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Sex After Miscarriage Felt Impossible

On the drive to Saint Augustine, Florida, where my husband and I had planned an anniversary getaway, I realized I was having a miscarriage.

The day before, I’d noticed some unusual spotting and rushed to my ob-gyn’s office. Spotting during pregnancy isn’t uncommon (about 20% of women experience it in the first trimester, according to the American Pregnancy Association) but my doctor also couldn’t detect a heartbeat. She gave me an order for two blood tests to be done exactly 48 hours apart in order to confirm if my HCG—aka the pregnancy hormone—was rising (a sign of a healthy pregnancy) or falling (a sign of a miscarriage), and sent me on my way.

As we drove from our hometown to our destination the next morning, my spotting got heavier and heavier. At that point, just six weeks into my first pregnancy after four months of trying, I didn’t need test results to tell me what was happening.

Miscarriage is heartbreakingly common—about 10-15 percent of women who know they’re pregnant, according to the March of Dimes. (Many more women are thought to miscarry before they even know they’re pregnant.) But knowing that didn’t make me stop wondering: Is there something wrong with me?

It felt—and still feels—surreal to have experienced such joy and such despair so close together. But what feels the most surreal to me still is how complicated healing from a miscarriage can be, even months later—especially when it comes to feeling like a sexual being again. Before my miscarriage, I was sexually on fire. With a surge of pregnancy hormones, I was turned on by the tiniest things and masturbated often if my husband wasn’t available. But in the days leading up to my miscarriage, my sexual frenzy started to calm down—looking back, it may have been a sign of the ebb in hormones that surrounds a miscarriage.

It’s been three months since my miscarriage, and life is mostly back to normal save for the way I feel about my body and my sexuality. I’d like to say that I am a-okay but the truth is I feel out of touch with my body—like my sexuality has disappeared, like my body has failed me. So many of our ideas about womanhood are tied to fertility—our breasts that can feed a baby, our periods that are an indicator of biological maturity, our wombs that can nurture growing life. After a miscarriage, it was hard not to feel like my womanhood had somehow failed me. It was—and still is—hard to feel feminine and sexy and desirable.

I know that motherhood is only one part of what makes me who I am—and as a feminist, I know that for many women motherhood doesn’t factor into their femininity at all. But in the haze of trauma, my femininity and womanhood and sexuality all feel muddled. I have always been a sexual person (I mean, I tried sex meditation and consider masturbation a form of self-care) and as my husband and I continue to talk about kids in our future, embracing my sexuality is even more important to me—even if it’s a little more complicated than it was before my miscarriage.

Feeling sexy again began with Beyoncé. A week into knowing about my pregnancy—a week before the miscarriage—Beyoncé’s Homecoming came out on Netflix. She opened up about her difficult pregnancy with twins Rumi and Sir and I found her admission incredibly inspiring, but what has inspired me every day since has been her previous openness about her miscarriage before Blue Ivy.

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Jeff Sessions Just Made It Impossible for Domestic Violence Survivors to Qualify for U.S. Asylum

A new ruling issued Monday by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions stands to put women who are fleeing gender-based or gang violence in their home countries in danger by turning them away from the nation’s borders.

In short, immigrants under the threat of domestic violence will not qualify for asylum in the United States, a move that has left critics baffled by what dangers do qualify for protection. The decision is likely to affect tens of thousands of people hoping to have their immigration cases reviewed, and is a particularly blow to women who have come to this country to escape instances of violence.

“The mere fact that a country may have problems effectively policing certain crimes — such as domestic violence or gang violence — or that certain populations are more likely to be victims of crime, cannot itself establish an asylum claim,” Sessions wrote in his 31-page opinion.

Sessions came to this conclusion after personally intervening in Matter of A-B-, a case that revolves around a woman from El Salvador, who had said she had been sexually, emotionally and physically abused by her husband for more than 15 years. She had been granted asylum through the Board of Immigration Appeals on the grounds that, as a woman unable to leave a violent relationship or receive protection from her government, she had suffered persecution related to her particular social group.

However, Sessions reversed the board’s ruling, saying it had “been wrongly decided.” His move represents a much tougher stance on immigration and a sharp change in previous policies that had been more sympathetic to survivors of domestic violence since 2014, when a kind of precedent had been set by the case of a Guatemalan woman named Aminta Cifuentes. She was granted asylum after describing how her husband had burned her with acid and punched her—even when she was pregnant— for over a decade. After Cifuentes, other victims who had left their countries shared similar arguments for why they should receive asylum protections in the U.S.

Immigrant rights activists have pointed out that Sessions’ ruling will hit hardest when it comes to women fleeing areas like Central America and parts of Mexico, where gang and gender-based violence is especially high. According to a 2015 United Nations report, a “surging tide of violence” has swept over countries like El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, forcing thousands of women and children to leave their homes every month. As part of the report, women told the UN they faced violence—such as rape, assault, extortion and threats by gangs—on a daily basis. Escaping to the U.S. and asking for asylum was often a final recourse for such victims

“What this decision does is yank us all back to the Dark Ages of human rights and women’s human rights and the conceptualization of it,” Karen Musalo, a defense lawyer on the case, told the New York Times.

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