Well first of all, you didn’t choose to have a miscarriage so I don’t think any justification is really necessary here.

Secondly, I’m sorry to hear that.

Many hospitals and other groups have support groups for parents who have had miscarriages. I’m sure there are also non-religion based groups online. Being Pro-Choice does not conflict with grieving over a miscarriage.

Oh sweetie. I wish I could hug you. I hate the phrase “pro life.”
This was your child. Of course you’re pro this child’s life.
Your loss is valid.
I think, instead of looking up stuff about miscarriage, you should look for things about loosing a child.
Love and warm thoughts!

I’m sorry that you’ve been through such a tough time. I don’t think you have any reason to worry about mixed messages or making sense. Being pro-choice and grieving a lost child are not mutually exclusive, in fact they are entirely different issues.

@fluthernutter, just as @Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard said, a miscarriage is never by choice. You need to allow yourself to experience your feelings – it is a bereavement. Based on what you have explained in your statement area, I would encourage you to do those things you feel comfortable doing that bring you comfort and to talk it out, cry it out, get out in nature, do what you can to solace yourself and ask the universe itself to help you come to terms. Your answers are in you and will come at the right time. Be good to yourself.

I’m sorry about your loss. And loss it is. A huge loss.

There is a huge difference between losing a baby that is wanted and getting rid of one that is not wanted. Huge.

People who have not gone through a miscarriage probably have a harder time understanding this, and you may have an even harder time understanding what I went through, but we’ll see. When we want to have children, we begin to create them in our minds long before they come into the world. Sometimes long before conception as well.

In our minds, those children are real. We imagine giving birth. We imagine creating a nursery for them. The books we buy. The clothes. The bottles. We imagine changing diapers and breastfeeding and reading and bouncing them on our laps and looking in their eyes and cooing and seeing them smile. Even hard-hearted jerks like me, who don’t like kids until they are like 7 years old, imagine these things.

Slowly, through seeing these things, they become real—at least in our hearts and minds. We actually live with them before they exist, and, in my case, before they have ever been conceived. [Crying break] My wife and I wanted kids for years and we couldn’t have them. The day I found out I was infertile…. well, I felt like an alien. I couldn’t do the one major thing that just about every other human being could do.

I sat on the side of my bed for hours, staring at the wall, wondering how I fit in. I had no idea. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know why I was reacting that way. But all my life I had believed I would be a father, and now I believed I would never be a father. All my life, I had believed in my children. Children of my mind. And now….

Now…. they were all dead. Gone. Never existed. Dead.

They were as real to me as any live baby. And so, I needed to grieve.

It’s crazy grieving over something that never existed, right? Well, we do it anyway. Yet people tell us we’re grieving over nothing and they just don’t get it. They can’t imagine.

You were closer. You could feel that life in your stomach. Maybe you could even feel it kick, although maybe the miscarriage happened before that. We subsequently went on to do various artificial procedures and at one point, my wife had three heart beats on the ultrasound. A week later, there were two. A week after that—one. Scary. We got our daughter from that group, and having one child instead of twins or triplets seems to make the others losses that aren’t so bad. You are desperate for any child so thinking you should have had three seems ungrateful. We were grateful for one.

Your child was real, and you had, whether you are aware of it or not, a whole story going on. You lost that story and most of us, when we lose something that important, need to grieve. It wasn’t the cells that you grieve, it was the child of your mind, which is an awful lot like a child that is physical, because while there is a physical child, the child you relate to is the child who you envision in your mind. We all do that. We relate to our perception of the other person, not to that mass of cells. We relate to our idea of their personality.

You don’t need to explain any of this to anyone except to people who can understand. If the people in your grieving group are all religious… well, I can see how that would be a problem. I tend to translate the language of religious people into something that makes sense to me, but of course I am most comfortable with people who share my view. Maybe there are other grieving groups who are religious. Maybe an online group. Maybe you have to teach your friends to understand it the way I do. Or the way you do.

