After the Flush
The new reality of pregnancy loss
Content Warning: This essay discusses pregnancy loss and grief, and includes candid descriptions of a miscarriage experience. If you aren’t in the right place to read about those things, please skip this post.
I don't talk about my second pregnancy loss very often. In a sense, it was much less traumatic than my first. This time, my body did what it was supposed to. There were no trips to the doctor, no ultrasounds, no procedures, no condolences.
There was just me cramping, knowing, going to the bathroom, sitting on the toilet, the possibility of life dropping into the bowl, a mass, not much more than a large clot, and the overwhelming grief, sobbing, until I finally pressed the lever.
After that, I chose not to have children. Experiencing that grief twice was too much, I was not willing to put myself through it a third time.
Imagine, though, at 19 weeks, more than 4 months in, you've been to the doctor, you've had the ultrasounds, you've seen the pictures, you've heard the heartbeat. Then suddenly, your body pushes this unformed life out, rejects it against your will. A mass of tissue that is nothing except loss. A future interrupted, extinguished. A mass large enough to clog your plumbing.
You were planning the nursery. Shopping for maternity clothes. Watching videos about how to secure car seats, babyproof your kitchen, counting the days until you could know the gender (or not). Imagining your child's personality as they grew up, imagining what they would grow up to do, who they would really be.
And now, you have a dead body.
This is the grief that no one should have to endure alone, but so many women do. If you don't know a woman who has miscarried, you've either been lied to because you are being protected, or because you are not safe to tell. Between 10-20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage. 1 in 4 women experience this grief.
Now imagine, while dealing with the physical and emotional aftermath of this betrayal by your body, that you are arrested. Not for an unrelated crime, but for the act of disposing of the remnants of this life that was never going to be lived. You are accused of miscarrying on purpose and throwing away a baby.
This is what happened to a 24-year-old Georgia woman in March of this year. Evidently she miscarried on March 20th, and was released on March 23rd on bond.
I don't know what happened between those two events, but I can imagine. Being arrested is a traumatic experience. On the day I lost my pregnancy, if I had been this woman, police would have come to my house, cuffed me in front of my husband, put me in the back seat of their car and driven away. At the police station, in a stupor of grief, I would have been processed, whatever that entails. I would be led to a cell, where I would be shut away from the world, behind bars, what autonomy I had left stripped from me. The rest of my bleeding would go into a metal toilet. There would be no solace. I would be alone in a sterile jail cell with my recalibrating hormones and overwhelming grief.
Worse yet, the charges against this woman were not dropped until April 4th. That is 16 days being treated as a criminal for something you cannot control. Such an experience is traumatic and inflicts grave psychological harm. This woman will live with the scars of these events for the rest of her life.
If they can do this to a young Georgia woman, they will do it to any woman in this country. No matter our color, income, education, religion - none of us are safe.
Thank you for reading. If my words were meaningful for you, please let me know.
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