Things I Didn?t Expect (When I Was Expecting) by Monica Dux

Things I Didn?t Expect (When I Was Expecting) by Monica Dux

Author:Monica Dux
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2013-01-14T16:00:00+00:00


Susannah Thompson, who wrote her PhD on the history of miscarriage and stillbirth, says that up until the 1970s the medical establishment generally regarded miscarriage as an entirely physical rather than an emotional hazard: a setback that women were expected to endure but not to indulge. At this time, women rarely talked about the ‘mischances’ of pregnancy. To do so was in bad taste. Any sense of personal loss was to be endured stoically and silently.

Thompson told me a story that epitomises this attitude, about a woman who miscarried decades ago while in hospital, waking up in a pool of her own blood. The nurses rushed in, quickly cleaned her up, removed all the bedding, put on clean sheets, then put her back to bed, all as if nothing had ever happened. And the matter was hardly even discussed again; the mess, and the pregnancy, had been neatly disappeared.

Up until the 1970s this policy extended even to stillbirth, a context where it appears incredibly callous. Dead babies were frequently taken away before their mothers could even see them, with women sometimes not even finding out the sex of their lost child. Instead, they were encouraged to think of the remains as mere waste, to be discarded unseen. Women were routinely sedated so that awkward questions could be avoided. To add insult to injury, these women were then generally put back in the maternity ward with mothers who’d just birthed live, healthy babies.

Of course this policy of denial and silence also had practical advantages for hospitals and medical practitioners. Thompson tells stories of medical negligence covered up, of doctors lying to women about why their baby was dead and of women being told that they’d birthed a ‘monster’ that should be forgotten, when in fact a disastrous medical error had led to the death of a healthy child.

In the last few decades of the twentieth century, official attitudes to miscarriage finally started to change, as women who’d endured pregnancy loss, and some of those who worked with them, began to organise around the issue. Support groups were set up; hospitals and governments were lobbied. Stillborn babies were given birth certificates and hospital staff were counselled to be more sensitive. All of this has resulted in a major cultural shift. Women still complain that the emotional cost of miscarriage is hidden, but for those working in the area, the change has been enormous. The common assumption among psychologists today isn’t just that a woman has a right to be upset by a miscarriage; rather, there’s an expectation that she will be.

Appropriately enough, the clinical term for this approach is the ‘grief and bereavement’ model. The woman’s loss is treated as real and a strong emotional response is treated as legitimate. A pamphlet from the UK Miscarriage Association, Your Miscarriage: A leaflet with pictures, typifies this. The emphasis is on the mother’s emotions. There are three pages on ‘Your feelings’ and a section on ‘Other people’s feelings’. It even opens with a condolence—‘We



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