Why Don't We Talk More Openly About Miscarriages?

When a fellow mom in my daughter’s kindergarten class told me recently that she’d just suffered a miscarriage, I gave her a hug. I didn’t know what else to do, and I was shocked she'd even mentioned it, since most people don't. She shrugged it off, though, as if she’d merely been sick, and smiled to reassure me. “I actually feel fine,” she said. “Really!”

Though I’ve never lost a pregnancy myself, I know enough people who have to realize that it’s a bigger deal than having the flu. But I also understand this: Talking about miscarriage is pretty much the last taboo. It’s why (most) people are finally writing about Lindsay Lohan this week with a whiff of something besides mockery. “No one knows this, and we can finish [the interview] after this: I had a miscarriage for those two weeks that I took off," Lohan said, tearing up as she spoke on the season finale of her OWN reality show on Sunday. And nothing in our society makes people quite as speechless and uncomfortable as a woman losing her pregnancy.

“The statistics of a miscarriage happening in every one out of four pregnancies is well-known, so people can see a miscarriage as something that ‘just happens,’ but there are rarely ever discussions about what happens after — the grief,” Devan McGuinness, the founder of the support website Unspoken Grief, tells Yahoo Shine. “It's easier for people to understand that bond of a child lost through stillbirth, because you can feel the baby move before, know the gender, and give birth — same with an older child. But miscarriages can be so medical and not supported as a whole.”

Media outlets have called Lohan’s disclosure “shocking,” a “bombshell announcement” and “breaking news” — which might seem a bit overblown if the silence around the topic weren’t actually so deafening.

Even searching around for emotional guidance online, where one can find support for anything from anxiety to erectile dysfunction, doesn’t yield much. There’s McGuinness’s site, filled with personal stories; MiscarriageHelp.com, on which “I Never Held You: Miscarriage, Grief, Healing and Recovery” author Ellen DuBois offers individual responses to women in the throes of mourning their pregnancies; and the scant referrals from the American Pregnancy Association, which sends folks to Mend.org, a Christian non-profit support organization, and, oddly, to APlaceToRemember.com, which basically sells saccharine CDs and books about overcoming miscarriage.

Virtual bookshelves are similarly sparse; an Amazon search for books on the topic of miscarriage yields results that are either dated, religious, or medical in nature, with just a handful — including the self-published title from DuBois and the recently revised “Empty Arms: Coping After Miscarriage, Stillbirth, and Infant Death,” by Sherokee Ilse, getting to the heart of the matter.

Ruth Bender Atik, national director of the U.K.’s Miscarriage Association (of which there is apparently no U.S. counterpart), aptly told the Guardian, "It hits the headlines when a celebrity has a miscarriage or when there is some new piece of research, otherwise it is not a headline grabber." Other celebs who have talked about losing pregnancies in recent years have included Beyonce, Lisa Ling, and Pink. "People aren't comfortable with it, whether it is the loss, the sadness, the vulnerability, the disappointment, the self-blame. … Many women who suffer a miscarriage have not told many people [they are pregnant] anyway, so after the miscarriage, when they are feeling desperate, they are having to 'tell' and 'untell' in a way," Bender Atik continued. "It's a tough one.”

Friends have told me in roundabout ways about their own miscarriages — either once the loss had long passed or in a quick, offhanded way that made it clear the topic was closed to discussion. And when I posted on Facebook asking for people to contact me for this piece with their personal experiences — a method that usually yields a steady stream of responses, no matter what the subject — I heard from just a single friend, who told me not about herself, but about her mother. “She had one before she met and married our dad. She would refer to it as her ‘breakdown,’ and she had to move back home and quit college. But her sister told us it was really a miscarriage,” she wrote. “I've never told our Mom that I knew.”

Perhaps some of the silence is because the woman who suffered the miscarriage might sense she won’t get the response she needs. “It's also difficult on the people being told, because often they don't know what to say either,” Bender Atik added.  “They don't know whether to refer to it as a 'baby' or a 'pregnancy.’” That one, of course, is a matter of opinion. So for now, I will just stick to the hug.