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Women Blame Themselves for Miscarriages. This Test Could Change That.


“I’ve had three miscarriages and one ectopic pregnancy and every single time I blamed my body,” says Danielle Campoamor, 33, a mother of two in New York. “My self-hatred became so severe I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. I starved my body as if I was paying a penance. I spent so much of the mourning process asking what was wrong with me. What was wrong with my body.”

The shame associated with miscarriage can be overwhelming. As a psychologist specializing in women’s reproductive and maternal mental health, counseling patients like Campoamor who blame themselves for their pregnancy losses is as common as loss itself. The women in my office are often riddled with guilt; revisiting every minute detail of their lives in search of the reason behind their miscarriage. In the haze of grief, they point the finger at themselves: Was it something they ate? Did they workout too often? Had they done something catastrophic in the weeks before they even knew they were pregnant?

Having access to concrete answers could change a lot.

At least half of all miscarriages are the result of an abnormal number chromosomes in the embryo, according to The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. It’s the most common cause of pregnancy loss. But getting access to the genetic testing of fetal tissue is complicated and costly—genetic testing is rarely offered to anyone who’s experienced less than three miscarriages, and can cost thousands of dollars. A new rapid genetic test, developed by Zev Williams, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Columbia University Fertility Center at New York Presbyterian Hospital and his team, hopes to change that. The new test would take just hours to complete, and cost less than $200. Williams expects the test to be available within a year but will need to be approved by medical regulatory agencies.

Campoamor says that kind of info would have made all the difference when she was mourning her losses. “What I wouldn’t have given to have access to a test that would’ve let me know that my body didn’t let me down, that there was a problem with the pregnancies from the beginning,” she says.

A 2015 national survey published in the Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology found that 47 percent of people who’ve had miscarriage feel guilty, and 41 percent felt like they had done something wrong to cause the pregnancy loss: Seventy-six percent of Americans believe pregnancy loss is caused by a stressful event, 64 percent believe it’s caused by the pregnant person lifting a heavy object, 28 percent believe previously using an intrauterine device causes miscarriages, and 22 percent blame the use of oral contraceptives, according to the survey. “I blamed my IUD. I blamed my decision to use birth control at the age of 15. I blamed my job, my work load, a harmless argument with my partner, running at the gym. I looked for any reason—anything—to blame for my losses,” Campoamor says. There’s no evidence that any of these things contribute to miscarriage but the stigma persists. “Years later, I still have to work to not blame myself, what I ate, how much water I did or didn’t drink. The self-blame just lingers.”

The same survey found that 78 percent of the participants “reported wanting to know the cause of their miscarriage, even if no intervention could have prevented it from occurring.” That’s precisely why this test is poised to be such a game changer. Getting women answers could help dissolve the feelings of shame and failure that so often shroud a miscarriage. A 2019 study found that one in six women experience long-term post-traumatic stress following a miscarriage, and 1 in 10 women meet the criteria for major depression directly following a loss. Bypassing the mystery can potentially lead to a smoother, less complicated emotional journey following loss.

The test won’t answer every question about a miscarriage. For starters, it requires tissue from the pregnancy to test, and doctors may not always have the opportunity. If a test reveals that there were no genetic abnormalities, it could trigger even more questions—and self-blame—about the cause. But even that can be helpful. “In the minority of cases where the cause of the loss was not genetics, it allows us to look for the cause sooner—before waiting for the women to have multiple more losses,” says Williams. “If a cause is discovered, it can be corrected so the couple can have the best chance for success in the next pregnancy.“

As humans, we like to know why. I’ve sat across from hundreds of women and heard the desperation in their voices as they search for a reason why they didn’t carry a pregnancy to term. This test could help mitigate some of the psychological fallout of pregnancy loss by separating fact from fiction; science from a pervasive cultural misunderstanding that fuels self-blame and self-hatred.

“After each loss I felt like I was in the dark,” Campoamor says. “Like I was just feeling my way through grief, trying to hold onto something, anything, before I floated away. Information about why it happened, why my body didn’t hold onto those pregnancies, would’ve felt like a lantern. It wouldn’t have assuaged my pain, but it would have lit a path through it.”

Jessica Zucker is a Los Angeles-based psychologist specializing in women’s reproductive health and the author of the forthcoming book I HAD A MISCARRIAGE: A Memoir, A Movement (Feminist Press, 2021).





