The politics of telling.

When does a pregnancy truly begin? I think at conception, but the outside world doesn’t necessarily view it that way. I’ve got the pro-lifers with me on this one, but even they subscribe to this notion that a pregnancy should be kept secret until the first trimester is over.

The rationale for this period of secrecy is that it is not “safe” to share the news until you are out of the statistical danger zone of miscarriage (although the length of this zone is debatable). Who and what is being kept safe? Is it the safety of your privacy in the event of a miscarriage? Is it the safety of your emotions so that you don’t have to spread the news of a miscarriage? Is it the bereaved truncated parents who are kept safe? Or is it everyone else? Is this secret kept to spare people awkward moments when they don’t know what to say? To spare people from confronting that life is fragile?

We told many people in the first couple of weeks that we were pregnant, and I have, since my miscarriage began, debated whether or not this was a good idea. On one hand, we have good friends and family rallying to support us, knowing what this meant to us and how sad it is for us to lose our- and here we go- what do I call it? Our baby? Our potential child? Our fetus? Our hope?

On the other hand, there has been the discomfort of dealing with people not that close to us who want to comfort us, and a sense of responsibility towards their emotions and experience with this. My miscarriage has felt very private, in that I have wanted mostly to be alone or with Cameron, but my experience has felt at times very public as I continued working through all of this, and only withdrew socially for a very brief time, and everyone knows. and now here I am writing publically.

Before I lost the baby, I struggled with this feeling that I couldn’t quite join the pregnancy club yet- I wasn’t far enough along- my pregnancy wasn’t quite “real” enough yet. There was this thin grey haired woman at the yoga studio who asked me if I was the teacher of the prenatal class I was emerging from. When I replied no, she eyed me suspiciously and said ”But you are not showing at all!”
“It’s early in my pregnancy,” I said, growing nervous.
“How early?” She threw the word early out as an accusation.
“Six weeks” I muttered.
“What, are you trying to get a head start or something?”
Luckily, a woman in the class with a belly big and ready to burst put her hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eye and said, “You are pregnant, you belong here.”

And now I’m not. When I think of that grey haired woman I often think “Shame on you.” And I wonder what provoked her to talk to me like that? Did she once lose a pregnancy? Was she encouraged to treat it as no big deal? Is there unacknowledged pain inside her that seeps out in scathing words?

If we pretend early pregnancies aren’t real, don’t count, then do miscarriages and abortions carry no weight? No pain? No consequence? Or does this all stem from the idea that our pain should be kept to ourselves. Dirty little female secrets. And I must say here that I am adamantly pro-choice, but I don’t know anyone who chose to terminate a pregnancy that didn’t experience some level of grief around that choice.

In the end I suppose I am grateful that I did not and am not going through this alone behind the bathroom door. I think it is important to share this pain. There are a lot of us who have lost a pregnancy (or pregnancies). The statistics hover between 20 and 25%. Roughly one in five pregnancies ends in a miscarriage- most occur during the first trimester. I do not think the frequency of miscarriages makes them less painful. I do not thinking hiding our losses makes them go away.