What is Lost During a Miscarriage or Abortion

I wish to preface this post with the obvious, yet still somehow necessary, proclamation that I am not a woman, nor do I claim to have intimate, relevant knowledge about the female experience if such a thing exists. Still, I do not think my maleness disqualifies me from critically, carefully, and compassionately examining the issues raised in this post.

That being said, this piece is not meant to be some formal, critical examination of experiences as intense and saddening as miscarriages and abortions. I use writing as a means by which to better understand myself and others, even if only a little more than I did before setting pen to paper, and that is all I set out to do here: To better understand.

Last night, I read a piece by Agnes Callard entitled “Half a Person,” where she honestly, heart-breakingly, and thought-provokingly recounts the second of two miscarriages she has had in her lifetime. In 2018, Callard found herself unexpectedly pregnant and considering an abortion.

In her piece, Callard makes a profound observation. When a woman has had an abortion, others meet her decision with an outpouring of support and affirmation. After all, the fetus was just “a clump of cells.” On the other hand, when a woman has a miscarriage, others meet her misfortune with a great deal of sympathy. After all, she lost a child. But people seem not to respond predictably to the announcement that a woman is considering an abortion. She, the woman who deliberates over abortion, has not yet come to terms with what her relationship is with that creature nestled inside of her. Is it a parasitic cluster of cells aimed at vitiating its host, or a beacon of hope, tenderly teaching its mother how to nurture? When the answer to this question is unclear to the pregnant woman, others cannot know how to respond to her situation.

But does it make sense for us to treat abortions and miscarriages so differently? Surely, they share many common features with one another. For one, they are bloody. Callard writes the following about her miscarriage:

There was an absolutely shocking amount of blood, and somehow it was also everywhere. All over me, all over the bathroom stall. How did it get on the door?

I thought about seeking out cleaning supplies, but the bathroom was humming and buzzing with mothers escorting children, and I couldn’t risk any of them catching a glimpse of what looked like nothing so much as a crime scene. So I had to clean the stall with only the materials inside it, which—well, you know what there is inside a women’s bathroom stall. Not much. I did my best. Then I waited for a pause in footsteps, and dashed to the sink for my Lady Macbeth moment, frantically scrubbing away at my hands so that most of the blood would be gone by the time the next person entered.

Anne Sexton, in “The Abortion” (1962), concludes her poem by saying:

Somebody who should have been born
is gone.

Yes, woman, such logic will lead
to loss without death. Or say what you meant,
you coward...this baby that I bleed.

During a miscarriage, Nature violently tears life out from inside of a woman, and leaves her in a pool of blood that is and is not hers. It deprives a woman of her choice to embrace motherhood. It denies a woman of her ability to say, “Yes.” Miscarriages are misogynistic thieves, targeting women and stealing what does, or what could, matter most to them in this world.

Abortions, however, present themselves differently than miscarriages. Yes, they leave the women who seek them bloodied like miscarriages do. But abortion is chosen. It may be violent in some ways, sometimes involving suction, dismemberment, or poisoning, but it is justifiable violence. A woman conscripts an abortionist to help her neutralize an unwelcome intruder. Abortion empowers women to reject those impositions placed on them by motherhood. It gives a woman the power to say, “No.” But do these benefits of abortion preclude that it is, like miscarriage, a profound source of regrettable deprivation?

Consider “the mother” (1963) by Gwendolyn Brooks:

Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,   
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,   
The singers and workers that never handled the air.   
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,   
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.   
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?—
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?   
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.

Part of what makes this poem so beautiful, to my mind, is that it brims with anguish. It shows us so simply and compellingly that the speaker is filled with remorse and regret. While the physiological cost of her abortions were sanguinary and temporary, she leaves us with the impression that the emotional toll of abortion is limitless. The unpleasantness of abortion, however, runs deeper than the havoc it wreaks on the inside of women’s heads. The speaker of “the mother” tells us that her abortions compel her to remember always that a possible life was denied entry into this world: “You were born, you had body, you died,” she tells her unborn child. “It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.” This is why she is overcome with abyssal sadness.

Miscarriages, similarly, force women to mourn someone who had not quite yet become. Being assaulted with cramps and claret seems not to be the worst aspect of miscarriage when we listen to those who have experienced them. What appears to be worse is that potential value is ousted with caprice. Those who fall victim to miscarriage often agonize over the different lives their almost-child could have lived. The things they could have done, the thoughts they could have had. This is eerily similar to those very concerns the speaker of “the mother” brings to light in Brooks’s poem. Abortion and miscarriage are pilfering bedfellows.