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Donna Dees-Thomases, Glamour’s 2000 Woman of the Year, Is the Friendliest Person to Change The World


In 2000, Donna Dees-Thomases celebrated Mother’s Day by going for a walk.

About 1 million people joined her.

It was the Million Mom March, a giant grassroots mobilization of moms against gun violence that Dees-Thomases had organized over the course of just 10 months. A mother of two girls living in suburban New Jersey, she had watched the Columbine massacre open up a summer of violence that ended with an attack on a day camp at a Jewish Community Center outside of L.A. in August of 1999 that left one dead and five injured. The sight of terrified children fleeing a gunman shocked her into action.

At this point in the story, which Dees-Thomases is telling me from the backyard of her home in Louisiana, she interrupts herself to pet a dog that has wandered into her yard. I hear panting in the background, as she begins to talk again about governmental inaction in the face of gun violence. Then she adds, ecstatically, ”Two goldendoodles! Beautiful.”

It’s this kind of extreme, almost comic friendliness that helped her organize a historic event and launch a national movement—and the reason Glamour honored her in 2000 as a Woman of the Year.

Dees-Thomases spent 10 feverish months working part-time as a publicist for Late Show With David Letterman, parenting, and organizing the Million Moms March. In the days before social media, before smartphones, before virality, Dees-Thomases used every connection she had ever made and worked every hour she could stay awake. As her plan, which had started as bullet points on scratch paper, grew into a national news event, she promoted it by debating the head of the National Rifle Organization on Meet the Press and securing a spot on Oprah. She wore denim overalls most of the time. On the day of the march, she was so tired she nearly put on mismatched sneakers. The day was a smash success, and honors, including Glamour’s Woman of the Year award, followed.

And then? You know what happened, even if you don’t know Dees-Thomases’s story. The Million Moms March was a massive success. But the mass shootings of the Columbine era continued. Innocent people died. Children died, all the time. There was no runaway movement that defeated the gun lobby and changed federal regulations and took over state houses. In 2019 there were more mass shootings than days in the year.

“Grassroots, progressive causes are not easy,” says Dees-Thomases, who is remarkably open about her own shortcomings. “We struggled so much to create an organization out of it. We attempted two mergers after the march, we struggled as an organization, we had branding issues. I think we overused our database for fund-raising.” She shares these lessons with the leaders of the other organizations she supports (and thinks you should support too): Moms Demand Action, Brady Chapter, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, Giffords, and March for Our Lives.

“Twenty years later I’m beating myself up a little less, because I’ve watched groups like the Women’s March struggle,” she says. “It’s difficult when you go from a Facebook page to activists across the country.” And gun-violence work, in particular, is hard (“No one wants to have a movement created by trauma and death”). She believes—she knows—that grassroots organizing to change law and life is possible and necessary. “Million Moms March was a grassroots group of women, many of whom had never organized so much as a carpool before,” she says. “But they found inner strength, used their talents and their ability to stand up to the gun lobby, and say, ‘This is what we’re doing.’”



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Climate Change Parenting – How to Raise a Child at the End of the World


My two-year-old is funny and joyful and extremely cute, but she requires a lot of patience, and I am often desperate to disengage from her. I am not alone in this feeling; at any playground, as soon as parents are behind their kids, pushing them on the swings, we’re on our phones, distracting ourselves with a little Instagram-induced adrenaline rush. Anything will do the trick: friends’ selfies, Twitter jokes, even silly videos of other people’s kids. But the images of the burning Amazon and Australian wildfires that keep popping up on my newsfeed are not the sort of adrenaline rush I hope for.

Raising a kid in this precarious moment requires both reckless denial and meticulous planning. Before our child was born, I put an emergency survival kit on the baby registry because I figured we might need to prep for the apocalypse as a family of three. My partner—not a doomsday prepper herself—was skeptical at first. But the kit I picked out was inexpensive. (At under $40, it’s a steal compared to the giant camo backpacks with their own pre-printed “HELP” signs that retail for hundreds of dollars.) It was also one of the first items to go; a younger friend picked it off the registry right away.

If it were just my partner and me, we’d head for the open road when the time came or swallow cyanide together romantically. But babies need car seats and five square meals, including two to throw on the ground, and as we prepared for our kid’s arrival, I figured we should think about what we’d need to ensure her basic survival at the end of the world in advance.

