Self Magazine published an article on August 5, 2016 entitled When You’re Having a Miscarriage but Have to Work Anyway, by Zahra Barnes. This article helps bring to light many of the pressing issues women who miscarry face such has social stigmas and having to work through a miscarriage. Many women don’t realize that miscarriage can be covered under FMLA as a serious complication from pregnancy or a serious medical condition. Learn more about FMLA for miscarriage here.
There are many good things about the article which focuses on the miscarriage experiences of Ashley Frangipane (Halsey), who suffered a miscarriage while on tour in 2015 and took narcotic pain killers while wearing an adult diaper while at her work venue. No time to have her miscarriage in the comforts of home or safety of a medical facility, if she stopped working it could have been detrimental to her career. This is an issue many women face.
1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage; roughly 10-25% of recognized pregnancies. The statistics are frightening because most women don’t realize how common miscarriage is until they have one. Women are typically silent about their miscarriages due to cultural taboo on talking about miscarriage. The social stigma is that miscarriage isn’t a big deal and when women do feel different than the stigma of the norm, there is shame in those feelings. Women become silent and suffer in that silence.
When famous women come out to share their experiences of miscarriage, the media reports for them. This helps women not feel so alone and that is very needed. It sheds light on the millions of women experiencing pregnancy loss around the world. Articles such as the Self article can be helpful but there is a hidden message in the article Self wrote. I will tell you what that is.
At the end of the article, the author calls for change in the beginning of her final statement when she writes: “Although it will take some time for cultural attitudes about miscarriage to shift…” But instead of helping to change that stigma, the author actually furthered a common misconception about miscarriage, that it’s “like a heavy period.” The author interviewed Dr. Sherry Ross, an OBGYN who stated that miscarriage will evolve into something like “the heaviest period you’ve ever experienced.”
I wonder if this doctor has talked with her patients or better yet, been there while her patients experience miscarriage. A majority of them would likely not describe miscarriage this way, especially if they held their very tiny baby. As a woman who experienced miscarriage twice, I can attest and confirm that miscarriage is nothing like a heavy period. In fact, I suffered through horrible periods associated with PCOS and hormonal imbalances for a majority of my life and I would take that experience over the labor pains I had with my miscarriages.
Another OBGYN, a male I might add, describes miscarriage to women as “hell.” He then explains that miscarriage can be “really heavy bleeding, really heavy cramping, and generally feeling really beaten up.” Before I discovered that Dr. Jacques Moritz was male, I made an assumption that this doctor had a personal experience with miscarriage and maybe his partner had one but he still minimizes the miscarriage experience. The statements by these OBGYN’s further trick women into believing that miscarriage is “no big deal,” “not a serious medical event,” can be experienced at home or work with little complication, and that miscarriage, “is like a heavy period.”
My book “It’s Not ‘Just’ a Heavy Period; The Miscarriage Handbook” shares with you how miscarriage is not a heavy period. It’s rarely experienced that way, yet women are told by their doctors that they will bleed like a heavy period and receive little to nothing more. Nothing to help with the pain that shocks them out of their sleep, nothing to catch their baby or remains in, and no real guidance on warning signs. Women are left to go through this experience alone and uninformed. I often wonder how doctors truly understand the miscarriage experiences of their patients when the majority of women are never seen and their pleas for help and guidance are ignored.
The article wasn’t all bad. I know I focused solely on the statements by these OBGYN’s but when Self Magazine calls for change, they should help create that change by interviewing proper professionals or women who have experienced miscarriage. One statement of particular note was when Penelope Trunk talked about how some women might prefer to go back to work immediately and that “there are basically no wrong choices here.”
This is a very true statement and women need to hear this. While some women couldn’t imagine going to work during a miscarriage, there are others who may prefer to go back to work and neither is wrong. Women who don’t feel they can go to work need to be empowered with information on how to manage that, such as through FMLA. Statements like the ones made by medical professionals, minimize the experiences of miscarriage by the majority of women. Because they are medical professionals, society places more trust in their words than in the words of the women who experience miscarriage.
So Self Magazine, if you want change for women; help make that change happen for women.