Commentary: My Miscarriage Taught Me What’s Missing From the Abortion Debate

On a sunny Denver morning, I lay on the couch wondering what was happening in my body. I was seven weeks pregnant and had started bleeding. The on-call OB reassured me that it could be nothing to worry about; it could be related to implantation or a minor hemorrhage. Neither of us wanted to say it, but it could also be the beginning of a miscarriage.

I pushed that thought to the back of my mind. I already had one healthy pregnancy and no previous miscarriages. My sweet two-year-old — laying next to me and declaring that his belly also hurt — was a welcome reminder of that. But when the cramping intensified, I Googled the stats…up to one-fifth of pregnancies end in miscarriage.

As friends began arriving for my birthday party, I resigned myself to what was happening. I recognized the feeling of my body shedding its uterine lining, as it does every month. I wondered if I would sense the moment I lost the embryo I had gotten attached to, that my husband and I had already nicknamed.

Each time I went to the bathroom, it became clearer I was having a miscarriage. First there was blood, then pieces of tissue. And finally, there it was. For weeks, I had been following along as my pregnancy app told me the size of the embryo — a sesame seed, a peppercorn, a blueberry. This week it was supposedly the size of a raspberry, though what I was looking at was bigger, more like a grape. I couldn’t stop staring at this clump of cells. These cells that could have turned into a baby. My baby.

I took a few more moments, then walked outside. I hugged my husband and told him it was over. I considered announcing what had happened as my friends sipped beers and ate burgers. But my son hadn’t known I was pregnant. Plus, it would surely ruin the party.

For the next few days, I mourned. I took a day off work; I got a massage; I laid in bed. I considered the irony that on Labor Day, the day my mother had given birth to me 37 years earlier, I went into a form of labor of my own, but one that wouldn’t result in a baby.

I visited the OB and was told I was healthy and could try again. That this was normal — likely a chromosomal abnormality, as with so many early miscarriages. I considered how incredible it is that more pregnancies don’t end this way. How unlikely that with all that needs to happen to make a healthy baby, the vast majority of pregnancies succeed. I felt a rush of gratitude toward my body for recognizing early that something was wrong. For making this decision for me, rather than allowing me to carry a fetus that I wouldn’t know was unhealthy until it showed up on a test — at which point it would be my brain’s responsibility to make the decision about whether to bring an ill baby to term or end the pregnancy. (Well, my brain...along with the men making policy decisions about pregnant bodies.)

I came to better understand the inevitable question around both miscarriage and abortion: What, exactly, is being lost? I am a staunch abortion-rights advocate. But according to much of the pro-choice movement, there was nothing to mourn here. This new identity of mine — woman grieving lost pregnancy — put me at odds with a movement I had identified with for my entire life. That seemed irrational.

I lost a pregnancy that I wanted. My loss is real. At the same time, a different person in a different situation may choose to abort a fetus of the same gestational age. And they should absolutely have that choice. Every single time.

If I am to make meaning from this experience, it is this: There is nuance to pregnancy loss that is impossible to hear through all the yelling. I still believe abortion is a fundamental right, and I also believe that the clump of cells I lost are worth grieving. My feelings of loss do not negate another person’s right to make an appropriate choice for their body and their family.

Meredith Slater is director of development at ActionAid USA, a social justice organization that supports women, girls and other marginalized communities around the world to claim their full range of sexual and reproductive rights. ActionAid tackles symptoms of unequal power and challenges the ideologies, legal systems and social norms that lie underneath.

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