Baby Lost

This is the transcript of a story I produced for ABC Radio National's "Life Matters"

I sat in the maternity ward with tears burning tracks down my face. I was surrounded by posters picturing birth and tiny hands and nurturing breasts, listening - afraid of babies’ cries - as life seeped out of me. The dignified African doctor looked at me and quietly said, “I’m very sad for you…very sorry”. I was 11 weeks pregnant. This was my third consecutive miscarriage and it was heartbreaking…

Six weeks earlier, while on a working holiday in Europe, I’d discovered I was pregnant. It felt like a miraculous conception given my partner’s cancer-related fertility problems. But within 24 hours I started to bleed. The next day I ended up in casualty at a strange hospital in an unfamiliar town in the middle of England.

I held my breath as the radiographer probed my stomach in search of life. I didn’t believe her when she pointed at the screen and said “look, that vigorous flashing is your baby’s heartbeat!” The report said: “foetus 6 weeks, one day. No sign of abnormality…”

Once a heartbeat is detected at 6 weeks there’s a 95% chance the baby will live to be born and despite trying to psych myself into a protective state of suppressed joy, I grew more excited with every passing day.

But several weeks later, only a day after returning home, I started to bleed again. And, I instinctively knew things wouldn’t be OK this time…despite everyone else’s insistence on optimism.

I spent days in a medical holding pattern. Hope lingered after seeing the GP but grief was unleashed via the ultrasound machine. This time, when the radiographer probed my stomach, there was just dead silence. There was no heartbeat detected. Our baby had died. Two days later I was hospitalised for a procedure that essentially amounts to the abortion of a longed-for baby.

The medical system with its cold terminology and emotional distance typically just compounds the grief. The death of a baby in the womb prior to 20 weeks gestation, in the absence of a complete miscarriage, is called a ‘missed abortion’. My baby went from being described as a ‘healthy foetus with a strong heartbeat’ to a ‘missed abortion’ overnight. The impact was devastating. As was the fact that as my body rejected my baby, I had to sit in waiting rooms full of happily pregnant couples and small children.

At first I couldn’t cry, but then a toddler in one of these waiting rooms came stumbling over to me and, mistaking me for her mother, put her chubby little hands on my knees and looked directly up at me, confused. I instinctively said “Hello sweetheart…you’ve got the wrong mummy” and then I began sobbing.

The tears wouldn’t stop and all I could say was “sorry”. I think I was apologising for the awkwardness other people felt; the fact that I was publicly displaying what society sees as inappropriate grief (it’s not like I’d lost an ‘actual’ baby) and because I somehow felt responsible for the extinction of the life inside of me. Grief isn’t logical. The fact that when miscarriage is discussed, it’s usually behind hands, and it’s invisibility in the media, make the grief seem even more illegitimate.

It’s not easy to know what to say – this is a taboo subject. Inappropriate responses range from – “oh well, at least you know you’re not infertile” to “were you really pregnant?” (I kid you, not) and “do you think you drank too much when you didn’t know you were pregnant?” Such remarks can make your heart break - over and over again.

It’s a cold fact: 25% of all pregnancies will terminate naturally. Frustratingly, a cause is rarely found and parents grappling to deal with the ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ of it all will often be told “it’s just bad luck”. However, after three consecutive miscarriages, I now find myself diagnosed with ‘recurrent miscarriage’.

This means I have a statistically much higher chance of miscarrying if I conceive again. There is strange comfort in this diagnosis. At last the medical fraternity is prepared to take my loss and my obstetric health seriously. But the way I feel now, the prospect of another miscarriage is too much for me to contemplate.

The involuntary loss of an unborn baby is compounded by the already complex issues around childbirth confronting contemporary women. Childless women often find it difficult to escape the judgement of others who make assumptions about their maternal nature (or lack thereof) and even their sexuality. And while childlessness is a deliberate, considered choice for a growing number of women, pregnancy remains a venerated female birthright among the sisterhood.

I’m in my late 30’s and I desire to have a child but it’s not an all-encompassing,
‘get-pregnant-at-all-costs’ obsession as it is with some women. In fact, during this latest pregnancy, I began to realise that the hopes and expectations of others regarding my capacity to be a mother may actually exceed my own. I wondered whether this meant I just wasn’t very maternal or if the fact that I had an intellectually stimulating career and rich life experience meant my identity was just less one-dimensional than some other women’s.

Maybe this is heartbreak speaking. Some will say it’s the bitterness of a childless woman. But, it is a genuine reflection on the impact of other people’s celebration of me as a pregnant woman and the sense of shame that’s somehow imparted by the experience of losing a baby. Like it or not, the ‘mother’ identity translates to status and belonging among the vast bulk of women. And as much as I try to dismiss my sense of failure on a reaction against society’s over-emphasis on women’s role as mother and child barer, the loss of this identity feels acute.

Perhaps this is because feminism has failed to date to take us beyond the role we’re physically destined for. Perhaps it’s because women need to celebrate their other identities – lover, partner, friend, sister, professional – in equal measure to motherhood. All I know is that it feels like the expectations of society and womankind hang heavily on my shoulders as I grieve for the loss of another small life. To be honest, all I want to do is get on another plane to another time and place…where the pain isn’t so raw and where my identity is disconnected from all things maternal.

I think a big part of making this grief less difficult to bear is openness. This is why I’ve told you my story.

(This story was originally broadcast on Radio National's (ABC) Life Matters program on 27/9/07 as a monologue recorded by me. You can listen to and download the story here)