Feminist reflections on miscarriage, in light of abortion

This paper highlights some of the personal, cultural, and philosophical challenges facing pro-choice feminists who miscarry in the United States. In light of the acrimonious debate over abortion, and the pressure to assign moral personhood to the beings lost in miscarriage, I offer suggestions for how we might mourn our losses without solidifying pro-life/anti-abortion politics. I outline a relational model of pregnancy and pregnancy loss that recognizes physical interrelation and dependency of an embryo/fetus on a woman, yet attaches as little or as much emotionality to that connection as each individual woman deems fit. I 2006, and again in 2007, I suffered the miscarriages of two wanted and painstakingly planned pregnancies. In the aftermath of each, I found myself unprepared, as do many women who miscarry, for the devastation I would feel. In my attempts to cope, I sought solace in the written testimony of other women who had miscarried, in the medical statistics that reassured me I still had a 2 International Journal of feMiniST aPProaCheS To Bioethics 3:1 strong chance of carrying another pregnancy to term, in the experiences of friends and colleagues who had dealt with miscarriage and other reproductive difficulties, and in the expertise of counselors who helped me process my thoughts and feelings. While each of these avenues was helpful in its own right, I still found myself struggling with a persistent confusion. I was having trouble conceptualizing and naming exactly what I had lost, and was having trouble squaring my losses with my pro-choice politics. This paper explores some of those difficulties, and situates them within debates over abortion and personhood in the United States. I claim that failure to recognize the prevalence of miscarriage, and particularly the sorrow that often accompanies it, runs counter to feminist pro-choice politics. I then suggest that a relational model of pregnancy can help reconcile feelings of sorrow after a miscarriage (a.k.a. spontaneous abortion) with a commitment to keeping elective abortion legal. Pregnant pro-choice feminists, coping with the termination of a desired pregnancy, often find it difficult to conceptualize and mourn our losses. Most of the self-help literature on miscarriage encourages us to call the embryos/fetuses our “babies” and to conceptualize our miscarriages in terms of their death. For those, like me, who have staunchly defended the use of precise prenatal terms—embryo until eight weeks, fetus thereafter until birth—the recommendation to name the lost being as a baby can be simultaneously disquieting and compelling. I, for instance, had always maintained a firm distinction between prenatal fetuses and postnatal infants, to help defend my belief that abortion of prenatal beings is a decision best left to the women who sustain and carry them;1 yet, after my miscarriages, my confidence in the terms embryo and fetus began to slip away. Somehow these terms were starting to feel too cold, too detached, to name and reference beings about which I had been so excited and hopeful. I began to find the notion that I had lost “babies” oddly comforting, in spite of worries that I was being unwittingly swayed by the “other side” to which my pro-choice politics had been so long positioned. Even some of the most helpful literature contains implicit critiques of the embryo/fetus vs. baby distinction. Marie Allen and Shelly Marks’s book, Miscarriage: Women Sharing Stories from the Heart, for instance, suggests that the experiences of women who miscarry are invalidated when referenced as “fetal” or “embryonic” losses. These terms, they claim, convey the message that these are “not really babies yet” and, for the woman who miscarries, invalidate “the reality of her baby and the legitimacy of her loss” (Allen and Marks 1993, 12). In their list of recommendations on how best to care for a woman who has