Two Stories of Pregnancy Loss

You’re voting today, correct?  Because the importance of how we vote and the laws we create is contained below.

I saw two stories last week, both concerning pregnancy loss.  You may want to save this post for later if you’re not in a good place to speak about loss.  (But, please, go vote.)

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The first is a disturbing piece from the New York Times looking at miscarriages and stillbirth that occurred due to poor working conditions.  A woman at the top of the article clutches an empty receiving blanket:

One evening in January 2014, after eight hours of lifting, Erica Hayes ran to the bathroom. Blood drenched her jeans.  She was 23 and in the second trimester of her first pregnancy. She had spent much of the week hoisting the warehouse’s largest boxes from one conveyor belt to the next. Ever since she learned she was pregnant, she had been begging her supervisor to let her work with lighter boxes, she said in an interview. She said her boss repeatedly said no.

It’s a side of pregnancy discrimination that we usually don’t think about, one that hits close to home for our community.  The public gets angry about the fact that women are often passed over for promotions or lose their job due to pregnancy.  We’re less comfortable speaking about how the workplace can cause loss.  That the items around us may have contributed to someone else’s pregnancy loss.

It’s a sobering piece, especially when you consider our 40-year-old laws concerning employers and pregnancy:

Under federal law, companies don’t necessarily have to adjust pregnant women’s jobs, even when lighter work is available and their doctors send letters urging a reprieve.

And the fact that the company in the article is a contractor of Verizon.

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The other piece is more moving.  It weave a personal story of loss with historical tales of loss.  Nursing Clio explains how she felt after learning her baby had no heartbeat:

More than anything, I felt how I had lost a story of the future that I had built up in my mind … What has followed in the last two years has been even more difficult than I could have imagined and has required many alterations to our pregnancy story. The loss of the expected narrative and the discovery of new narratives is what I want to focus on here.

She uses her background as a professor of eighteenth century literature to try to make sense of what she lost.  Of how women have processed their losses over the ages, especially how male authors (vs. female authors) discuss loss and the concept of mourning pictures.

It’s an incredible piece weaving the personal with the academic.  And I found it hugging my heart after I read that first exposé on loss.