“I couldn’t stop talking about it,” Sarah admits. “Not to everybody, but just to my mom. She was almost as upset as I was about it.”
Sarah was twenty-six when she had experienced her miscarriage, and for her, talking about it was the only way she felt she could survive. “My mom was very supportive,” she says. “It wasn’t a planned pregnancy or anything, but losing the baby was still devastating for me.”
Other women are more hesitant about sharing their story. Rachel didn’t want to talk about her miscarriage to anyone. “I didn’t tell friends and family as I didn’t want to have to rehash it,” she explains.
“I told a sister a year later and she couldn’t believe, as much as I like to talk, that I hadn’t said anything.”
“Every woman deals with a miscarriage differently,” explains Kristen N. Innes, MD, an obstetrician with her own practice in Frisco, Texas, a Dallas suburb.
“Some benefit from meeting other women with similar experiences, some grieve better personally, and others don’t grieve a miscarriage at all,” she says.
However, if a woman does want to discuss her miscarriage with others, there are resources available to her. Dr. Innes says these can be found through a hospital’s labor and delivery department, where they usually have lists of area resources for women dealing with the loss of a pregnancy.
In a paper published by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), miscarriage is defined as “the loss of a pregnancy before twenty weeks. It occurs in 10 percent to 15 percent of all known pregnancies. Most miscarriages occur in the first three months of pregnancy.” The medical term for a miscarriage is spontaneous abortion, but the condition is not an abortion in the common definition of that term. The most common symptom of a miscarriage is spotting or bleeding.
“A woman should contact her doctor if she experiences spotting or bleeding while pregnant,” says Dr. Innes. Other symptoms may include fever, cramps, abdominal pain, weakness, vomiting, and back pain. However, Dr. Innes says that some women won’t experience any symptoms. This is called a “missed abortion” and the abortion isn’t diagnosed until a sonogram is performed.
Jenna, now a mother of two, says that after reading about miscarriages when she was trying to conceive, she realized that she might have had one in college without realizing what it was. “I never went to a doctor or anything,” she says. “There was just very heavy bleeding when there shouldn’t have been, and it was strangely clotted. It didn’t seem like a big deal.”
Early miscarriage is actually very common. In fact, experts from the University of Maryland Medical Center claim that up to 50 percent of all fertilized eggs die and are lost (aborted) typically before women know they are pregnant.
Seeing your doctor for a suspected miscarriage is recommended, as some women may need further medical treatment, such as a dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure to empty the uterus of any remaining fetal or placental tissue.
Many women don’t realize just how common miscarriages are until they have experienced their own and then talk about it with friends and family, only to discover that many of them have had their own miscarriages. This was the case for Sarah, who hadn’t even known her mother had had one until she told her about her own. “It was nice because we could sort of support each other,” she says. “My mom had never talked about hers with anybody.”
While there isn’t any one specific cause for a miscarriage, there are certain medical conditions that can increase a woman’s chance of having one. Antiphospholipid antibody syndrome, having the anti-LA antibody, (causing a propensity to clot), polycystic ovarian syndrome, and diabetes can all raise your risk. “Also,” Dr. Innes states, “miscarriages may be caused by anatomical abnormalities of the uterus (bicornuate or septate uterus). Some women have low progesterone levels during the luteal phase of their menstrual cycle and require extra progesterone to support an early pregnancy.”
