It’s been almost three years since my big brush with miscarriage.
The road away from miscarriage is hazy. One feels the shadow it casts for a long time. Subsequent pregnancies are experienced as possible or probable miscarriages until, eventually, as if by magic, they aren’t.
Equally, we are all knocking up against the miscarriages of others every day, often without knowing it.
I miscarried in 2022, a few months before my eldest turned two. She was a true Corona baby. The first day of my last period (the milestone from which a pregnancy’s gestation is measured) was January 1st, 2020, the dawn of the first year of Covid-19’s international impact.
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She was born the night the second lockdown went into effect. My experience of care during that pregnancy was – despite everyone’s best efforts in a challenging time – disjointed and isolating. I attended every hospital appointment alone – my husband one of many partners wandering nervously around Merrion Square and other public spaces adjoining Ireland’s maternity units.
That being my first pregnancy, I felt lucky I didn’t know any better.
My best friend Susie’s pregnancy with her third overlapped with that first one of mine, and she found her solo march through antenatal care much weirder.
So I knew no other way, and the loneliness of that clinical experience never really occurred to me at the time. However, it normalised a sense of pregnancy as a purely individual business in a way that I look back on very differently now.
[ Even the word ‘miscarriage’ seems to suggest the mother is somehow at faultOpens in new window ]
When, at just more than 13 weeks, I went into the hospital for my booking appointment and learned I’d lost the pregnancy, I scrambled to get a D&C (dilation and curettage) appointment immediately. I wanted to be through it as quickly as I could. When the day came for surgery, I had so internalised the normality of medical isolation in my Covid pregnancy that I didn’t even think to ask could I bring my husband to the hospital with me.
I just assumed I couldn’t.
I’d been induced alone with my daughter at 42 weeks in my first pregnancy, waiting for the checks on my dilation to pass a threshold that would allow my husband to come and help me birth our child. Two years later I sat in a similar hospital bed knitting and bleeding alone before the surgery, because I had so internalised the idea that this was just a me thing that I never even thought to ask if he could come and hold my hand.
My second big lesson was to trust my knowledge of my body. As a philosopher working primarily on the history of science, I think I have a pretty healthy mixture of, on the one hand, appropriate deference to medical expertise and, on the other, the kind of scepticism over clinical certainty that is a necessary byproduct of having studied the way scientific knowledge evolves over time.
I’ve had a very regular 29-day cycle for most of my adult life. When early scans showed that the blastocyst was not the right size for its gestation, I let myself be talked around to the idea that I was wrong about my dates and cycle length and that everything was probably okay. Of course, people will try to allow a person to keep a hope alive where it’s wanted (and it’s difficult for health practitioners to ever know your medical values), but I feel I could have spared myself some subsequent grief if I had trusted myself.
Afterwards my mother said she had always been worried about that pregnancy because of the revisions of the dates and how unlikely it was that I would have been wrong about them. Again this never even occurred to me. Optimism is a heady drug, but I should have allowed myself to respond in the sensible way there and said: “I am not wrong about these details, so if our theory of what’s going on in my uterus depends on my being wrong about them, we should change our theory.”
Finally, infrastructure. There is compassion in good design. The row of seats that face the registration desk in the hospital I attended for miscarriage surgery contained me and two heavily pregnant women checking in to give birth. Having had this experience, I feel I can say with confidence that there’s a good reason you wouldn’t have a wedding planner and an undertaker share a reception.
Similarly, because of construction works at the hospital and some necessary repurposing of rooms, I could hear newborn cries from the recovery bed where I ate my first bites of post-surgery toast. Again, an emotional hardship most could do without.
[ Even the word ‘miscarriage’ seems to suggest the mother is somehow at faultOpens in new window ]
The urgency of better, newer hospitals is not just about better facilities and technology, it should be about taking us out of buildings that are not fit for purpose – and that’s leaving aside the legacy of the carceral ghosts that inhabit many of these institutions, the sites of so much injustice against women on this island in recent history.
Thanks to the work of a few brave politicians and many activists and researchers, there seems to finally be a bit of momentum around the need to legislate for paid miscarriage and fertility leave. However, we also need buildings and systems that provide a space in which to endure these experiences with as much dignity and comfort as possible.
Similarly, we must reflect back on some of the impacts of healthcare under Covid and ensure we do a better job of balancing safety and supports for the vulnerable in future public health planning.
