Miscarriage is a devastating bereavement – women like me deserve closure
It is impossible to imagine what it’s really like to have a miscarriage until it happens to you.
No matter how much research or anecdotal evidence you gather, something unexpected hits you before, during and, above all, after. Today, a report published by the Universities of Birmingham and Bristol, Death Before Birth, shows that nowhere near enough is being done to support and inform women after their pregnancy ends prematurely – as one in five in the UK does.
A little over 11 years ago, I became part of that statistic. I was then 36 years old, and happy about my first pregnancy. I went for my first scan. At the time I lived in Scotland and, at 12 weeks, nurses at the Stirling Royal Infirmary informed me that the foetus had no heartbeat. They could see my baby in the womb, but the baby was dead. It came as a total shock.
Next they told me they were fully booked for the surgery required to remove my unborn child, leaving me to wait, and miscarry the baby naturally.
It took three days to happen. I walked around with my dead foetus inside me. I wandered around, keeping busy, but I couldn’t think of anything else.
It started with a great gush of blood as I drank tea with friends. Before we’d left the hospital, my partner and I had been advised to collect the remains and take them back to check that the miscarriage was properly complete, removing the risk of infection. That’s what we did – scrabbling around to collect clots and bits of foetus, placing them in a washed-out ice-cream box.
The next day, we took the box into the hospital. A nurse asked if she could take it away for examination. She was sympathetic as she asked permission to examine the contents of the tub, but then I asked what she intended to do with it afterwards.
“Oh,” the nurse said, taking the remains from me, “we’ll dispose of it with the other clinical waste.”
In an alternative world, my partner and I would have liked to bury our baby in a quiet, dignified spot, somewhere I could visit on my own to think about what might have been.
The instant she took the tub, I experienced a visceral trauma. I burst into tears. I watched the nurse walk away with my box carrying a child I would never meet. That was that; we were never offered back the remains to give our baby a more dignified end.
Miscarriage is bereavement. It is not a medical nuisance; the lost foetus is not ‘waste’. When they took the body away, I wasn’t then blessed with the foresight that it would support me better if I could keep the remains and dispose of them myself, with due ceremony. Normally the evidence of a death helps you come to terms with that has happened. Burial achieves closure. As it was, I had no evidence I was ever pregnant. No scans, no pictures, and no resting place.
Subsequently, I found out they had been in error, not offering me the box back. Perhaps the staff were under-trained, or misinformed, or overworked. Either way, it is not the level of care that women in my situation deserve.
In an alternative world, my partner and I would have liked to bury our baby in a quiet, dignified spot, perhaps planting a flower there. It would be somewhere secret and meaningful that I could visit on my own every once in a while, to think about what might have been.
Having that place would have been especially helpful in the months immediately afterwards, when you struggle to process the loss. Friends can be well-meaning but thoughtless, saying “Oh well, at least you can have fun trying again!” as though miscarriage were a pub quiz. I felt a failure, as though my body had foundered in its essential task.
The following year, I was lucky enough to carry a child to full term. With every day of that second pregnancy, I didn’t believe it would happen. Right until the end of the labour I found it hard to believe that I would give birth to a live child. My son is now nine, and one day I’ll tell him what happened. At one point when he was younger, he would complain that I didn’t have another baby as though he was casting around for the baby that never was. You wonder, sometimes, whether the survivors sense the presence of their unlucky siblings.
Having a miscarriage is a very secret thing. In the UK, 2,000 or so a year happen behind closed doors. As a result, not nearly enough is spoken about it, or the requirements of people who experience it. A major part of that care is deciding how to dispose of remains, and parents must be made aware of the options available to them. The report is welcome and long overdue. It can’t help me. But I hope it will help many other women. For their sake I ask medical professionals to deliver good training and consistent, sensitive practice. Miscarriage is a bereavement and it should be treated as such.
