Life

New Essays By Jewish Women On The Pain And Secrecy Of Miscarriage

Image by Getty Images

By Phoebe Maltz Bovy May 18, 2017

Few topics are as commonplace and secret as miscarriage. The secrecy is fully understandable on an individual level, but can pose challenges of its own. Thus why, in a moving essay about her own experiences, Hadley Freeman writes that she “find[s] the idea that women aren’t supposed to talk about this – that whole ‘Don’t tell anyone that you’re pregnant until after 12 weeks, just in case you then have to tell them that it died and that would be super awkward!’ — verging on the misogynistic.” Adds Freeman:

Because of this silence, people don’t realise how traumatic miscarriage is until it happens to them — I certainly didn’t. Hey, at least you know you can conceive, right? I’d forgotten that it is the loss of a baby, one you felt inside you, one you’d already planned around, one you wanted.

Freeman is not the only Jewish woman writer to take on this difficult topic of late. The Forward’s news editor Helen Chernikoff wrote a must-read essay for Newsday about women such as herself “who have lost babies to miscarriage or stillbirth but who deeply feel they mothered those children.” This can be true even for women with kids. Writes Helen:

The dead are still our babies. Grief lessens, but it doesn’t disappear. A woman I know never takes off a necklace that bears the name of her stillborn baby. “It always feels like someone is missing,” she said. I know exactly what she means. Just a few weeks ago, my husband, kids and I ate Friday night dinner with another family. They have three children, the youngest is 6 months old. It was such a lovely evening, but my husband and I exchanged sympathetic glances and hard hand squeezes. Just being around the baby was tough.

What spoke to me most in Helen’s piece was its mix of powerful personal testimony and a call for understanding of, and respectfulness towards, others’ silent suffering.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy edits the Sisterhood, and can be reached at bovy@forward.com. She is the author of “The Perils Of ‘Privilege’”, from St. Martin’s Press. Follow her on Twitter, @tweetertation

Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a former editor of the Sisterhood blog at the Forward. Her writing has appeared in several publications, including The New Republic and The Atlantic. Her book, “The Perils of ‘Privilege,’” was published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2017. She has a PhD in French and French Studies from New York University, and has read a lot of 19th century French Jewish newspapers for a 21st century American.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

The coming year promises to be filled with more complex and historic developments. We are entering an era where independent, fact-based Jewish journalism will be more important than ever. We need to be ready for whatever 2025 will bring, and with your help, we can be.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO