Miscarriage. Even the semantics is jarring. Miscarriage; miscarry; mis-carry. That “mis-” prefix lands on me with an unwelcome normative thud, implying some sort of fault at the hands of the carrier – a handling error. Presumably, the etymology derives from a more general sense of a miscarriage (as in miscarriage of justice) that has been wrought upon a person, but the relationship with the verb “carry”, so key to pregnancy, suggests something done by you instead of something happening to you, even if the suggestion is unintentional. Another offensive item in the reproductive lexicon.
The intergenerational disparity in responses to miscarriage is striking. Though many miscarriages are still kept private (and different cultures often handle them differently), the general recommendation now is that it’s better to talk about them. Think about the no-longer-pregnant daughters who return home to talk to mothers and grannies about the kind of loss those mothers and grannies were told not to discuss in their time. Or think about what has been asked of women historically: how frequent the tragedies, how minimal the supports. It’s easy to imagine a secondary wave of trauma hitting modern families, where the buried sentiments of older generations rise up alongside their younger loved ones’ fresh wounds.
Even within generations, reactions vary. I can discuss my miscarriage experiences with great analytical clarity and a sense of detachment that sometimes unnerves me. Then I read something particularly well captured and I’m surprised to find my cheeks wet. I’m not even sure whether it’s my own experiences or others’ that are getting to me. This happened while reading Eavan Boland’s poem about pregnancy loss, written while she was writer-in-residence at the National Maternity Hospital.
I cannot find you / in this dark hour / dear child.
Wait / for dawn to make us clear to one another.
Let the sun / inch above the rooftops,
Let love / be the light that shows again / the blossom to the root.
My reaction reminds me of the intricacy of grief and how good we become at soldiering on. Art gets through, however
Now I read that the UK is planning to introduce two weeks unpaid leave for miscarriages that occur before the 24th week. There is currently nothing in place for families who lose a pregnancy at 23 weeks (or before) there or indeed here. Let that settle. At a moment in the life of the country when we are constantly reading anxious pieces about decreasing reproduction rates (imploring us to create more little future contributors to the national pension pot/domestic care network), the news that a neighbouring country is going to support two weeks’ unpaid leave to allow mothers grieve a loss feels like a big win.
Many respond to this policy vacuum by asking what doctor would fail to provide a patient who has recently miscarried with a medical note to give them recovery space. Well, probably very few. However, pregnancy loss is not a sickness. Of course there are medical side effects of having lost a pregnancy, but a miscarriage is a complex life event. And such notes may not be available to partners. This general approach encourages a view of the loss as a mostly medical phenomenon that excludes the grief of anyone who hasn’t been pregnant themselves.
The recognition that statutory miscarriage leave would provide is important. Recognition confers legitimacy among those who don’t have personal experience. This is especially important for miscarriage, where generations of women were told to get on with it and offered no formal support at all. Asking women who’ve miscarried to frame their loss as a more generic case of sickness is a retrograde step.
It’s hard to disentangle this loneliness and lack of recognition from recent discussions of our ageing population and the falling fertility rate. If you want women to have more children, a first step should be to try to make it easier for them to have children, both before and after babies are born. This would require progress on a whole host of fronts – affordable housing, access to free IVF, fixing childcare and after school, shared parental leave, and supports for parents when they’re trying to get pregnant and facing losses. A cash bonus won’t do it.
My hospital experience conferred a dignity on my loss – I believe my own little would-be baby went off to Glasnevin cemetery with other patients from the ward that day. The sad camaraderie of that never fails to move me. Post-loss supports were offered in the hospital. But beyond the clinical world, it was like nothing happened. Miscarriage is usually followed by trying to conceive again, which can also be pitiless. The ordinarily mundane business of menstruation means every month can contain a new mini tragedy, viscerally revealed on a trip to the bathroom. Still not pregnant. Two months after my miscarriage at thirteen weeks, two pregnancy tests told me I was expecting. I remember gleefully whispering it across a conference dinner table to a friend when I returned from the bathroom. The short-lived belief that I was pregnant again and the disappointment to learn that the tests had just been registering chemicals from the previous pregnancy sent me into a spiral of distrust of my body that only giving birth again has cured. This taxing cycle of hope and dejection is a routine part of life for so many people, playing out quietly in homes and workplaces across the country.
Imagine, this Mother’s Day, if Ireland decided to lead on this issue. If, perhaps in a spirit of recompense for the manifold miseries visited on vulnerable women here, we decided to become the country that the rest of the world pointed to when trying to improve on the compassionate handling of pregnancies – instead of the one they look to for historical examples of institutional abuse.
Dr Clare Moriarty is a postdoctoral researcher working at Trinity Research in Social Sciences in Trinity College Dublin
