The Miscarriage epidemic

The Miscarriage epidemic 

I’m going to give you a big piece of my heart… and some insight into the world I navigate with women & men every single day. 

Most of us know someone or are someone who has experienced a miscarriage or loss. 

And most of us wouldn’t know how to hold space for that.  

It’s confusing, it’s unclear:

Are they devastated?  … Are they relieved? … What happens now? …Is it better if we don’t acknowledge it?

What am I supposed to acknowledge; her or the baby or the injustice?

It wasn't a “real baby” yet, was it?

Do I tell her, “at least something worse didn’t happen”?

Collectively we don’t know how to hold loss. 

Like birth, death is also stuffed away in a closet. It’s too raw, too real, too heart-exploding. 

To reflect on it, to participate in it would peel back too much, leaving us exposed and face-to-face with what is bubbling beneath our very own surface… our very own grief about so much.  

Does the taboo nature of knowing it exists but acting like it doesn’t make death erotic? Is this why we can’t look away from an accident or why we binge on shows like Dexter, which give us a window into the portals of death and birth but at a very significant, and safe distance? Can we only feel life and its many portals through theater? 

If this is the case, is that why we have made miscarriages, death, birth and everything in between so soulless, impersonal & sterile? (pun intended)

Cross-culturally and throughout our human history there has always been ritual surrounding death and birth. Both being initiations; status changes. 

 In the case of miscarriage a fetus was considered a human being bearing as much significance as a baby who was born and grew up to be an adult.  In other words they were given their rightful place in the family system. Sometimes named, and even assigned the role of “big sister” when discussed with other siblings. In Islam for example the miscarried or lost child was issued a name and death certificate and guaranteed entry to Jannah (paradise, heaven). Or the example of the Manus women of the Admiralities of New Guinea. These women named each baby lost to miscarriage and treated its memory as if it had been a full individual.  Years afterward, when reminiscing about their children, these mothers would not distinguish between a miscarriage at three months, a stillborn infant, and a child who died several days after birth.

When a baby is not acknowledged for their life, they are considered an “excluded”. According to Psychiatrist Murray Bowen, MD founder of Family Systems Therapy Theory, this creates a rupture in the family tree and the entire subconscious of the biological family is burdened. It’s almost like a weight that does not allow the family to move forward and thrive.  Even if the miscarriage was a secret the mother kept to herself, there will be a rasping of the proverbial door until the lost baby is integrated as part of the family's story. Because somatic experience and conflict is passed down cellularly and through unconscious beliefs. 

Over the last 12 years of working with women who have miscarried (and aborted)  I began to notice patterns…  and I began to ask myself: “Is this one of the reasons why so many families experience so much pain and discord, as well as challenges with fertility, birth and launching in life?”

Come to find out every single one of them had a baby (or babies)  in the lineage who weren’t acknowledged as part of the family, they were simply a “miscarriage” or “procedure” long forgotten. I’d always hear:  “it happened so long ago, I don’t really think about it”... but the unconscious does, the body does, and therefore everyone in her field does. 

Once we began to dig in… once we started to place that baby in the family, giving it its rightful place, the woman would finally open the valve and feel the grief she was never given the space to experience. Weeks later, she would call me and say she was finally able to get pregnant, or tell me her relationship with her husband was improving, or that she felt more connected to her (living) children, or that she was finally able to complete the project she had been sitting on for months. 

“A woman who is witnessed in her grief, is a woman who can transform a pile of dirt into a blooming garden” 

Today we find ourselves in a world where children are commodified; grown in labs, frozen and stored. In a world where we tuck away our elderly into glorified prisons because  it’s too gross, too real to watch them age, deteriorate and die. We encapsulate birth into a frigid framework where a woman is placed in a 10x10 room, knocked out, and the baby is dragged out to later emerge squeaky clean and in fresh blankets ready for the camera. The mess of labor and birth is avoided, because to witness that means we don’t have control, and means we are compelled to feel the deep well of surrender. It means we feel our mortality and the melting ice cream scoop of our physical bodies. To witness our mother aging is to come face to face with death. To feel the grief of losing a baby (even if we chose it) would make us so human, so humble in the face of our crafted grandiosity. 

To come into contact with our hearts can be so intense. 

This is an invitation to notice where we brush it off with the brain so the cracks in our heart stay spackled together, intact, undisturbed. 

If you want to learn more, I led a 90 minute masterclass to talk about miscarriages, how they happen, how to step into grief, how to hold space for it, and what's on the other side of the wall.

PPS. 

Are you interested in how to “hold space” for yourself and others day to day and in challenging moments?  Come into one of our most powerful courses: Containment: Creating Safety in the Body. I created this beautiful offering for men and women to teach anyone how to master remaining in their own grounded experience while moving through the various experiences and spirals life has to offer.