protections, simply because pregnancy is more fatal than abortion.
“When my baby died, I became a magnet for other’s stories of loss. People from all facets of my life were coming out of the woodwork to comfort me with their own tragedies—miscarriages, stillbirths, and infant deaths.
The Justice Department sued Idaho in 2022 over its abortion law, which allowed for the arrest and prosecution of medical providers just by showing abortion had been performed, regardless of the circumstances around it. The doctors can defend against this only if the procedure was necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman—not if it merely prevented serious harm. And they were supposed to wait until the woman was near death, even if the patient could face major permanent injury as a result.
It’s also becoming harder to tell from the outside whether someone’s had a miscarriage or an abortion, because medication abortion at home is more common. This means that in many cases, enforcing regulations is going to rely on investigating pregnancy loss.
Idaho has a near-total ban, with exceptions for the mother’s life, rape, or incest, and those require a police report.
Not likely a coincidence, Idaho is also the only state in the country to stop tracking maternal mortality rates.
The underlying premise in Oklahoma is that when someone miscarries after twelve weeks, it might have been nefarious, like a person doing something to contribute to the end of their pregnancy, and that was even before abortion was formally banned in the state once Roe fell.
Oklahoma is one of thirty-seven states (plus the federal government) that have laws allowing for homicide charges for causing the loss of a pregnancy. (In 1986, there were zero laws like this.)
homicide is the number one cause of death in the United States for pregnant women and those who have recently given birth,
Miscarriages are not counted in any tally. Abortions are.
In September 2001, the first birth certificate for a stillborn baby was issued in the United States.
Former Florida governor Rick Scott made the state the first to offer death certificates to women whose pregnancies end after nine weeks but before twenty weeks. Idaho’s Unborn Infants Dignity Act does the same.
A 2021 study showed that pregnancy loss is associated with about a $2,500 loss in annual income.
You must grieve, but quietly and privately—a dignified sadness that no one has to witness. This can last maybe a couple of weekends—a month, tops—of eating pints of Ben & Jerry’s while weeping and watching Bravo before reemerging into society with a full face of makeup and a readiness to try for a baby again,
You should consider this loss a personal failure and spend weeks, months, or years feeling like garbage about it, questioning every move you made that could have contributed to it while you fester silently in your own stew of guilt, shame, and sorrow.
miscarriage, stillbirth, and other pregnancy loss seems uncommon as a result. Nobody is hearing the “untelling” of 20 percent of pregnancy announcements.
Between one-third and one-half of women will experience pregnancy loss, and one in four women will get an abortion.
the “strident trifecta” of miscarriage—silence, stigma, and shame.
People are less likely to share their stories because they think it’s rare and therefore think they must have failed, a shame spiral that leads to fewer people sharing and the cycle continuing.
“During a successful pregnancy, silence forces us to make excuses for being tired, for missing work to go to doctors’ appointments, for running to the bathroom. During an unsuccessful pregnancy, it forces us to suffer alone. In both cases, it causes us to shy away from asking for help when we need it,”
The majority of those who did share the news of their loss talked about how shocked they were when people came out of the woodwork to share their own losses.
This secret society only makes itself known to new initiates, like a uterine Skull and Bones.
People were especially blown away by the stories that were revealed within their own families. Older generations lost their pregnancies in a culture that told them to suck it up, have another, and not talk about their losses.
“Once you have a loss, you find out other people in your family had a loss. Other friends had a loss. Everyone you know has had some type of loss—miscarriage, TFMR, stillbirth, whatever it may be. So it’s crazy that we don’t talk about this as a society.