Having established that, typically, some undesirable state of affairs takes place in the stead of both abortions and miscarriages, I want to ask whether we can understand only the mother as having lost something, or both the mother and would-be child. In defense of the first thesis, one might insist that because the fetus had not yet come into existence in the morally relevant sense, only the mother could have been negatively affected by a miscarriage or abortion. But it seems as though women are negatively affected in part because they fixate on the valuable futures their would-be child could have, suggesting that perhaps the would-be children who are killed during miscarriage and abortion themselves had value that could-be mothers recognized and lamented.

Somebody could retort that pregnant women only view fetuses as having value because our male-dominated society compels women to rationalize and pursue motherhood. But this sort of argument fails on several counts. First, it is patronizing to women: “You cannot clearly understand what is at stake when an abortion or miscarriage takes place because you are impressionable and others have deceived you into believing something that is (a) baseless and (b) will subjugate you.” Second, it stands in tension with many of the lived experiences of women. Of course, there will be some women who are unfazed by abortion or miscarriage. But many are not. Third, this sort of reasoning could lead us down the path of accepting that very few of our beliefs are reliable in any meaningful sense. Perhaps this is true, but the consequences of accepting such a view are undesirable, to say the least.

There is another way to support the thesis that only women, not would-be children, are deprived of something after a miscarriage or abortion. You might concede that women often believe that the fetus they carried had some sort of value, but insist that believing something has value is distinct from recognizing that something has objective value. I can believe that my lucky pencil has value such that losing it would be tantamount to losing a child to leukemia. Believing that this is the case, however, does not make it so.

This sort of response holds some promise, except that it fails to acknowledge that attitudes held about the termination of pregnancy conflict with one another often. I would likely be the only person in the world who thinks my lucky pencil is as precious as I perceive it to be, but most people are of two minds when it comes to the value of a fetus: A fetus is valuable before a miscarriage, but is valueless during an abortion. Both of these things cannot be true at once.

Of course, one might say that a fetus is valueless whenever. But it seems like most would say this because they confuse admitting that the fetus has some value with admitting that the fetus has as much value as you or me. One need not go so far. Consider the conclusion of Agnes Callard’s piece, where she reflects on the aftermath of her miscarriage:

In the days following the miscarriage, when the shock of medical urgency had passed, when I had stopped crying, when I had the peace of mind to reflect, I was able to admit to myself that what I felt was: relief. I felt like a whole person again, for the first time in months. My nausea was gone, I could climb stairs without getting out of breath, my ravenous appetite had subsided. I could think. Pregnancy clouds the mind, and life with a newborn so much more so. Giving birth to a baby is, literally, splitting in two, and it is not always clear which one your “I” goes with. Actually, it is clear. It is clearly not you. The one that matters—the real person—is the one whose needs, cries and future you spend all your time attending to. You are reduced to almost nothing, not even half a person.

After the miscarriage, I realized I had been dreading undergoing that reduction a fourth time, dreading that slow and grueling climb back up to personhood. But I didn’t know I had been dreading it until the possibility of undergoing it was gone. And that is an astonishing piece of ignorance.

So many times during the pregnancy I had asked myself: What will it feel like if I don’t have this baby? I wasn’t trying to ask myself whether I would feel guilty about the abortion, I was trying to ask myself whether I wanted the baby. Had I known that a miscarriage would bring such relief, I believe I would have had an abortion. I didn’t want to continue a pregnancy with a baby I didn’t want—even given the fact that, were I to have her, I would surely come to want and love her.

Which is not to say that, had the miscarriage not happened, I would’ve had an abortion. I think I would have carried the pregnancy to term. Because I wouldn’t have known about the relief. I couldn’t spin out the various possibilities in advance; I couldn’t look at the different futures and compare them. Sometimes one can’t do this because one lacks the imaginative and intellectual resources to simulate the different possible outcomes. In this case that was not the problem. My husband—despite the fact that he was firmly in the pro-baby camp—was not surprised by my relief about the miscarriage. If, like him, I had taken a cold, hard look at the Agnes-data, I could’ve known easily which was, at least at that time, my desired result.

But I couldn’t take that look. I couldn’t let myself simulate the two lives, one with her and one without. I couldn’t stomach that reasoning exercise. I locked the doors of my own mind, forcing myself to stand outside them. Why? Because it seemed unconscionable to play with someone’s life that way, to simulate her into nonexistence. Even half a person is more than nothing.

“Even half a person is more than nothing.”

I absolutely oppose the use of coercive state power to force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term. But this is not what this post is about. This post is about using experiences that others have written about their abortions and miscarriages to give us insight into what exactly is lost during abortions and miscarriages. It seems to me that what is at stake is not merely the welfare of the woman who miscarries or seeks out an abortion. There is something about the would-be child in them that matters too, which makes both miscarriage and abortion intensely sad and oftentimes regrettable.