Another big round of personal emails:
I have closely read each and every miscarriage post, out curiosity and compassion. I am a single 30-year-old male who is now absolutely paranoid about the possibility of not being able to have kids one day, which I very much want to (more than I want to get married, but that’s another story). One of your recent posts mentioned guilt on the mother’s part – I would imagine the mind can be awfully cruel and somehow blame oneself for a miscarriage. But it raised another question: is the viability of an embryo totally dependent on the mother’s health? Or does the father’s sperm count/quality play any role? It feels like it would be best for couples not to know who is to “blame” in these situations.
It looks like chromosomal abnormalities from either partner can cause miscarriage, as well as damaged sperm. Another reader:
I was reading this post at work today when my 7-week-pregnant wife called to tell me she started bleeding and is being sent to the emergency room. Now I am writing while we wait for an ultrasound and hoping for the best. If thing go badly, these series of post will have been helpful in dealing with the grief, knowing we are not alone. Thank you.
He follows up:
After a four-hour stay in the ER, it turned out that the bleeding was caused by a fairly common occurrence of the egg sack pulling a piece of the uterus lining away during the implantation process. It usually heals on its own and everything is fine, but sometimes it keeps pulling away and eventually detaches leaving the the fetus cut off from the uterus. We’re ok for now, but have to keep watching.
Another reader:
After 40 years of marriage and three healthy children, this still stands as the single most loving thing my husband ever did for me:
he forced the hospital to give him the fetus so he could bury it under a tree in our yard. We had brought the tiny one-inch body into the hospital with us, wrapped in toilet paper, to show what had happened suddenly at home. What followed was an emergency D&C and an overnight stay for me, and he went home with our two year old daughter. That’s that, I thought. Nothing is in my control. But when he picked me up in the morning, he related his having had second thoughts upon getting home and his subsequent big loud angry argument with staff in the hospital hallway over whether it belonged to him or to them. He had won.
From another woman who experienced miscarriage:
I was devastated. I’d already picked a name for the baby, it already had a nickname with my co-workers, and it had all seemed so right. The 24 hours I had to wait until I could have the D&C seemed like an eternity. After reading one of the stories you posted, I am grateful that I did not have to go to a strange doctor to have the procedure done. Given how common D&Cs are for reasons totally unrelated to abortion – later in life, I had several simply to treat excessive menstrual bleeding – I’m stunned by the notion that OB-GYNs are not being taught to perform this procedure as a matter of course.
As overwhelming as my grief felt those first few months after the loss, as real as that “dream baby” seemed to me, my experience only increased my fervent support of reproductive freedom. Only once I had been pregnant did I truly understand the countless changes that occur to a woman’s body even at the earliest stages of pregnancy. Only once I knew my pregnancy was doomed did I know how intolerable it could be to “wait for nature to take its course.”
Another:
Contrary to one of your readers who was reassured when she was rushed past all the pregnant ladies for her post-miscarriage D&C, I quite a different situation. After arriving at the hospital for a D&C, not only wasn’t I shuffled away from the pregnant ladies, but to wait for my procedure I was put in a double room with a young woman in active labor!
I spent the first five minutes silently cursing the hospital and feeling deeply sorry for myself, but then I started noticing that the young woman was definitely not having an easy time of it. She was quite young, certainly not out of her teens, and all alone. Clearly no one had coached or mentored her on what to expect because she was handling her contractions all wrong, and in doing so making everything a lot harder on herself than it needed to be.
I spent the next hour doing my best to teach the young mom to be what I could remember of the Lamaze method (thanks Elizabeth Bing!). Slowly, she learned to work with the contractions, to focus, and to calm herself. When the nurse came to get me, she expressed regret that I’d had to be placed there in that room. I told her, and believe to this day, that it was one of the best things that ever happened to me – not only did the experience take me right out of my own misery, but I was able to pay forward what I was taught, helping a stranger make the most she could of a tense, scary and painful situation.
One more:
First, to echo many, thanks for airing the stories of miscarriage. These are stories that for all kinds of reasons need to be heard and aired to better understand the varied realities and experiences of women and men who go through miscarriage.
My personal experience aligns with a few of your readers – a missed miscarriage followed by a D&C – though my grief was slight because I had two children already and knew the statistics that as many as 1 in 3 pregnancies actually end in miscarriage. I think the lack of information around reproduction, and the ability to know you are pregnant only three weeks after conception, have combined to cause far too much grief. Our culture fears discussing conception and reproduction because it is so intertwined with the myopic politics of abortion, but that leaves the average woman without the knowledge your PhD reader has.
Lastly, the statistics – up to 1 in 3 pregnancies end in miscarriage – and being a practicing Catholic make me wonder at the apparent wastefulness of miscarriage. The platitudes about not knowing God’s plan or God only giving you what you can handle don’t seem quite enough. Is the obsession with life beginning at conception, and the silent suffering around the common experience of miscarriage, just one more example of the Church’s (and much of our culture’s) refusal to really know and understand women and their biology? What would the Church’s teaching on life look like if it were informed by these stories, and the biological realities of one of the most complicated/least understood things the female human body does? How might that teaching then be pastoral instead of dogmatic and actually minister to women and their bodies in the world?
The Dish 