In a disaster-prep presentation at work right before the baby was born (because we have those now), we were told to keep four gallons of water on us at all times. I pictured myself holding my toddler in one arm, her folded-up crib in the other, the backpack we use as a diaper bag crammed with water jugs on my back, the cat obviously forgotten at home. It was not a comforting vision.

That’s how we ended up with our end-times kit. You register for gifts so that the kind people in your life can help you get ready for life with your child—the right car seat, the best crib, flares in case of disaster. The kit I chose is packed into a black-and-silver tin a little bigger than a deck of cards, with a Dia de los Muertos skull design for our Instagrammable escape. You can do a lot with a tampon in the wilderness, they say, like filter water or have your period for three hours, so we’ll be fine with the single one in the kit. There are iodine tablets and doll-sized fire starters that I don’t know how to use, plus bandaids, which will probably come in handy for wildfire burns. Okay, so our emergency kit is a box of bandaids. We’re all set!

It is a profound leap of faith to bring another person into the world, and it is extra profound now. Some argue that it’s irresponsible to produce another consumer as we battle climate change, a person who will probably eat beef and fly on airplanes and drive a car for 80 years.

“It’s easy to give up meat and ride my bike everywhere, but to sacrifice having a family is a big change,” my friend Carlie says. She’s a paleontologist who studies dinosaur extinction and wears an inflatable T-Rex costume at Halloween, and she’s not sure whether she and her new husband will have kids. “There’s no way I can look at what we’re doing now and say a mass extinction isn’t coming,” she says, and I groan.

Those of us who plunged ahead despite the warnings are raising end-of-the-world babies. Before she was born, I promised myself that once I had a child I’d keep the gas tank full instead of zipping around with the warning light on like I used to, daring it to hit zero before I pulled into the cheap gas station. If we needed to evacuate, I intended to be able to leave. (I know several people who have fled climate emergencies, so the scenario is not as hypothetical as I want it to be.)



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If Manny Jacinto’s Cheekbones Can’t Get You to Care About Climate Change, I Don’t Know What Can


Looking like a figurehead on the prow of a ship that has been given consciousness, the Good Place star Manny Jacinto protested government inaction on climate change on Friday in Washington, D.C.

The appearance of the Internet’s Newest Boyfriend in circumstances that were somehow do-gooder, subversive, and literally wet has been too much for most. “Manny Jacinto’s jawline for president,” one Twitter user wrote. “How does his face just do that?” others asked. “Adding ‘Manny Jacinto holds my umbrella’ to list of PG-rated fantasies,” another wrote.

The 32-year-old actor joined in activist Jane Fonda’s ongoing “Fire Drill Fridays” protests in front of the Capitol building, and gave a speech that highlighted legal action that Filipino citizens are taking against corporate climate polluters. “Climate deniers are attempting to deflect our attention,” he said, jawline slicing through the air like a knife juggler’s tools.

Hi. John Lamparski

“Rather than finding policy solutions, they’re highlighting the need for our individual changes,” he continued, as falling raindrops sizzled on his skin, pooling in the hollows under his cheekbones.

“And yes, while our individual actions are important—like eating less meat or conscious transportation choices—we cannot be taken in by this deflection campaign and must push for policy reform,” he said, shimmering with sweet, hot indignation. Pausing for the audience to absorb his words, he seemed to be saying, “If our only world becomes uninhabitable, my genetic code will no longer be replicable.” Jacinto was not arrested, which hopefully means he’ll soon be back for more.

If Manny Jacintos Cheekbones Cant Get You to Care About Climate Change I Dont Know What Can
John Lamparski

For Fonda’s “Fire Drill”–themed protest Jacinto accessorized with a firetruck-red skinny scarf that matched Fonda’s own wrap coat, as well as large, round eyeglasses that made some onlookers (me) whisper the word orgasm to ourselves. When Fonda had the mic, he stood behind her nodding manfully, his extraordinary hair threatening to steal focus from the catastrophe of national inaction in the face of environmental devastation.

Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour.





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Ilana Glazer and Jameela Jamil Are Using Humor to Change the World


Ilana Glazer and Jameela Jamil have each had quite the year. Glazer’s hit TV series Broad City came to a hilarious, sentimental conclusion this past spring. Meanwhile, Jamil is only a few episodes away from saying goodbye to NBC’s The Good Place for, well, good. These two women are unique and talented in their own right, but they do share a commonality: They’ve used their authentic voices to effect real change, both in Hollywood and beyond. Whether it’s the body positivity movement or politics, Ilana Glazer and Jameela Jamil frequently use humor and genuine communication to move the needle forward. At Glamour‘s 2019 Women of the Year Summit on November 10, they taught us how we can do the same.

