The #ihadamiscarriage hashtag is looking to end the silence around losing a baby
As if losing a baby isn’t devastating enough, too many women feel they can’t mention what’s happened to them.
Whether you’re an average woman or a high-profile celebrity, the stigma is the same.
Despite the fact that they’re very common; among women who know they’re pregnant, one in six pregnancies will end in miscarriage.
Yet many of us aren’t aware of this, as no one talks about it.
Which is what one social media hashtag, #ihadamiscarriage, is hoping to change.
Jessica Zucker, a psychologist specialising in women’s reproductive and maternal mental health based in Los Angeles, US, thought up #ihadamiscarriage after miscarrying at 16 weeks pregnant with her second child.
After her loss, she began to tell her story through a series of essays which she added the hashtag to.
In 2015, she then went on to create a new Instagram account IHadAMiscarriage, which invites women to tell their own stories of lost pregnancies.
And each touching story reveals just how different each woman’s experience of is.
While Zucker’s first pregnancy went smoothly, her second pregnancy ended in a traumatic miscarriage in her second trimester.
After 16 weeks, she started spotting, and went into labour.
She delivered at home alone, and began hemorrhaging, when her husband returned home and rushed her to hospital to remove the placenta and remnants of the pregnancy.
“Two hours later I went back to my house and was no longer pregnant,” Zucker told Self.
“That was pretty much the most profound thing that ever happened in my life. The most traumatic.”
Medical tests soon revealed the fetus had chromosomal abnormalities which, if Zucker had known about, she may have chosen to terminate.
While she has since tried again and given birth to a rainbow baby, Zucker has seen the experience as an opportunity to help women who feel ashamed about their own miscarriages.
A post shared by Jessica Zucker, Ph.D. (@ihadamiscarriage) on Jun 27, 2017 at 10:43am PDT
“My personal experience was a way to model for other women around the world that there is absolutely no shame in loss,” she said.
And she hopes that the Instagram account and hashtag will help women to understand there is absolutely no shame in miscarrying, nor talking about it.
“By putting it out there in the world and sharing it with women globally, people then feel this sense of recognition and a robust community,” she said.
“I don’t have to know you, because it’s social media, but I know those feelings so well.
“In so many of comments or messages people say, ‘I could have written this myself.’
“Part of the point is to really show that we’re more similar than we think.”
Check out the account here.
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