Miscarriage: When It Happens To You

“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.