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How to Support a Woman After a Pregnancy Loss
What to say — and, just as importantly, what not to say — when someone you love is grieving
When my grandmother died at age 96, I was crushed. At her funeral, I gathered with family and friends to share memories and console one another. The accompanying rituals — the eulogy, the heaps of Southern food shared with loved ones — all helped me process her passing.
It was all a stark difference from three years prior, when I suffered another devastating loss: I terminated a much-wanted pregnancy at 13 weeks after discovering that the fetus was nonviable. A handful of people helped me through it, but overall, I was floored by the collective ignorance about this profound grief. Almost no one knew what to say or do; the insensitive comments and overwhelming isolation felt nearly as painful as the loss itself.
In recent years, the public discourse around traditionally taboo topics like miscarriage has been slowly opening up, but not enough. Pregnancy loss still carries a stigma — in one study of people who had experienced a miscarriage, or were with a partner who had had one, nearly half said they felt guilty about it — despite the fact that an estimated 10 to 20 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage. That’s a lot of people who are suffering in silence…