I am so sorry for your loss. More so now that when I started this comment since thinking about it brought back a lot of old feelings. It sucks. It will not really begin to go away until a lot of time has passed or until you have a new conception growing that can rekindle your hopes and dreams. I hope that happens soon for you and that it goes easily. If you have trouble, I urge you to join a fertility group. For two reasons: one, it is comforting to talk about this shit and two, because people in fertility groups have a much higher chance of having children. I think they stick to it longer. Support makes a difference. We were the second to last two to have kids and in the end, they were biological children. The miracle of modern science. I think this experience will make you more grateful for your child than you might otherwise be. It is easier to appreciate them, and I think that makes you a more understanding and empathetic parent. When you have trouble, you know how fragile life can be. It’s not something to take for granted. You understand where your love comes from and of course, like every parent, it is probably the most powerful thing you ever felt.

I am so sorry that you experienced this loss. You might find this web site helpful.

@wundayatta Thank you for sharing that. I haven’t cried that hard in weeks.
Even though our experiences are very different, they’re also very much the same. I felt as if my body had failed me. Betrayed me. I wanted to tear off my own skin and scream and beat it. Instead, I was trapped inside this terrible broken thing. I didn’t belong in my own skin.

@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard It’s not justification, but the whole set of beliefs that come with being Pro-Choice. If it’s okay to have an abortion, why am I so sad about a miscarriage? If they’re developmentally the same, aren’t they the same loss?

@janbb I know a support group might help. But I’m not sure how comfortable I feel being that naked in front of other people. Just this question already had me bawling. I’m not sure I’m ready to do that in front of people (where I can’t log off and cry in private).

@Judi Thanks, Judi. I do feel it as a loss of a child. But I was reading a book on miscarriage that equated a miscarriage as being the same as the loss of a grown child. And reasonable or not, it felt as if I were belittling the death of that child. I felt guilt over grieving over my miscarriage as a loss of a child. But wundayatta really put what I was feeling into words and I feel a sense of peace about it.

@syz Thank you. I’m also trying to sort out mixed messages to myself.

@smilingheart1 I’m trying to. Thank you.

@marinelife Thanks, Marina. I’ll definitely check it out.

People still grieve over abortions… either way, you’re dealing with thoughts of what could have been. Please do be kind to yourself.

I know how difficult and sad it can be to miscarry, sorry you are going through such a hard time. I will tell you my perspective on the topic, I don’t know if it will help, and in no way am I trying to discount any thoughts or feelings you have regarding your loss.

Miscarriage more than anything for me is the loss of the new picture your life was going to have. Imagining what the pregnancy was going to be like. All the planning you had already started. The excitement. The new addition of the baby and everything you were starting to envision that would be your new life, with this new little person, a new dynamic, a new chapter. The grief associated with that loss is a real thing, even if a person believes an embryo or young fetus is not a viable life yet. The hopes and dreams are real.

What I think you should know is 1 in 5 known pregnancies miscarry. That does not mean it should be no big deal, that your miscarriage is just one of the many. But, knowing the realities might take the sting away a little that miscarriage is very common, seemingly a natural part of attempting to have children, in that within nature it occurs frequently. Especially among mammals that primarily have singleton babies, including human beings.

Let yourself go through the stages, sadness, anger, acceptance, like any other loss.

I’m sorry for your loss. You are grieving. Things aren’t easy when you grieve. Contradictory feelings are completely normal and very common after a miscarriage. Trust that you have made the right decision and that what is meant to be will be. It takes different times for people to ‘move on’, so to speak, if at all. I am a mother of 2, I’ve had 2 miscarriages…one last month, actually. I felt worse with my first miscarriage because I was about 2 months along and not as badly with the latest because I was only a couple of weeks along. I know that’s kind of an arbitrary thing but that’s how it felt for me. My partner and I have a name for the baby we lost between our children and I like to pretend that the baby I lost ‘came back’ through my second son, at a better time in my life. As for how to talk about it, you don’t need to talk about it. People should be there for you, regardless.

