Is The Subject Of Miscarriage Finally Getting The Proper Care And Attention It Deserves?

“I remember the feeling of immediate darkness,” recalls Laura Buckingham, 37, sitting by the window in her Kent home, describing her reaction to her first miscarriage – one of 11 she has experienced to date. “It was so frightening.” For Bex Gunn, also 37, there was an overriding sense of bewilderment. “When I was at my 12-week scan and the sonographer said there was no heartbeat, I was so embarrassed not to know what was going to happen or how big the baby was at that gestation,” she explains, speaking from her photography studio in East Sussex. “As someone who’d already had children, I ignorantly didn’t think miscarriage would be part of my story.”

Driven by a desire to reach out to other people who had found themselves in that darkness, to offer comfort where so often we find shock, sadness and incomprehension, Buckingham and Gunn co-founded the podcast The Worst Girl Gang Ever, which has offered guidance and solace to countless women since it launched in July 2020. In August, they are set to release a handbook (bearing the same title as their podcast) that aims to offer practical and emotional help to those navigating pregnancy loss. “To improve support we need to start doing it earlier,” says Gunn. “We need to make baby loss a part of normal conversation. It should be as well recognised as What to Expect When You’re Expecting.”

Buckingham and Gunn are part of a growing group of women helping to change the place of miscarriage in public consciousness. Speaking from her home via Zoom, global health correspondent for BBC News Tulip Mazumdar, 41, explains how her own recurrent pregnancy losses prompted her to make the documentary Miscarriage: The Search for Answers, which first aired earlier this summer. She says her naivety saw her get on a plane to the Moria refugee camp in Lesbos while having a miscarriage. “I think I was probably in shock, but the rhetoric is always that an early loss is just like a long period,” she explains. Had there been complications, she says, her own life may have been at risk.

Since writing about her experience in Vogue in 2018, this August Pippa Vosper will publish Beyond Grief: Navigating the Journey of Pregnancy and Baby Loss, a book – which includes many personal accounts of miscarriage, from Leandra Medine Cohen to Elizabeth Day – inspired by the tragic loss of her son, Axel, five months into her pregnancy in 2017. “Whether it’s four weeks, a pregnancy test or an eight-month birth, people just want to tell you what happened,” explains Vosper. “And there’s not much room for that in social circles.” Meanwhile, psychotherapist Anna Hogeland’s debut novel, The Long Answer, also published next month, explores “the ways in which women are bound together and pulled apart by their shared and contrasting experiences of pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage and infertility”.