the times | Thursday November 26 2020 1GT 3
times
her before they start pressing her on
her future plans for children.
Two years after the miscarriage we
had twins via IVF. Opening up about
the struggle to get there brought such
relief after so much secrecy. It wasn’t
a “failure”. It wasn’t my fault. I’ve had
so many kind and touching responses
from friends and colleagues
that it made me wonder why
I was so afraid of telling them
in the first place. It might have
made an awful experience
a little less painful.
In the conversations I’ve had
since, I’ve noticed how the
experiences tend to differ
depending on age, from the
family friend who, when her
first child was stillborn more
than 50 years ago, was
expected to adopt a stiff upper
lip and keep her grief to
herself, to my mum, who will
never forget the cruel manner
of the older male doctor who
brusquely told her the baby
was dead during a routine
scan, and directed her down
the hospital corridor for its
removal, without so much as
saying: “I’m sorry.” I’m forever grateful
to the sensitivity of the sonographer
who had to tell me, as I lay alone on
that hospital bed, that there was no
heartbeat. Things are changing.
Thanks to the Duchess of Sussex, they
have just changed a little bit more.was to walk around, a zombie in your
own life, waiting to find out who has
won — the baby or the bleed.
Then, one morning I woke up
knowing there was no more life inside,
calmly filed my story, made some
arrangements with the workmen who
were building an extension and took
myself back to the by now familiar
unit to do what needed to be done.
That was just the beginning.
There’s a reason no one talks about
that bit, why Meghan didn’t go into
further detail; because the business of
expelling a failed pregnancy is visceral
and traumatic. I remember weeks
later, as I was still recovering, a male
acquaintance chiding me to hurry
up and have a second child because
I wasn’t getting any younger.
As I wrote, I felt like ripping out the
lady nappy I was wearing at the time,
throwing it at him and shrieking:
“THIS! THIS IS THE REMNANTS
OF MY SECOND CHILD, YOU
ARSEHOLE.” To my regret, I didn’t.
Instead, I did what many women do
in this agonisingly common scenario:
said nothing and cried angry, hot tears
somewhere else. God forbid I make
him feel awkward.
Later, chatting to a friend who
witnessed this episode, I wondered
what I should have done. “Thinking
back,” she said, almost wistfully,
“it would have been more memorable
if you’d thrown a fanny pad across
the room.”
I wonder how many times, as
a mother of one in her late thirties,
Meghan was asked about her plans
“for number two” before she wrote
that piece.
My experience was not remotely
unusual — quite the opposite. It was
the common-or-garden-variety early
miscarriage, the kind happening every
day behind fixed smiles and toilet
cubicle doors. There are about
250,000 million miscarriages in the
UK every year. There will be about
600 happening today.I still find it astonishing that
every day there are women,
stoically going about their jobs,
holding meetings, going to Tesco
and, yes, if they are duchesses,
attending glamorous events, while
hiding the fact that there’s a baby
dying inside them.
We hear a lot about sex and we
hear plenty from birth onwards,
but very little about the bit in
between, unless it is the sanitised
“good news” version of cradled
baby bumps and wholesome blooming.
Well, no. As I said then, and believe
even more strongly now, the messy,
visceral, high drama of the bit in
between — and I mean all of it, from
the fear, the failures and the false
alarms to the injections, the surgery,
and the sheer, exhausting, emotional
toll of it — are not just the outtakes to
be deleted from the main story. They
are the story. It is the unspoken
zone in which many women
experience the lowest points
of their lives. Sometimes it can
even be the making of us. They
are (quite literally) the scars
we carry for life, yet there is
a strange expectation not to
talk about it, like some kind of
ovarian omerta. They are the
deleted scenes of so many
women’s lives.
Enough. With more women
sharing their experiences, the
taboo is beginning to be broken.
I hope the candour of the
Duchess of Sussex and Chrissy
Teigen, the social media star who
documented her own pregnancy
loss in shocking detail, will
encourage kinder conversations.
Maybe, just maybe, if the three
in four pregnancies that do make it are
celebrated in open knowledge of the
one in four that don’t, it might just
encourage the insensitive strangers,
the well-meaning friends and family,
to consider whether the woman in
front of them has a baby dying insideknew there was no life inside’
COVER: MEGA AGENCY. BELOW: GETTY IMAGES; DAN KENNEDY FOR THE TIMES MAGAZINEThere’s still
a stigma
Rebecca Reid
Left: the Duchess and
Duke of Sussex at Royal
Ascot in 2018. Above:
Lucy Bannerman with
her children. Below:
Chrissy Teigen’s
Instagram post
from hospitalI
was pottering around our flat when
I felt the same sharp cramp that
the Duchess of Sussex described.
Then: dark, sticky blood. I called
a taxi to the hospital. Waited,
sitting on the cold plastic floor. I was
sent home. Apparently, if you’re less
than 12 weeks pregnant — just shy of
11 in my case — there’s nothing they
can do. They don’t do out-of-hours
ultrasounds for people who may or
may not have had a miscarriage. “Just
come back tomorrow,” a male nurse
told me. “Either it’s a miscarriage or
it’s not.”
We went back the next day. A
gynaecologist/obstetrician tried to
scan my abdomen, then had to reach
for an internal probe. It’s a testament
to how awful this process is that you
barely register a man putting a
medical wand inside your vagina. “I’m
afraid I don’t have good news for you,”
he said. I was prescribed pills to help
my body to expel the pregnancy
because, although I was no longer
growing a baby, I was still chemically
pregnant. Morning sickness, breast
pain and mood swings, with no chance
of a resulting child. I bled so profusely
in days after the pills that I could
barely function.
Eventually, it transpired that the
medication hadn’t worked. There
was still a piece of pregnancy tissue
clinging to the top left corner of
my uterus. “I can’t even have a
miscarriage properly,” I cried to a
kindly gynaecologist, who prescribed
surgery under general anaesthetic to
vacuum the “retained products of
conception” from my womb. It seems
that some people think a pre-12-week
loss is “just like a heavy period”.
I assure you, it is not.
About one in four pregnancies
ends in miscarriage. Yet talking about
pregnancy loss still comes with stigma.
Whenever I mention my miscarriage
I bring the conversation to a crashing
halt. Perhaps it’s the combination of
grief and gynaecology — two things
we are terrible at discussing — but
there is still a sense that this is
supposed to be a very private pain.
Meghan was criticised from the
outset of her entry into the royal
family for being too open, too political,
too American about her feelings.
There will no doubt be those who
regard this essay as an overshare.
Even I have encountered people who
regarded my accounts of miscarriage
as oversharing. In fact, I think
oversharing is exactly what we need.
No woman, famous or otherwise,
should ever feel obliged to discuss
their pregnancy loss, any more than
she should feel obliged to hide it, but
Meghan’s essay will go some way to
stripping back some of that stigma felt
by women all over the world, and for
that I am enormously grateful.
The Power of Rude: A Woman’s
Guide to Asserting Herself by
Rebecca Reid is out now