The Sacred and Holy in Pregnancy Loss
Living Through Loss
I recently experienced a miscarriage. I don’t know what I was expecting the experience to be like, but I was surprised by it. I suspected it was happening for a few days, and a trip to the ER confirmed my intuition. This pregnancy had felt so different from the pregnancy that led to the birth of my son several years before. I hardly had any symptoms and felt so disconnected from it. I was in a constant state of disbelief that I was pregnant and kept waiting for some sort of physical or spiritual confirmation beyond the positive pregnancy tests.
This doesn’t mean the miscarriage wasn’t devastating. It was a weird, uniquely painful experience to feel the loss of life through my body. Dripping out of my vagina into pads and into the toilet, it somehow felt both mundane and visceral. My living, breathing, healthy body rejecting an embryo felt so surreal. It still feels surreal, writing about it now. At the time, it brought back memories of my second abortion, when I took the Plan B pill through Planned Parenthood that initiated a miscarriage. Memories flooded back of being held by soul sisters as we danced while I cried. Of squatting in my best friend’s parents’ backyard, bleeding into the earth, offering to Her to hold what my body could not.
This time, I passed the embryo into the toilet. It just slipped out of me. One moment, it was housed in the warmth, comfort, and softness of my womb that rejected it, the next it was floating in the water. I crouched down and stuck my face in the bowl, half marveling, half shivering with a mixture of shock and awe that this was the tiny baby-to-be I had been growing in my body. I ran to my husband, and he came and fished the embryo out. We buried it in the garden outside our bedroom window and each said a few words. Later that day, with our son and my mother, we bought a lemon tree to commemorate and ritualize the loss of this being, who for a few short weeks had joined our family.
I kept marveling at how I just kept bleeding. That the miscarriage just kept happening, that there was not a definitive start and stop to it. The physical exhaustion of losing blood and enduring cramps for weeks mixed with parenting a toddler knocked me flat. Emotionally I was a wreck, feeling like everything I thought I knew about myself came crumbling down. Unexpectedly, it also became an opportunity to connect more deeply with my mom, who had had two miscarriages before I was born and one later in life. And the experience connected me more deeply to the wide spectrum of pain and loss that exists within this human life and within pregnancy.
Holding the Tension Between Life and Death
We hardly talk about the initiations of pregnancy and infant loss. What they mean, how they affect us, what they ask of us. We don’t talk about the tension of walking (and crossing) the line between hosting a living being and experiencing a death inside of our bodies. This is profound. So profound. This is what myths are made of. How do we make sense of something so natural that asks so much of us physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually?
A miscarriage is a holy experience. It is a sacred experience. To be a living, breathing embodiment of holding the tension between life and death is a sacred and holy experience. Patriarchy and organized religion the world over have asserted dominance and control over wombs, over women, over femme bodies precisely because of the power and wisdom inherent in our lived experiences. By disconnecting women and femmes from reproductive rights, by relegating our experiences to the shadows, they have driven us into hiding, breeding shame in and disconnection from our bodies, our wombs, our mothers, our lineages, our intuition, our very nature. Regulating the wombs of female and femme bodies is a form of enslaving Nature—it’s patriarchy claiming the right to control and extract whatever it needs at will at the expense of the body, the psyche, and the soul.
The radical, unconstitutional abortion ban recently passed in Texas that criminalizes abortion after six weeks of pregnancy (SB 8, which went into effect September 1) is nothing new or surprising. It is only shocking in that it’s now making dystopian fiction into reality. But the control and dominance over female and femme bodies has been occurring for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
We have lost our way. We have lost our connection to the natural truth that birth, pregnancy, miscarriage, and abortion are all part of the reproductive journey and initiation that women and femmes go through. We only honor one: a healthy pregnancy and birth. There is no space for the intensity and reality of what it means to be a human with a womb. The experience of bleeding every month. The experience of endometriosis, fibroids, cysts. Humans with wombs are expected to keep pushing through pain, through loss, through fear. Even after birth there is an expectation that we act as if our bodies did not just undergo a massive and profound experience, that we pretend our psyches and souls did not just change forever. The same is true for abortion, miscarriage, and pregnancy and infant loss.
Reclaiming Our Holy Bodies
I envision a world where we have reverence for our lived experiences. All of them. I envision a world where we hold collective space for the magnitude of the decision to have an abortion and for the depth of pain a miscarriage or infant loss elicits. I envision a world where humans with wombs are intimately connected with their cycles, with the power they hold in their wombs, with their intuition. I envision a world where people with wombs are revered and embraced in all their complexity and power.
As birthing folx, we strengthen Mother Earth, we reclaim our power, and we heal our lineage when we honor our holy bodies. As birthing humans with wombs, we hold life and death and are intimately connected to them. By honoring, speaking, sharing, and being witnessed in our experience, we emerge from the shadows. It’s healing on an individual, collective, and planetary level. It is an act of reclamation.
I’ve had one miscarriage, two abortions, and one healthy pregnancy and live birth. My body has housed four souls, and I am eternally grateful for the opportunities to grow that these experiences—all of them—have gifted me.
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