My Pro-Life Story, Part 2

Continued from Part 1, which is here.

Fast forward again, this time to my 31-year-old self (now Catholic by the way), crying in the bathroom of my Chicago apartment with the heartbreak of miscarrying my first child. At 11 weeks gestation, my precious, already-beloved baby had no heartbeat, and suffered a “spontaneous abortion.” (I hate that they call it that on the forms—like a knife in my stomach in more ways than one.) I had no idea what to expect, and no idea what was going on in my abdomen at that point. My OB/Gyn (a lesbian abortionist when not at her day job, about which I was, of course, oblivious—well, not the lesbian part) recommended that I “let my body expel the tissue naturally,” or something like that, which basically meant crying and hurting and bleeding all weekend, wondering when it would be over.

The doctor had given me a prescription for some kind of something that would help my uterus contract and settle down when the whole thing was over.

“Take it after several large pieces of tissue are expelled,” the nurse instructed me.
“What do you mean?” I said, “How big?”
“Oh, you’ll know,” she said.

Well, I didn’t know. I got it wrong and took the medicine too soon, which resulted in a horrible trip to the ER in the middle of the night (does anyone ever go to the ER in the daytime, I wonder?) and an overnight stay in the hospital. I can still picture my doctor’s gentle, comforting smile early the next morning when she came to check on me; she did make me feel better that morning. Despite the bad call about the do-it-yourself miscarriage, she was a skilled physician who went on to deliver my first- and second-born children in the two years following that first heart-wrenching loss.

Not many people talk about miscarriages. (When you have one, you find out that they are actually quite common.) For some reason, it can feel embarrassing, like the whole pregnancy was more of a misdiagnosis than an actual child who died. This denial, I think, makes it harder to process your grief over the loss. Nowadays, I know people who would have had a funeral for that baby, and I wonder if doing so would have helped me grieve.

Part 3 is here.