Making Room for Miscarriage

After I miscarried my first pregnancy, I quickly realized that I needed a historical perspective to make sense of this shockingly unexpected and distressing event. Before I got pregnant, I had no idea that around 20% of confirmed pregnancies miscarry, mostly in their early months, and that miscarriages are a normal part of childbearing for healthy women. Once I understood the statistics, I was appalled by how many pregnancy “experts,” from pregnancy manual authors to pregnancy website marketers to my midwife, had encouraged me to bond immediately with a pregnancy they knew might not last. How did such a misleading and damaging expectation of perfect pregnancies, in the face of statistical reality, come to be?...

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