Or maybe not surprising at all, if only we spoke about all the things with truth, facts and honesty, no shame, no hushed tones.
I’ve had two silent miscarriages, followed by D&C procedures. Looking over my medical notes, the official diagnosis is “spontaneous abortion”. For many people, they find this terming jarring – the word too loaded for the sadness they feel. But the pragmatism of it, I found had me wishing for a better starting point for conversations about abortion (particularly in the current climate of US politics). So often would I read or be told that 1 in 4 pregnancies miscarries – 1 in 4! 25%, a quarter. Some of these are so early on, people often don’t know. The body is picky, not every fertilised egg is destined to be a human. We’re not sure what happened with Pregnancy One, but Pregnancy Two had a chromosomal trisomy which always results in miscarriage/spontaneous abortion. That’s very heartbreaking when you were hoping, but the circumstances weren’t right. And it made me think: nature is doing this already. Nature is saying “nope, not this one”. My body didn’t kill a baby, it knew the circumstance were not right. Rather a different one, in a different time.
And so it was a surprising yet not really surprising thought-train I found myself on, that instead of being angry at people choosing no when my body chose no by itself, I found myself empathising instead, thinking ‘for you too, the right one at the right time’.