Jamil, who created I Weigh after being long-frustrated with women getting reduced to a number on the scale, began the conversation by opening up about her own journey to self-acceptance. The actor pinpointed a time when she was first bullied in school, which she says led to her developing an eating disorder. “My teacher made the stupidest fucking decision of all time…in order to teach us about charts, [she] weighed everyone,” she says. “I was the fattest, and my name was at the top of the chart. That’s when the bullying began about my weight, which led very quickly to my anorexia. That was the first time I realized I was a bit chubby.”

Glazer has also created a platform for social change, with hers connecting people to political policy. The actor and activist is the founder of Generator Collective, which was born out of her desire to learn more about our governmental systems. “I didn’t know what was coming up in the local elections. I didn’t realize that the primaries are different for states, you know, things like that,” she says. “It’s just saying, ‘I don’t know. I just want to learn the basic minimum.’ And it’s about finding minimal civic engagement and embodying that, which is voting whenever there’s an election and God forbid, canvasing once every four years.”

Jamil is just as fired up about American politics, particularly when it comes to women’s rights. “I’m really upset about abortion not being considered a woman’s right. I’ve had an abortion before. It was brilliant. I mean, it was also painful, but it was an excellent decision. And it wasn’t because of an emergency. It was just something that I needed to do because my life is as important as someone who was not yet born,” she told the audience.

Craig Barritt/Getty Images for Glamour

Aside from their activism, the two share a similar philosophy on life. Jamil considers herself a work in progress, and neither are obsessed with perfectionism, or portraying a persona online or in the press that’s anything other than their authentic selves. “In the 90s, when it was actually just TV and film and standard forms of media, [there was] a movie star image and this mystery behind it,” Glazer says. “The mystery is gone. I like it. I prefer it. Women are able to narrate their own stories.”





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Gender Equality Is 208 Years Away. Melinda Gates Wants to Change That.


It can be hard to find the words to describe just how frustrating it is that gender inequality is still so pervasive, even in the wealthiest nation on the planet. From compensation to representation, women lag so far behind men that the World Economic Forum estimates it will take more than two centuries to achieve gender equality in the United States.

Disparities between men and women have been discussed ad nauseam; it can feel like we’re out of points to make and tactics to use. But comedian Sarah Silverman is creative. Thanks to Melinda Gates and a new (hilarious) PSA, Silverman summed up her exasperation like so: “How is it that I can order a bag of dick-shaped gummy bears with same-day delivery, but I have to wait 208 years for gender equality?”

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It’s a good question, and one that Gates has tried to solve (in, uh, different words) for decades. Earlier this summer, she addressed the issue in an op-ed and wrote an entire book, titled The Moment of Lift, to discuss in detail some of the solutions she believes can help women get ahead. But ever the realist, Gates knows that even the most well-intentioned articles and books have a limited reach. So to inch the needle forward, she’s decided to take the fight to social media.

The Equality Can’t Wait campaign aims to accelerate progress when it comes to gender issues in America, building on the framework that Gates outlined in her recent book and inviting both men and women to share their stories about how crucial it is to close the gender gap. To kick it off, Gates didn’t want to release another mournful PSA. Instead, she tapped actor and director Natasha Lyonne to corral over a dozen comedians to, well, roast the problem.

In under five minutes, Silverman, with Ilana Glazer, Abbi Jacobson, Uzo Aduba, Maya Rudolph, Fred Armisen, John Mulaney, Margaret Cho, Natasha Rothwell, and more, crack jokes about how absurd it is that genuine gender balance is still several lifetimes into the future.

As Mulaney puts it, “That’s the most specific bad news I’ve ever heard!” Or as Aduba fumes, “That’s 1,456 dog years. I’m telling you, bitches never get a break.“

Towards the end of the video, conversation does turn serious and it becomes clear that the reason it’s so hard to talk about sexism is because the issue is so, so vast. It’s not just unequal wages or discrimination or harassment or bias. It’s all of that. And then some. When the music turns somber, Aduba explains that two more centuries of the status quo means not a single woman alive now will ever experience a fairer, more equal world. Glazer recounts sexual harassment. Silverman reminds viewers that some elected leaders have in fact tried to turn the clock back, weaponizing their power to strip women of the rights we do have.



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