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...discovered, was political event as well. Eleven weeks into the pregnancy, I was bleeding, bleeding, bleeding. How many "napkins?" the doctor asked. I was not counting napkins, but worrying about how to retrieve blood clots out of the toilet at 3 AM, as many health books advise. (I decided not to do so.) As the pains carne and went, the torrent of blood made what was happening very obvious. I went to the emergency room, doubled-over, while the doctor used an ultrasound to see what was going on. (I found it interesting that the equipment used during pregnancy and delivery is also used during miscarriage.) I too looked at the ultrasound and was told that I was seeing a sac; the embryo had never developed at all. When the doctor said, "well, it looks like the baby won't make it," I snapped, "well it never was one, was it!" The doctor diagnosed a miscarriage-in-progress (medical professionals no longer use the medical term spontaneous abortion with patients), and, yes, I definitely wanted them to finish it with a D and C.
When I received a small condolence card from the midwives who were to deliver the expected baby, I thought that was nice. I appreciated their sympathy. Cards, pasta, flowers, and chocolate from colleagues, family, and friends all helped when I felt miserable. When I got a big folder full of material from the hospital, I was not surprised by information about signs (such as heavy bleeding or fever) that meant I should visit the doctor again, but I was surprised by the sympathetic letter concerning the loss of my "baby" and the grief that I would feel. I have friends whose children have died, my miscarriage was not the same.
The stationery featured baby footprints on each page. (1) Those footprints for an eleven-week pregnancy still make my stomach tuna. This material was not just helpful medical material; it was sympathy with a vested political interest. Baby footprints are one of the symbols--along with roses and fetuses in jars--of the anti-abortion movement.
Here is where I began. I realized that the doctor and I were both producing meaning about the miscarriage. The terms baby and abortion are value-laden and highly contested. What provoked this research project was not that one doctor happened to say the wrong thing to me--words that another person might have appreciated--rather, the printed materials that the hospital gives to every woman who experiences a miscarriage provided the impetus. That folder, and the institutionalization of language that it represented, informed me that I was in the midst of a social process that was remaking the meaning of miscarriage. I was curious about how miscarriage is represented now, how it was represented in the past, and at what point physicians, social workers, and reporters became interested in women's emotional responses to miscarriage. By the 1990s, miscarriage had become a significant event that was infused with tragic meaning. Although some women and members of the helping professions are preoccupied with the topic of miscarriage, historians have mentioned it only briefly in studies of childbirth, birth control, abortion, and infertility. That I presented a paper about miscarriages at the 1999 Berkshire Conference on the history of women was a sign of its importance during the 1990s.
Although miscarriage has received little historical attention, there is nonetheless a widely-held picture of the past: miscarriage was shrouded in silence. Scholars and activists have relied heavily on the metaphor of silence to indicate changes since the 1960s and 1970s; however, the metaphor of silence overstates the silence of the past and overlooks the silences of the present. Women's accounts of pregnancy loss were published in earlier periods. (2)
During the past twenty-five years, however, a new social movement has arisen that encourages women to speak about their grief following miscarriage. The resulting public attention to women's grief has changed the venues in which women's words and memories have been published. Women's reproductive health and emotions are no longer confined to women's and health magazines. For the first time, articles about miscarriage are appearing in national mainstream news magazines and newspapers. Such coverage indicates the success of both the women's health and pregnancy-loss movements. Through an analysis of the articles on miscarriage in popular magazines as well as social science and medical journals, this essay outlines the representations of miscarriage encountered by women (and men) over the course of the twentieth century. (3) I suggest that today's pregnancy-loss movement draws on both the anti abortion movement and feminism to comprehend and define miscarriage, female emotion, and motherhood. I also question the uncritical adoption of this new movement's redefinition of miscarriage by hospitals, health professionals, and therapists.
A woman's response to miscarriage is neither purely personal nor universal. Rather, the meaning of miscarriage is historically and culturally constructed. Indeed, social movements have given miscarriage a variety of meanings and used it as a symbol for several political projects. The normative representation of miscarriage has dramatically changed during the twentieth century from hazard to blessing to tragedy. At the beginning of the century, miscarriage was represented as a cause of physical harm to women; in the middle, to miscarry was represented as good fortune; by the end, miscarriage was represented as a source of emotional devastation. Today, in the United States, women are expected to grieve their miscarriages, a feeling that professionals, hospitals, and a social movement nurture. The relationship between miscarriage and motherhood has shifted as well. Many women, past and present, share the experience of miscarriage; but, at the end of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first, some mothers claim that the experiences of pregnancy and miscarriage--even if one never bears or rears a child-bestows motherhood. Like mother-love, the mourning mother of a miscarriage is historically produced. (4)
Today, when emotional distress following a miscarriage is highlighted, the physical stress of the event tends to be obscured. In contrast, childbearing women and health reformers of the early twentieth century could not forget that pregnancy in general and miscarriages specifically were physically draining and potentially deadly? Letters sent to Margaret Sanger by working-class or low-income women seeking birth control attest to the physical hardship of miscarriage. One mother of four wrote about her repeated miscarriages and her fear that, ultimately, she would die following a miscarriage: "I get pregnant every two or three months, and in [a] few weeks miscarry. I realize it is killing me-soon I'll be gone and then who will see to my little children[?]" Another woman described her miscarriage: "I had a miscarriage which lasted for about a month and which made me an invalid for about six months." A twenty-two-year-old, who reported herself "in bad health," listed a miscarriage, two children, and then three more miscarriages one after the other. "I almost died the last time ... and [the doctor] says I can't carry a nine months baby any more because I are too weak." (6)
Part of Sanger's struggle to win women's right to contraception was a fight to improve women's health. "Pregnancy," wrote Sanger, "imposes a heavy tax." She exposed the physical harm women endured as a result of repeated pregnancies--including miscarriages, stillbirths, and deliveries and declared the laws that created the situation unjust. Sanger also recognized the misery of women who anticipated children yet lost their pregnancies. (7) Nonetheless, she did not campaign to memorialize those losses but to end women's suffering. Miscarriage was more than a private problem; it was a political one. Birth control, Sanger urged, not only made family planning possible, it could also prevent repeated miscarriages and stillbirths.
Furthermore, as numerous women testified, miscarriages were expensive and could financially drain the entire family. One woman, who reported "seven years of misery" and six miscarriages of "badly deformed babies," wrote, "[W]e are not wealthy people as my husband is a farmer and he has spent so much money for doctors ... that we are almost paupers now and must sell the farm." "I am a poor farmer's wife ... [and] a mother of eight children and five mishaps," wrote another woman. "I had a mishap two weeks ago and it cost my husband about fifty dollars." (8)
The story of Esther points to the significance of context for determining meaning. Women were not necessarily dejected about their miscarriages. In 1919, a nurse told the story of "Esther," a thirty-four-year-old mother of nine who received milk at a milk station to feed her "puny baby." Esther told the nurse that she "always thanked God when I had a miscarriage." (9) For a poor and overburdened family, a miscarriage could be a blessing.
Unlike the representation of miscarriage in Sanger's early publications, when articles about miscarriage first appeared in popular women's magazines during the 1940s, they all assumed that miscarriage represented the loss of wanted children to married couples. There was no "Esther" who thanked God for her miscarriage. "The articles of the...
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