Tag: Miscarriage

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IVF Failure Felt Like Miscarriage


Ten percent of all known pregnancies end in miscarriage. So why does the subject still feel so taboo? For women dealing with the complicated grief of miscarriage, it’s not the stat that’s comforting—it’s the knowledge that they’re not alone, that there is a space to share their story. To help end the culture of silence that surrounds pregnancy and infant loss, Glamour presents The 10 Percent, a place to dismantle the stereotypes and share real, raw, stigma-free stories.

Infertility isn’t a word you expert to hear at 26 years of age. Certainly not when you’re still single and years away from thinking about your future family. But that’s exactly how old I was when, still young and single, I was told that stage IV endometriosis had stripped me of my ability to conceive. “If you ever want to have biological children, you need to do something about that now,” my doctor advised.

The development of my condition happened swiftly, so it’s not like I’d had years to prepare for this possibility. It was all dropped in my lap in a bundle; the diagnosis, the prognosis, and the suggestion that I act upon my fertility now, before it was too late.

I visited with a reproductive endocrinologist and weighed my options. At the time, egg freezing was considered a risk, still experimental—the rate of eggs that survived freezing was just too low, and the possibility that none of my eggs would survive and that I wouldn’t know that until years down the line was just too great.

I knew I couldn’t live with the years of uncertainty, my desire to be a mom anything but uncertain.

Embryo freezing was seen to have better odds, but if I was going to purchase sperm for that, I figured I might as well go the whole way and do a fresh in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycle, which had the best chance of success overall. At least, that was how I reasoned with myself when I decided to pursue IVF as a single woman just a few months past my 27th birthday.

The process happened quickly. A month of medications followed by a minor outpatient surgery to extract the eggs that would then be fertilized for my IVF cycle. In the end, I had only three viable embryos. But the picture given to me of those three embryos was one I cherished. These are my babies, I thought.

Because I was young (with the assumption being that my youth might lead to more favorable results), the decision was made to transfer only one of those embryos at first. From the moment that transfer took place, I was convinced I was pregnant, turning down wine at dinner with a gleeful smirk. Every twinge and butterfly I felt was proof to me of that fact, even long before physical symptoms would have made sense. So confident was I that there was a little life growing inside me, I even toured the local midwife center, aiming to get on their list as soon as possible so that I could give birth to my baby in their birthing tub.

I was so convinced I was pregnant that when the call came 10 days later confirming that I wasn’t, I immediately fell to the floor in tears. I knew logically that what I was experiencing was not a miscarriage—you have to be pregnant first to experience that—but in my heart, a miscarriage was the closest thing I could think to compare my IVF failure to.

That had been my baby. I’d seen its picture. An actual, viable embryo had been placed into my body; all my hopes and dreams tied up in a little clump of cells that bore my DNA. And it hadn’t survived.



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When Miscarriage Is a Relief


Ten percent of all known pregnancies end in miscarriage. So why does the subject still feel so taboo? For women dealing with the complicated grief of miscarriage, it’s not the stat that’s comforting—it’s the knowledge that they’re not alone, that there is a space to share their story. To help end the culture of silence that surrounds pregnancy and infant loss, Glamour presents The 10 Percent, a place to dismantle the stereotypes and share real, raw, stigma-free stories.

When she was in the throes of postpartum psychosis after the birth of her daughter in 2011, Sarah Fader thought she was dying. She couldn’t sleep. Her anxiety was out of control. Most of all, she worried about who would take care of her toddler son and newborn daughter when she was gone. “It was so terrifying. I did not expect that my mental health would go to that place,” says Fader, 40. “I was convinced that I was dying, and no one could tell me otherwise.”

Following her first pregnancy, Fader had experienced depression after she stopped nursing. She sought out medication and therapy, which set her back on track. The psychosis she was experiencing after her second pregnancy was significantly worse—the hormonal changes of pregnancy and childbirth had exacerbated her OCD and generalized anxiety disorder, she says (which some research suggests can be a common experience). “Any preexisting mental health issues can definitely be escalated during pregnancy and after childbirth,” says Courtney Glashow, LCSW, owner and psychotherapist at Anchor Therapy in New Jersey, who specializes in helping women after miscarriages. “Pregnancy and postpartum are fragile times for anyone, and it’s always helpful to have support, since you can feel heightened emotional issues.”

Fader eventually got help—she found a medication that worked for her and gradually felt stronger. But the terror she felt during that postpartum breakdown stayed with her. She had come to realize “with the subsequent birth of each child that I had, my mental health declined.” The thought of another pregnancy, another battle with perinatal mental health issues, was paralyzing.

Then in October 2012, Fader missed her period and took an at-home pregnancy test. It was positive.

“I was so scared to go back to that place when I found out I was pregnant for the third time,” Fader says. “On the one hand, I was really excited that I could potentially have a third child. But on the other hand, I was absolutely terrified that I would get even worse than I had the second time and be in a state where I could not function or care for myself or my children.”

At about six weeks gestation, Fader miscarried. “I was having those conflicted feelings, and then I just got a really heavy period. And I felt super relieved: I don’t have to risk my mental health to carry a baby,” says Fader, now the founder and CEO of mental health nonprofit Stigma Fighters.

Miscarriages are incredibly common: They’re estimated to occur in about 10% of known pregnancies, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Despite how common they are, our attitudes make talking about these experiences difficult, and the only permissible emotion is grief—shared quietly, modestly.

The truth is there’s no right or wrong way to feel after a pregnancy ends. Women experience a whole range of emotions—even relief—after a miscarriage, all of which deserve respect and empathy.

“If someone experiences a miscarriage, it is a cultural norm to see it as a devastating loss,” Glashow says. But feeling relieved when a pregnancy ends—perhaps it was not planned, not viable, not financially or socially feasible—is normal too.

Feeling relieved after a miscarriage comes with its own complicated grief. To help take on the taboo, Glamour asked women to share their stories.

“I was relieved to no longer be in limbo.”

Vanessa*, 32, was hit with conflicting emotions after finding out she was pregnant in May. The parents of a 20-month-old girl, she and her husband knew they wanted a second child but weren’t trying to conceive. They were just beginning to hit their stride as parents—two kids under the age of three would be a huge challenge. On top of that, Vanessa, who works in education, had recently negotiated with her bosses to work part-time. Finally, it felt she had achieved some balance.



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Missed Miscarriage: What It’s Like to be Waiting to Miscarry


Ten percent of all known pregnancies end in miscarriage. So why does the subject still feel so taboo? For women dealing with the complicated grief of miscarriage, it’s not the stat that’s comforting—it’s the knowledge that they’re not alone, that there is a space to share their story. To help end the culture of silence that surrounds pregnancy and infant loss, Glamour presents The 10 Percent, a place to dismantle the stereotypes and share real, raw, stigma-free stories.

After suffering three pregnancy losses over the last year, I’ve become a bit of a reluctant expert on miscarriages. There are the really early ones, sometimes called chemical pregnancies, which you might not even know about unless you take an early pregnancy test. There are the sudden, unexpected ones—the ones every pregnant woman fears. And then there’s the missed miscarriage, the kind of loss that takes its time, leaving women like me in a state of stagnation as we wait, sometimes weeks, for our pregnancies to end.

I would have been about seven weeks pregnant when I found out about my own loss. At the time I was vacationing in Spain with my husband and 2-year-old son, but all I could think about was going home to my doctor so I could get an ultrasound and see the baby’s heartbeat. I worried over every twinge until I woke up one morning with cramps so sharp I made an emergency appointment with an OB at a hospital on the outskirts of Barcelona.

I’d become all too familiar with transvaginal ultrasounds during my first pregnancy, and that moment of holding my breath before the doctor smiled and pointed out my healthy baby and its beating heart on the screen. Except this time the Spanish doctor didn’t smile and instead told me that the pregnancy had stopped progressing weeks earlier.

These types of pregnancy losses come without the obvious symptoms of a miscarriage. I’d experienced no bleeding. No cramps until that morning. Nothing to indicate the ball of cells growing inside my uterus had abruptly stopped without so much as a whisper goodbye. For this reason, missed miscarriages like mine are typically diagnosed by ultrasound, says Scott Sullivan, M.D., director of maternal-fetal medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina. It’s an experience that’s becoming more common. “When I started my career [20 years ago], our ultrasound abilities were limited—we couldn’t even see what was going on at five, six, seven weeks,” Sullivan says. Thanks to better technology, women are now getting their first ultrasound at 12 weeks, if not sooner—a significant jump from the 16- to 18-week window of the past. “I suspect that in years past people had miscarriages that they didn’t know about,” Sullivan says. It’s not that missed miscarriages are getting more common; it’s just that we’re more likely to know about them.

In Barcelona the doctor advised me to prepare to complete the miscarriage within a week, and I booked an emergency flight home the next day.

Back in the comfort of my home, I braced myself for the bleeding, but nothing happened—for five weeks. I looked and felt normal as the pregnancy hormones dissipated, but my routine now included weekly visits to my OB for check-ins. I’d wait with pregnant women in my doctor’s lobby, staring at the photos of newborn babies hanging on the walls before going into the ultrasound room that had been such a joyful place during my first pregnancy. And there, visit after visit, I’d see that there was still a five-week-old embryo hanging out in my womb, apparently in no hurry to leave. My doctor confirmed that I was experiencing a missed miscarriage, which seemed a funny way to describe something that hadn’t technically happened yet.



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‘I Owe $2,500 for My Miscarriage’


The first time we heard the heartbeat, my pregnancy app said that baby was the size of a blueberry. There it was, our second surprise baby, their little heart flickering at us. “Hi, baby,” I heard my husband say while the nurse handed him the photo of our little one. The second time we went in for an ultrasound, two weeks later, to make sure everything was progressing normally, things went differently.

Before the appointment, everything with my pregnancy seemed normal—I was more tired than usual, sometimes taking naps at the same time as my son did; I had food aversions, especially to things that had very strong smells; and I had to pee all the time. I had no bleeding or cramps. Walking into the ultrasound center, I fully expected a normal appointment. They were going to measure the fetus to see how far along I was, look for a heartbeat, and make sure it had implanted correctly in my uterus. But when the sonogram technician kept pushing the wand around inside of me and making faces I knew something was wrong. “There’s no heartbeat,” the doctor said. My body immediately went numb.

I knew this was a possibility, considering that 1 in 10 women experience a miscarriage. It was an even higher possibility for me, since doctors had discovered a polyp on my uterus after the birth of my first son. Still, hearing those words felt like running face-first into a brick wall—I was stunned, shocked, and confused at the sudden pain. Despite the fact that miscarriages are so common, nothing can really prepare you for how you’re going to feel or react in that moment.

My husband kept telling me how strong I was and how we were going to be okay, and I knew, eventually, he would be right. But right now, all I could think about was not having a dead baby inside of me.

I called my gynecologist and she gave me three options: We could wait for my body to miscarry naturally; I could also take misoprostol, a pill that helps speed the process along by inducing strong uterine contractions (also sometimes called the abortion pill); or I could get a dilatation and curettage (also known as a D&C) in which a medical professional surgically removes all pregnancy material from your uterus.

Given that the fetus had stopped developing two weeks prior and my body was showing no signs of having noticed, my doctor warned me that a natural miscarriage could take weeks if not months. I couldn’t bear the thought of living in that limbo, not knowing when or if my body was going to start the process, still feeling all the symptoms of pregnancy but also fully being aware that this baby I was carrying was no longer growing, so I opted to miscarry through a D&C.

Miscarriages are traumatic on so many levels. Knowing that there was a fetus that had stopped developing still inside of me was destroying me emotionally. It was all I could think of. The loss of that potential life was gutting enough—the thought of then seeing the miscarriage unfold in my underwear made me feel sick. We scheduled the surgery for two days later.

The day of the surgery I was pretty relaxed. I had read innumerable stories of what the process is like, and I felt mentally ready to face it. Then, while signing my intake papers at the hospital, I read the word abortion on my chart. My whole body tensed.

Technically D&Cs are used in cases of miscarriage and abortion, and so hospitals sometimes use one label for both. “Abortion simply means the ‘termination of pregnancy,’ whether by the body or an external force,” says Chloe Lubel, a midwife at Central Park Midwifery, who oversaw my first pregnancy and also saw me through my miscarriage. I understand the technicality, but seeing the A-word when you very much did hope to carry your pregnancy to term and meet what had been stirring inside you earthside is gutting.



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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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Whitney Port Reveals She Had a Miscarriage Two Weeks Ago


We’ve seen so much of Whitney Port‘s life over the years—after all, The Hills and The Hills: New Beginnings star has been on our screens for over 10 years. But Port recently shared her most personal story yet, in which she reveals she had a miscarriage two weeks ago.

Port shared the story during an intimate interview with her husband, Tim Rosenman, on her podcast With Whit, and then posted footage of the exchange on Instagram. In it, she describes how she felt when she found out the news. (She and Rosenman were expecting their second child after giving birth to their son in 2017.)

“This is really hard for me to write. Two weeks ago, I had a miscarriage,” she explains in the Instagram caption. “The amount of various emotions I felt in the past couple weeks have been extreme…from shock to sadness to relief, which then led to guilt for feeling that relief.”

She continues, “My identity has been shaken in regards to who [I am] as a mom and human being. I’m currently in the process of learning to accept that my feelings are valid no matter what they are. Whether or not people feel the same way as me or not. They are my personal emotions that are the result from my own journey.”

This is not the first time Port has opened up about her experiences with motherhood—she previously talked about a tough incident she had in which she felt she was mom-shamed, and she encouraged other women to share their own stories. She’s approaching the story of her miscarriage in a similar way, explaining in her Instagram that she wants to use her platform to open the floor up to other women who have gone through the same thing.

“The video above is a glimpse into the story and coming to terms with how I feel,” she writes. “I welcome anyone to share their stories or feelings. I want my platform to be an open place where we can share difficult conversations.”



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