Black Women & Miscarriages, A Common Tragedy

In pop culture and on film and TV — the place I generally go to either make sense of the world or to escape it — miscarriages are typically used as a plot device, a way to get a character out of a pesky pregnancy or as a copout so the writers don’t have to deal with abortion (see: the “convenient miscarriage” trope in TV most recently depicted on And Just Like That). As “common” as they are on screen, the gory details are usually spared. In Grey’s Anatomy, when Cristina Yang has a miscarriage in Season 2, the focus of her recovery is on her emotional coldness towards the incident (she eventually cries so hard she delivers the now iconic and much-memed “Somebody sedate me!” line), not the physical specifics. When Meredith Grey and Miranda Bailey experience their own in later seasons, the medical ramifications, aside from some blood, are also glossed over.