Why Women Are Talking About Miscarriages

Meghan Markle might have opened the floodgates but many Indian women are also doing their bit to break the silence and stigma around pregnancy loss

- Sonam Joshi

Jyoti Sagar Singh’s first was a normal delivery so five years later when she had a miscarriage, she couldn’t shake off the grief or the feeling that she might have done something wrong. “Most people didn’t console me or check how I was doing but instead asked when I was trying again,” says Singh, a social media influencer who made a video about her experience which has got 7.4 lakh views. Singh says that the video was a way of telling women that “there is nothing to be ashamed of.”

Emboldened perhaps by the string of global celebrities such as model Chrissy Teigen, former US First Lady Michelle Obama and, most recently Meghan Markle, many women are breaking the silence and stigma around miscarriages.

What makes it worse is the superstition that you should not talk about your pregnancy till the first trimester is over. This means that women can’t even discuss their loss.

Mumbai-based author Meghna Pant, who miscarried in 2018, was told she shouldn’t have spoken about her pregnancy so early. “But I don’t abide by it. You want to share the joy with loved ones, why should that be stripped from you because of fear?” When she conceived again, Pant tweeted about her pregnancy as soon as she found out.