TV Scope: Waiting for a Heartbeat, Horizon, BBC2, Thursday, 9pm.
Miscarriage is an all-too-common event. Up to half of fertilised eggs fail to survive until birth. Perhaps for this reason the loss suffered by women and their partners to miscarriage is something that is not often talked about.
Yet miscarriage can be a shocking emotional event for both partners. Depending on the individual's particular psychology, even a relatively early miscarriage can be particularly distressing.
The man may not want to increase his partner's distress by talking about it and this may leave her with the impression that he does not particularly care. It may be that nothing could be further from the truth. This is not true of all men, of course. However, it is true often enough and it may be more closely linked to how men deal with their own pain than to a callousness on their part.
The BBC Horizon programme on miscarriage looked at the work of a team at St Mary's Hospital in London which treats women who have suffered recurrent miscarriages. If one miscarriage can be a deeply painful event, those were not been through it can only speculate on the degree of pain felt by couples who see miscarriage after miscarriage take away the hope of having a baby.
The Recurrent Miscarriage Clinic sees up to a thousand new patients a year who have had this awful experience. In some cases, the clinic has found that blood clotting disorders restrict the flow of oxygen and nutrients between mother and babies and that this leads to miscarriage.
In other cases, the woman's immune system may attack the cells of the embryo and placenta for reasons that are not clear. Or the mother may have a condition which thickens the blood causing clots to form in the placenta.
The more surprising finding at the clinic though, is that an underlying cause for the miscarriage has been found in fewer than half of cases. This does not always come as good news to couples who have suffered a number of miscarriages and who had hoped to identify a clear cause for this by going to the clinic.
Expecting to get specialist help, they are simply told to try again.
Rachel, featured in the programme, has had six miscarriages, two of them after she began attending the clinic. The clinic cannot identify why she is having miscarriages but it tries various treatments in the hope of enabling her to have the baby she desperately wants. Finally, a baby survives all the way to full term. The camera follows the couple into the hospital and waits outside the delivery room door while she is giving birth. A healthy girl is delivered. For Rachel, the miracle happened. For many it does not. And perhaps those people need more understanding and support that we tend to give them.
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor.