Discussion for article #234417
That is probably the most moving cartoon I’ve ever read.
What do the forced birth advocates have to say about stories like this?
Can you imagine one of these women having to run the gauntlet outside many (most? all?) clinics in addition to the pain they’re already experiencing?
Well done.
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This is very well done. My wife and I were married when we were about 40, and she miscarried her first pregnancy. We were actually giving a party when she realized something was wrong. We ran her to the doctor, who said “I think you may be miscarrying this pregnancy.”
I hadn’t ever considered a miscarriage. I didn’t know what to think. But the (female) doctor told us about how common these things are, why they happen, etc. And then I was cool with it. I told my wife that I felt her body wasn’t ready to carry the pregnancy to term, and miscarried, basically, in order to protect her. Her body was reacting appropriately to the situation. My level-headed attitude helped her a lot.
We wound up getting pregnant not long after that, and had our son.
The first thing people ought to know about miscarriages is how common they are. The second thing is not to blame yourself for it.
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My daughter lost her second pregnancy at 36 after months of trying to get pregnant. Although the fetus died around 9 weeks, it didn’t abort on it’s own. She had a dilation and evacuation at 12 weeks to deal with that. Technically, that’s an abortion. I cringe when I see legislators in various states that would force her to go before a court to “prove” that she didn’t intentionally kill the fetus, and get their blessing to remove it - before it became septic and killed her too.
Did you know that even with the fetus dead the body still thinks it’s pregnant? My daughter continued to have severe morning sickness for the 3 weeks the fetus was dead until her D & E.
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Very well done. I had a miscarriage at the ripe old age of 47, when I thought I was all done. It was upsetting, but after having tried to get pregnant early in my 40s, I understood that most miscarriages occur because the contributing egg or sperm have defects that are incompatible with life, especially if you are a woman in your 40s! There may be physiologic reasons for repeat miscarriage in younger women, but these are certainly not a woman’s fault either.
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The comic itself is very important and moving, but bear in mind: a large number of anti-abortion laws being pushed by the GOP across the country right now would subject every woman interviewed here to a criminal investigation to determine if her miscarriage should be declared a homicide. That, on top of everything the women here describe going through. Horrifying.
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Great comic. One of my neighbors became pregnant about two years ago, and didn’t tell any of us until she was past the 12-week mark. That was the first time I had heard of anyone doing this, and I’m 50 years old. I guess we’ve just been very open amongst my family and friends. As far as I know, everyone announced as soon as they knew. A few times, the pregnancy ended in miscarriage, or the couple decided on an abortion, and we were there to sympathize and help if we could.
A friend of mine was a single mother, and her daughter died of SIDS. She doted on that baby, it was the center and light of her whole life. The subsequent investigation, questioning, and accusations - on top of waking up to find her daughter dead - just about killed her. I know what it’s like to carry a child, a growing life inside of you. I cannot imagine having to go through the BS some of our legislators are proposing after the heartbreak of miscarrying.
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This is one of the thousand reasons why women should never vote Republican.
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I experienced an ectopic pregnancy (and Paul Ryan calls that an abortion*). It was one of the most devastating times of my life. I went in for an infertility work up and they were doing a laparoscopy when they found an almost two month pregnancy outside the womb. They didn’t wake me up; I was rushed into surgery. So, in essence when I awoke I had lost: one fallopian tube they worked to save but couldn’t and a baby I was trying so hard to conceive.
Guess where they put you to recover from the surgery? Oh yeah. The Maternity Ward. Terrific. I hope things have changed. Nobody talked about it with me. Not at all. My husband at the time (now my former husband and this was probably the beginning of the end) wanted to take me to Disneyland to cheer me up.
About five years later, I was in the public library, browsing the shelf of “new books” when I happened on one about miscarriage and the loss of a baby. I flipped it open, read a few lines, and started to cry. I couldn’t stop crying. I had never dealt with this loss. The emotional pain at that point was overwhelming – overshadowing all the physical pain I had endured five years earlier. I look at my two sisters’ boys who were born a month apart –– I would have had the third baby between those two. I never can forget.
And I never got pregnant again.
(*By the way… They (right wing/right to lifers) call that operation – terminating the baby living outside the womb – an abortion. They know the baby cannot survive. and the mother is in grave danger of dying, too. But people like Paul Ryan don’t care. A fetus is all they care about, no matter how insanely they stretch the concept.)
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- mental hug *
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Yes, one more panel. “And then the doctor told me she was required to report my miscarriage to the government and I might be investigated.”
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Most excellent article! More like this, please, where real people are able to share difficult material thru the anonymity of cartooning.
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I am so sorry for your loss - the baby, the marriage, and the hope. Forty years ago, my OB had a staff member whose first pregnancy was ectopic, followed by a second pregnancy, also ectopic. I guess the “usual” at the time was just doing a hysterectomy at that point, but he didn’t. He said, “Someday not too long from now, they’ll be able to harvest her eggs and implant the embryo in her uterus.” That was 4 years before Baby Louise, the first “test tube baby” was born in England, and 7 years before the procedure was performed successfully in the U.S. It was incredibly controversial at the time, but I always thought of the young woman in the OB’s office and crossed my fingers for her.
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My WWII generation Irish Catholic Mom had 4 miscarriages and 5 live births. 4 are women. None of us has every attempted to get pregnant. Youngest is 56.
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Oh my god. Thanks for doing this. “We never lost a child together. I lost a child.”
I had one early miscarriage, two kids, and a “fetal demise”. My baby started kicking at 16 weeks (I always feel them early), stopped kicking at 17 weeks, and died at 18 weeks. The baby was normal, but the placenta was partly detached and couldn’t keep it alive. I didn’t want to go to the hospital overnight away from my kids and go through induced labor with no hope at the end of it. I didn’t want to see it or even know the gender; the grief was unbearable as it was… So I waited two weeks over the Christmas holiday until a doctor was available to remove the baby (it’s dangerous to be that kind of doctor in this day and age, so there aren’t many). I couldn’t go out, because people would see the pregnancy and I would have to explain that it was dead. I wished I was. Thank god for the kids I already had, or I would have gone over the edge. My husband didn’t want to “go through another of my pregnancies” so we never tried again. I should have told him I was desperate to have another child to replace the one I lost, but I figured I had no right to pressure him, considering how sick I always got and how much extra work it was for him. He never knew how badly I wanted it until it was too late. Maybe he was right, and maybe it was too risky and I could never have had another healthy child. Now I’m crying again, fifteen years later. What a fool I am. Looking forward to having a daughter-in-law soon, and maybe grandbabies, because nothing heals old wounds like more family to love.
People don’t get this. They don’t understand why a woman can’t just forget and move on after the body heals, the way you do after an injury. It’s a primal thing, to carry a child. For a few months, you are never alone. Then suddenly you are alone in your body again. Whether your baby is alive or not, your body makes you feel like a mother, makes you want to care for that baby, to make sure it is safe. It’s not possible to come out of this experience unchanged.
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I understand. Hugs.
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Why this isn’t part of every high school’s basic human biology class is a national embarrassment.
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Maybe my earliest memory. Christmas eve when I was 2, excited. It wasn’t till later I realized that that was the first of two Christmas eve miscarriages. Mama doesn’t always drink to be festive.
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I had a miscarriage, but it was between two healthy and successful pregnancies, so I am one of the lucky ones. Actually, since, as this story points out, people don’t discuss miscarriage much (including me) I don’t actually know exactly how typical I am. I do think most women I know have had at least one.
Looking further, I suspect that the 20-week ban, among the many other officious attempts of red states recently to insert themselves politically into every pregnancy they possibly can, is going to bring an awful lot of unhappy stories to the surface. I’m sure it feels uncomfortable if not outright embarrassing to some, but I’m hoping we will all feel stronger for being honest about the real deal with pregnancy, mess and tears and all.
I know I am closer to telling my abortion story than I ever have been in my life. I’ve been able to plan my family as I wanted to, and I think those of us who’ve been the beneficiaries of Roe v Wade have a real moral responsibility not to let anti-choicers win in spreading their simplistic views of women’s experience. I won’t go into how enraged it makes me that the rise of the religious right in my lifetime means that my daughters will have to face clinic shouters and hysterical lies, and disingenuous red tape disguised as concern for their “health,” if not an absolute rollback of their individual rights to plan their own futures.
Anyway. I’m planning on being a little old lady in tennis shoes making a ruckus for as long as it takes…
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One of the most traumatizing experiences in my life happened about a year ago. My wife and I had two, successful, high risk pregnancies. With three children, we decided not to have any more. We used an IUD for birth control. Despite that, one day my wife tells me to get a pregnancy test. I drive to the store, wander around in a daze, and buy the tests. Positive. We go in, see the doc, get an ultrasound and see a child, hear a heartbeat, and see the IUD. The baby does not seem to be hurt by the removal of the IUD. A week of joy and confusion was all we got. The next ultrasound the fetus was not moving. Our doctor came in and hugged us. I then had to go back to the same store, go to the pharmacy and get the drugs to take care of things. I asked for a description of the process from the pharmacists. It was quite awkward. I am grieving and talking about abortifacts to a stranger, who, thank god, was a woman.
My wife experienced weeks of pain, and my daughter saw her father become severely depressed.
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