It's Time To Talk About Miscarriage
Marie Claire - UK|May 2019

It may have happened to you, but chances are you haven’t shared your experience. So why are we still secretive about miscarriage? Charlotte Philby reports on a long overdue movement seeking to open up the conversation at last

Charlotte Philby
It's Time To Talk About Miscarriage

I remember my first pregnancy as a series of fragmented snapshots: me, aged 25, on the floor of my bedroom, shaking with shock as I watched the second line emerge on the pregnancy test. A few weeks, later trying on maternity clothes in Topshop, smiling as I imagined my belly expanding over the following months. Later that afternoon, the feeling of liquid pouring down my leg as I walked home from the Tube station. That evening, the doctor’s mouth moving as she explained the procedure known as a ‘sweep’ – necessary to clear my womb of any debris from the foetus I had just lost – as swiftly and as unexpectedly as I had learned I was pregnant.

The experience of having a miscarriage at almost three months filled me with a deep well of sadness, a feeling that sat fundamentally at odds with the doctor’s reassurance that this was a common occurrence, and that, at this stage, the life inside me had been nothing more than a collection of cells. My sadness was unalleviated by the well-meaning close friends, who reassured me that one in four pregnancies fail to thrive and end in spontaneous miscarriage or to hear that I was still just as likely to have a healthy baby one day. I had already redrawn my future with this particular baby at the center of it. This was my baby. I had loved it, and now it was gone, and only a handful of people knew it had ever existed. I was heartbroken.

This story is from the May 2019 edition of Marie Claire - UK.

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This story is from the May 2019 edition of Marie Claire - UK.

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