Processing Pregnancy Loss and Infertility
Identify Your Reproductive Story
Look back through your life and the stories you’ve created for yourself, the stories you were given from parents or culture or partner’s expectations.
Notice your expectations and the way you imagined this story playing out. Gently explore the differences between your imagined story before starting your reproductive journey and the reality that you’ve experienced so far.
Identify your hopes and dreams around pregnancy and parenting. Notice which parts are yours and which are from society, family, or other pressures.
Exercise: Write your story out. Start from your own childhood- did you play with dolls? Were your toys connected to each other in relationships? What movies, books, and songs did you take in that mentioned relationships, families, and parenting? What were your expectations as a young child about your reproductive future? Did you dream of getting married and becoming a parent? As you grew older, did that story shift to accommodate new stories and expectations? Did anyone around you experience loss in their pregnancies? In the stories you grew up with, was having children expected or framed as a natural next step?
Acknowledge Trauma
Not all pregnancy loss is traumatic, and you may not have had a trauma experience with yours. But sit with your loss and see if there’s any part of your experience that may be feeling traumatic for your mind or for your body.
One major source of potential trauma is the disruption to your identity. You’ve expected to be a parent and then had trouble getting pregnant, trouble staying pregnant, or other medical issues that led to pregnancy loss.
Another source of trauma are the effects on your body and any medical interventions that you may have needed through the loss of your pregnancy.
Pregnancy, especially in the later stages, is a communal or public experience. Loss of a pregnancy is hard at any point, but once others have been told about the pregnancy, loss is a more public experience. A third form of trauma is the repetition of your loss story as people around you ask for updates on the pregnancy and you are reminded over and over that you’ve lost your baby.
Similarly, loss before you’ve told anyone can feel isolating. For them to join you in your grief, you have to catch them up on the story of your attempts as well as the loss.
Exercise: Reflect on your grief history. What other griefs and losses have you already experienced? Is there any part of your current loss that’s bringing up older memories and emotions? Go through the grief story exercises here if that feels right for you.
Many Forms of Loss
Failed IVF cycle
By the time you’ve started IVF, you’re already aware that your story isn’t going to go as easily as you dreamed. 35% of cycles fail, and the repeated losses are compounded by the time and cost of the effort.
Chemical pregnancy
When you get a positive result on a pregnancy test, it’s normal to start thinking about what that means for your future. To then find out that it wasn’t a true pregnancy can feel like that potential was taken away.
Ectopic pregnancy
If you’ve been struggling with infertility, it can feel relieving to hear that you were able to successfully create an embryo. But then to hear that the embryo didn’t make it to where it needs to be can feel devastating. Additionally, you now have to go through medical interventions to remove the baby you want to keep.
Molar pregnancy
There’s nothing quite like hearing that your pregnancy isn’t viable AND you have to take medications for up to a year to treat it. Not only are you not pregnant, you now have to wait to try again.
Abortion
Whatever your reasons for having an abortion, you may feel the trauma or grief of the loss. You may have been feeling happy or ambivalent about the abortion and still feel grief. And if you wanted to be pregnant and needed an abortion, the discourse around abortion can feel discouraging and isolating.
Miscarriage
If you’ve been trying to get pregnant, you probably know the statistics on age and miscarriage. But that doesn’t make it easier no matter how old you are when you experience it.
Recurrent pregnancy loss
When you’ve tried and tried but experienced repeated losses, it can be easy to blame yourself. There must be something you’re doing wrong if you’re not able to keep a pregnancy. You may start to ruminate on what you did or didn’t do in the weeks leading up to the loss.
Stillbirth
Hearing that your baby no longer has a heartbeat feels devastating. Stillbirth happens after 20 weeks, so you had already passed several major milestones with the baby’s development. The further discussions of how to deliver the baby are important, but they can feel clinical and dismissive. Going through induced labor and delivery for a stillborn child is a very unique kind of grief that can’t fully be explained. And the offer to hold your baby- it’s normal to have a disgusted reaction to holding your dead baby. But you’ve probably also heard that people who skip holding the baby feel regret, so you’re pressured to make the right decision in a short time frame.
Termination for medical reasons
Choosing an abortion for any reason can feel like you’re stepping on a minefield. Whether this is the best decision for you, you were coerced by a partner or medical professional, or it was a reluctant decision, termination of a pregnancy is difficult and your grief is valid at your loss. This decision feels stigmatizing, and you may not feel like you are able to talk about your loss since it was your choice. This is not an easy decision that often weighs serious risks for yourself and for the baby. You may not feel safe discussing these huge decisions with friends, family, or clergy because of their reactions to elective termination.
Selective or Multi-fetal reduction
Multiple pregnancies are risky for mothers and for babies, and you may be advised that this is a recommendation for you. When you are still able to keep one or more of the fetuses, it can feel difficult to hold your happiness with the successful pregnancy alongside the loss of the other fetuses.
Neonatal and infant loss
Losing your baby shortly after birth or within the first year is incredibly painful. Parents who are doing everything the best they can may still lose their baby. Accidents, illness, and other factors can make you question whether the loss was your fault. If your baby was in the NICU for any length of time, you know how scary that feels. And if you’re needing to be in recovery from your birth process, you may feel like you aren’t able to be there for your NICU baby.
Incomplete adoption
There are many reasons for an adoption to fail to complete. After months or years of waiting, huge costs, and paperwork, it just doesn’t happen. Adoption is often thrown out as a failsafe option for people who aren’t able to have their own children, but it’s not that easy.
Infertility
Being infertile can feel like you’re invisible in society. People around you ask when you’ll start having kids, or people who choose to be childfree may comment about how lucky you are. Both sorts of people aren’t able to see your pain of wanting a child and being unable.
Emotional Pain of Loss
It’s normal to feel sadness, worry, and a loss of identity with pregnancy loss, especially when it’s recurrent or connected to a broader pattern of infertility.
This time feels incredibly stressful, and can be more difficult when you now have to inform friends and family of your loss. If you were farther along, you may have the baby’s room ready, or you may have already bought things for them. People you haven’t told about the loss may ask how the baby is doing, and you know they don’t mean to give you pain but it can hurt deeply.
Being pregnant and losing the baby is acutely painful, but you also now have to deal with the sudden hormonal shifts of the pregnancy loss. It’s normal to wonder what you did or didn’t do that may have caused the loss.
The non-pregnant partner can often feel overlooked in this process. Much of the medical attention is focused on the pregnant mother who has just lost her child. But fathers and other partners have also lost a child, lost dreams of parenting this child, and lost their reproductive story.
When you’ve been through loss, future attempts at getting pregnant can feel incredibly fraught. Every doctor’s visit, you may find yourself bracing for bad news.
Pregnancy loss can feel like a loss of your innocence. Your eyes are opened in new ways to the cruelty of the world and the unfairness of life. Other people may dismiss your grief or suggest that an unborn baby is not “as bad” of a loss or that pregnancies are “replaceable”. You may even agree with them and feel ambivalent about grieving the loss of your pregnancy.
Grief therapy for pregnancy loss and infertility
You deserve help and support as you go through this tough time. Contact me today to learn how online grief therapy can help you process your grief and pain.