It's Time To Talk About Miscarriage

It may have happened to you, but chances are you haven’t shared your experience. So why are we still secretive about miscarriage? Charlotte Philby reports on a long overdue movement seeking to open up the conversation at last

- Charlotte Philby

I remember my first pregnancy as a series of fragmented snapshots: me, aged 25, on the floor of my bedroom, shaking with shock as I watched the second line emerge on the pregnancy test. A few weeks, later trying on maternity clothes in Topshop, smiling as I imagined my belly expanding over the following months. Later that afternoon, the feeling of liquid pouring down my leg as I walked home from the Tube station. That evening, the doctor’s mouth moving as she explained the procedure known as a ‘sweep’ – necessary to clear my womb of any debris from the foetus I had just lost – as swiftly and as unexpectedly as I had learned I was pregnant.

The experience of having a miscarriage at almost three months filled me with a deep well of sadness, a feeling that sat fundamentally at odds with the doctor’s reassurance that this was a common occurrence, and that, at this stage, the life inside me had been nothing more than a collection of cells. My sadness was unalleviated by the well-meaning close friends, who reassured me that one in four pregnancies fail to thrive and end in spontaneous miscarriage or to hear that I was still just as likely to have a healthy baby one day. I had already redrawn my future with this particular baby at the center of it. This was my baby. I had loved it, and now it was gone, and only a handful of people knew it had ever existed. I was heartbroken.