I remember shortly after I had miscarried, an older woman I was sitting near at a party leaned over to talk with me. I don’t know if she had overheard about my experience, but somehow she knew. Instead of offering sympathy or support, however, she instead commented on how so many more women these days were miscarrying than in ‘her’ day. I knew she just meant to make conversation, but I remember how much the comment stung. I was in a fragile place and it felt as if this little tidbit she had offered was some sort of commentary about me. About how being a woman of child-bearing age in today’s world somehow inherently put me at fault for this horribly sad thing that had happened.
At the time, I politely nodded and smiled, but it wasn’t until afterwards that I realized what absolute bullocks her comment had been. My small amount of research on the topic, like anything on the Internet, shows varied and opposing results – some sites reporting an increase in miscarriages and some a decline. But, common sense brings up some points that need to at least be taken into consideration: Women today are equipped with so much more knowledge about their bodies and their cycles that if a woman is paying attention, she will most certainly know when something has shifted. Add to that the ease and accessibility of earlier and earlier at-home pregnancy tests, and, of course, women these days know they are pregnant far sooner than those from the past. Women from the past may have mistakenly thought they were bleeding mid-cycle or had what they thought were heavier periods and not even known they had miscarried. Of course, not all miscarriages slide by this way, but certainly some women, even these days, miscarry without ever having known they were pregnant. And it is very likely this happened to many women in the past as well.
The other part of this equation is the openness and platforms that women have today. Topics that were once taboo or kept in tight circles are now talked about (by some) in much larger ways. So, even when mothers of the past knew they had lost a baby, it was probably not brought up in conversation. Along with the fact that such things just weren’t discussed, it also might have been feared or viewed as a failure of one’s body in some way and therefore was not a safe thing to discuss.
Of course, there are certainly threats present in our modern society that might contribute to more complications. But there were also challenges in the past that time has eliminated. It doesn’t seem to me like there is a way to properly gather statistics about miscarriages over time. So, will I ever know if losing my baby was part of the perils of living in this present day? Not really. But having known the vicious cycle of ‘what-if’s and self-blame that can follow a miscarriage, I do know that women who miscarry – past, present, or future – don’t really need statistics or analyzations, so much as they just need love and support.