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.
“I want to share with you that I am most likely experiencing a miscarriage,” Hilaria Baldwin wrote to her more than 600,000 followers on Instagram in April. Baldwin, who has four kids with husband Alec Baldwin, had come back from an ultrasound devastated after finding out somewhere around 10 weeks that the embryo wasn’t growing and its heartbeat was weak. In the midst of all the uncertainty, she turned to social media. “For me, community is healing,” she told Glamour.
Baldwin isn’t the only one turning to social media to share the experience of miscarriage—even as it happens in real time. Currently there are more than half a million hashtags related to #miscarriage, #miscarriagesupport, and #miscarriageawareness on Instagram, their numbers growing every day as women send some of their most intimate experiences into the ether of the Internet. (Baldwin ultimately did suffer a miscarriage. Her post alone garnered nearly 21,000 comments, many from women sharing their own stories of miscarriage.)
“There’s no doubt that the bereaved after miscarriage can be nourished by the comfort and understanding of others who share their own experience of loss, either online or face-to-face,” says Julia Bueno, a psychotherapist specializing in miscarriage and author of The Brink of Being, her memoir of a personal miscarriage and how society reacts—and fails to react—to pregnancy loss. “While every story is different, more often than not there are commonalities. It helps to know you aren’t the only one feeling a certain way.”
Despite the culture of silence that’s enshrouded miscarriage for years, it’s an incredibly common experience. An estimated 10% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. (And that’s just clinically recognized pregnancies—an estimated 25% of all pregnancies, including early pregnancies that women may not yet be aware of, end in miscarriage.) The loss can trigger anxiety, depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder in addition to feelings of anger, grief, and isolation.
Enter social media, a public forum that’s paradoxically become home to many of the things that are too taboo to say out loud. “The very act of sharing a story conveys a desire for a lost baby to be acknowledged and ‘witnessed.’ Among a compassionate community, this will happen,” Bueno says. “This is so important, as it’s precisely this lack of acknowledgement of what has been lost that compounds grief and hurt.”
For Erika Vecchio, 36, opening up her feelings about miscarriage on Facebook this summer wasn’t a hard decision. The Detroit marketing strategist wanted to share the story of her third pregnancy loss not only to help people understand her situation but also to end the silence that surrounds the unexpected end of a pregnancy.
“No matter how much anyone tells you that they’ve gone through it, and know what it’s like, during the experience it’s a dark and lonely time,” Vecchio wrote, noting the pain of the contractions and the blood loss she experienced after her third pregnancy ended at 11 weeks. “But knowing that talking about it openly after is frowned upon makes it harder.”
At first, sharing her story felt liberating. Then came the comments. There were the ones that meant to be comforting, like the well-intentioned relative who promised Vecchio she would have a “rainbow baby” someday (aka a full-term pregnancy and birth after a miscarriage). Others were head-scratchers, like the far-flung friend who said his mother had had a miscarriage and went on to have him and “a healthy life.”
The ones that struck Vecchio the most arrived as private messages, many from friends she knew as happy fathers. They wanted her to know about the miscarriages their wife had experienced, how their relationships had weathered the pain, and how they feel now about the experience. These are the messages she reads again and again. “They wanted me to know they had gone through it, and that we weren’t alone,” Vecchio said. “I’m so grateful for the people who have told me their stories after having multiple miscarriages and then had healthy babies.”
Of course, not all messages are so supportive—as much as social media provides community, it’s also a haven for hurtful comments, even those that, while well-intentioned, can come off as unsympathetic or even callous. Bueno worries that women—and men—who share their miscarriage stories on social media can end up facing more trauma. “Sometimes a story may be shared, and then not be responded to at all, or adequately, by people who matter. And of course this can hurt a lot,” she says.
Finding a way to help people share their miscarriage stories in a way that’s healing and not triggering became a mission for Melanie Paterak, 34, a maternity and family-portrait photographer in Arkansas, who experienced a miscarriage herself after having two healthy pregnancies. Earlier this year a mom reached out to her to suggest doing a photo essay on the things people say to women who have experienced a miscarriage—both the kind and the cruel. After a few of the women who’d agreed to participate canceled, Paterak put out a call on Facebook, asking for women who had suffered miscarriage or infant loss to come out and help with the session. Overnight she received hundreds of messages.
“It hurts to see firsthand how many truly are in pain. I never imagined so many people would reach out to help with this,” she says. “Some of the women I got messages from, I actually knew, and had no idea they had been through a loss.”
The images are startling. Images in color share kind sentiments shared with the woman after she experienced a miscarriage, while black-and-white images share “not so positive” words spoken to the woman in the portrait, like “At least you didn’t have to get to know her and then lose her.”
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The photos went viral—the post was shared 46,000 times on Facebook and had more than 2,600 comments. “I believe these images further our understanding [of miscarriage] because they’re real and raw,” Paterak says. “During a time of loss, people generally do not know what to say. Sometimes the kindest people with the best of intentions can say things that in your time of pain are just interpreted differently than intended. A simple ‘I’m here for you’ truly is always best.”
Sharing the details of your life online always comes with a particular kind of vulnerability, but when it comes to grappling with the shame and sadness that so often follow a miscarriage, social media can open a space for conversation in a way that feels real and substantial, Vecchio says. At the very least, it helps to end the silence.
Karen Dybis is a writer in the Detroit metro area covering parenting, small business, popular culture, and Detroit’s economic recovery. Follow her @KarenDybis.