After reading some of the earlier responses, I had to take a break from this question because it was making me much more emotional that I had anticipated. Crying is good. I just needed my own space to do it.

Coming back to this, it’s just come rushing back again. I’m so so sorry you went through that, @Simone_de_Beauvoir. Sometimes I feel like I’m crushing under all of this. I can’t even begin to imagine all of this twofold.

To anyone who’s still reading this, again, thank you.

Sending a hug.

Take care!

I had a miscarriage in between my first and second full-term deliveries. It was at about 3 months, and I was pretty upset. I too am strongly pro-choice, and I have never thought pro-choice meant pro-abortion. It means pro-choice.

What I lost was not a baby yet, but if things had proceeded normally, it would have been. What I lost was the prospect of a baby, with all the hope and joy I had invested in it. I did not choose to lose that prospect, and I grieved for it. For some years afterward I silently observed its would-have-been birthday in my mind, and I still think of it now and then, wondering if that would have been the daughter we never had.

Time does help. Time seems to help just about everything. You never forget, but the sharp edge of sorrow does wear away.

A scary moment occurred as we were anticipating our second son. Because of my age, I had amniocentesis. I bit my fingernails until the test came back normal. My husband said, “I guess we know what we would have done if it hadn’t. I don’t think I’d have been up for heroics, and I don’t think you would have either, at our age. I mean, why have the test if you’re not going to act on the results?” I was shocked and said, “I believe in a woman’s right to have an abortion, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I could have one.” We kind of looked at each other and neither of us dared to say another word. It’s a good thing we never had to face such a decision.

@Jeruba I’m truly sorry you had to go through that. I’m also relieved that you didn’t have to go through other things. [hugs for a younger Jeruba]

I know that my grief is mostly for the prospect of this baby. But holding what remained in my hands, I felt a real loss of life. Not just the loss of possibility.

I feel haunted. A death occurred within my own body. Not just the passing of some non-viable cells. That’s where I feel conflicted.

I’m more okay with feeling conflicted now. I’ve come to accept that emotions and grief can be messy and flow over our neat little boxes of sensical thought.

Nearly five months later, I’m just feeling a bit lonely in my lingering grief. It feels like the socially-accepted timeframe to speak of such things has passed. Unless you’ve been through it yourself, people seem puzzled that it still troubles me. This notion that I should have gotten over it by now. sigh

@fluthernutter I’m not a great believer in virtual hugs but I’m giving you one now.

A Mother never gets over the loss of a child. Even one she never got to nurse and kiss. :-(

@fluthernutter I still think about my miscarriages sometimes and they happened many many years ago. I think if I had children now the miscarriages would barely even come to mind, although I can’t be sure how I would feel. Mine were very early in pregnancy. I have a girlfriend who lost two, one in her 4th month and another in her 5th, and she has two children, and she talks about her miscarriages 20 years later now, and still sees them as huge losses, and she is very pro-abortion.

@JLeslie Thanks. It helps to hear.
Even if it’s sad to hear…

@JLeslie Really? Pro-abortion? I have a hard time believing that anyone is pro-abortion. And if they are, they are some kind of eugenicist. I think people believe abortion should be an option, but they hope they never have to use it and they probably even hate it. That’s pro-choice. But I have never met a person who is pro-abortion, and I can’t believe your friend is.

@wundayatta I sometimes use pro-abortion, although in this case pro-choice would have been more accurate. Pro-choice can be people who are pro-life in their own lives, but are in favor of choice because they realize not everyone thinks of pregnancy or a fetus in the same way, with the same values about when life begins, etc. Pro-abortion to me means someone is ok with abortion, would consider it for themselves if pregnant.

I’m sorry but I don’t see how you get from “ok with abortion” to “pro-abortion.” I don’t believe that anyone but the most sociopathic is “pro” abortion. It is something people resort to only when they feel they have no other choice.

@wundayatta I explained how I define it. You obviously disagree with my definition, I’ll think about what you said.