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Susan Best  One sunny Saturday morning I was cleaning the house, listening to a Fiona Apple song called “The Child is Gone,” when the lyric caught my attention and stopped me in my tracks:
I ran my hand over strange inversion
A vacancy that just did not belong — The child is gone.
I stood, cloth in hand, burst into tears, and sat down on the sofa and wept, shocked at the strength of this unexpected emotion. Seventeen years ago, at the age of 25, I left a doctor’s office stunned by the news that I was pregnant. I had only just begun a shaky relationship and pregnancy was not on the agenda. I had never been pregnant before and even though the circumstances of the unplanned pregnancy were far from ideal, I surprised myself by deciding to have the child and I began re-arranging my vision of my future in preparation for what I knew would be one of the biggest events of my life. Some weeks later I found myself clutching crippling cramps in a taxi headed for the Royal Women’s Hospital. The intern who examined me told me I was having a miscarriage. The next day an ultrasound revealed an ectopic pregnancy and I was rushed into theatre where the ruptured tube was removed. Due to previous complications my right tube and ovary had already been removed, so I woke to the news I would no longer be able to conceive. After many days recovering I went home, bloated and sore, to grieve and rest up and once again re-arrange my vision of my future. I would not be a mother after all. Ever. That Saturday I began to wonder how other women felt about the loss of a pregnancy long after the fact, and if there is a difference between the way women grieve depending on whether they have lost the pregnancy through malfunction or choice. Carla Evans, 44, is a self-employed importer. She is married with two children. She had two miscarriages at the age of 35, at six and 11 weeks. She describes the second one as a “complete nightmare”. “The first time I fell pregnant I was so excited. I felt like I’d won some kind of prize. Then when I lost it I was devastated. The second time I felt it was such a sure thing at 11 weeks. It was agonising physically but mentally and emotionally the loss was enormous, the blood going down the toilet... my baby going down the toilet. The symbolism of that was hard to cope with, just flushing it away like it didn’t mean anything. "I was right down the end of the hall of the big ward and whenever the nurses came to see me they had to walk right down the hall and they resented it. I felt incredibly isolated and alone and rejected. There was not an ounce of empathy or kindness.” Carla says she doesn’t think of the miscarriages much these days, but she still feels emotional when she does think of them. “I can still feel the grief and loss in my heart, particularly with the second one because we were nearly at the end of the first trimester and I was buying clothes for the baby, and then it was so awful the way I was treated. It took me a long time to get over that.” Dr Sue Brumby has worked in sexual health care for over 20 years, and she has performed abortions throughout that time. She says that in the case of miscarriage where it was a much-wanted pregnancy there can be “immense grief, even if the pregnancy is very early.” She points out that when it comes to grief and loss in our lives, “there’s always a sad place in our heart, even if we’ve come to terms with it and resolved it and grieved it, there’ll always be a sadness.” A 38-year-old counsellor, Sky Laska is married with a daughter, aged 13. She has had two abortions, each at eight weeks, when she was 24 and 25. Both pregnancies were a contraceptive failure, and she decided to have the abortions because she felt she wouldn’t make a good mother. “It was so clear to me I wasn’t ready to be a mother that I didn’t really have a moment’s doubt.” She says what was most emotionally difficult about them was, “the whole procedure, the fact that it was physically painful, the fact that it was dehumanising, the fact that I had to walk a line of protesters the first time — that was horrible. But I didn’t feel a lot of trauma from the experience, just an absolute sense of relief.” Sheila Wells is the co-ordinator of Pregnancy Counselling Australia, a nationwide “pro-life” telephone counselling service funded by Right to Life. She cautions against the assumption the relief some women feel after having an abortion is the end of the story. “We hear from women a day, a month, a year, ten years, up to six decades later who come to us and say, “this has impacted on my life and has caused me various degrees of dysfunctional behaviour”, so I really think it’s a false claim that women don’t suffer. You’d have to have lived out your life in peace and harmony to be able to make the claim that it didn’t affect you.” Dr Brumby, however, says the evidence is in. “Some pro-life people claim there will be major psychological problems and unresolved grief and that’s extremely uncommon. The vast majority of women come to terms with it. Abortion studies show that is the case. Some women have sadness and unresolved feelings around it, but for others there just isn’t that sadness.” She points out that hormones play a significant part in women’s feelings around pregnancy in general and the loss of a pregnancy specifically. Dr Brumby adds that the range of emotions and reactions women have to the loss of a pregnancy depends to some degree on the circumstances of both the pregnancy and its loss. “There can be a whole gamut of emotions because it depends where the woman is coming from. In the case of termination, that’s a conscious decision, they have to come to terms with that decision, they have to consciously do it, whereas a miscarriage is beyond their control.” The bottom line seems to be that there are as many variables to the way women feel about the loss of a pregnancy, both in the immediate aftermath and many years later, as there are women themselves. The day I cried on the sofa I thought about the lost pregnancy. Had it come to term I would have had a 19 year-old hogging my broadband and eating me out of house and home. I thought about how different these last 19 years would have been, the particular joys and pains I missed out on from not having had the child, the particular joys and pains I would have missed out on had I had the child, what he or she might look like, and what kind of person that embryo might have become. I’m at peace with the hand I’ve been dealt. Despite my reaction to the song, I don’t believe I am haunted by repressed despair. My lost pregnancy is just one of the significant life experiences that resonates within me from time to time to remind me it took place, it mattered, it left its imprint on who I am. I wiped my tears, rose, and resumed cleaning, satisfied that all is as it should be.
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