Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

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Please, forgive me if I come across as harsh or insulting. I cannot imagine what you went through and I wish you never had to.

Some time ago I talked to my neighbor (76 y/o woman), while my wife was pregnant, she happily told me that she had 6 kids and 2 miscarriages. Like it was a very normal thing. I asked and she said it was just part of it, the fetuses were probably not healthy to begin with. She seemed of the opinion that it was just part of life and it didn't seem to affect her. I didn't ask further but I do notice myself that once you start taking about miscarriages or, in our case, difficulties getting pregnant, many people went through the same experiences. And certain experiences seem commonplace. On me that has a consoling effect.

Do you think it would have helped if you would have known about the possibility in advance? Or had friends go through the same and society in general being much more open about these things? My mother in law told me about her miscarriage only when our son was 2. I think it would have (hypothetically) helped us be more open and accepting if we would have known in advance.

Thank you for being so open about this on the jungle that is the internet. It takes a lot of courage to come back and read replies.

I think older people accept bad things as "normal" because they were more common. Having something bad that happens to 1 in 5 people is awful, but having something that affects 1 in 50 people feels worse. As tech and medicine improves this problem will probably become more prevalent.

Miscarriage affects more like 1 in 3 pregnancies.

That number won't change. The main cause of miscarriage is that the embryo/foetus has a massive problem and can't ever develop. There is nothing medical science can do. In fact many more miscarriages are known about today - 50 years ago most women wouldn't even have known they were pregnant they would have thought they had a late heavy period.

To what extent is that "happens 1 in 50" and to what extent is it "happens 1 in 5 but only 10% of people are vocal about it"?

Having had 6 kids (that presumably by that stage were fully grown and flourishing) it is easy - I expect - to brush miscarriages off as no-biggie. After all, you got the family you (probably) wanted so the miscarriages don't represent so much of a set back to you.

If you are trying for your first child and nothing is working though, it can be absolutely crushing emotionally. You end up not just being envious of pregnant friends/colleagues/people on the street, but even being envious of fucking plants that manage to reproduce successfully when you can't. It is a very existential thing, and it is utterly consuming.

I've also found that a lot of the older generations like to say "oh when I was your age we just got on with it!" (Or similar) regardless of situation, context, or emotions.

I imagine it's different, if for example one first gets a child that survives, then another, and then, the 3rd time, there's a miscarriage. Then, that's easier to get over, because you can be happy for and focus on the children you have already?

Compared to if one has tried just once, and that was a miscarriage.

I am that first scenario. I had 2 healthy kids followed by 2 miscarriages. I can’t speak to easier or harder, but I do know that even the 2 losses I had in quick succession (one in March and one in August of the same year) affected me in profoundly different ways. I think they’re all different and terrible in their own way.

I'm sorry to hear that. Thanks for replying. I think I will never know how that feels like.

I can tell you that miscarriage messes up women that already have a kid pretty badly, we have few couples around who went though it. Of course I can't compare it to same woman without any baby at all, but this perception of "focus on positive, look you already have one healthy baby" is outsider's perspective. Kid of best effort to soothe the unsoothable.

That sounds very plausible indeed.

Plausible, but not necessarily true.

Our fifth and sixth babies miscarried. Our seventh had his second birthday the other week, and it's still really hard for me to finish typing this comment and post it.

I do think if society was more open and there were more personal stories out there it would make parents who’ve experienced this kind of loss at the very least feel less alone. That’s why I am out there talking about it whenever I can. It is possible to get to the point where you can be as matter-of-fact as your neighbor but consider she’s had half a century to process the loss too.

That's why I try to be as out as I can stand about my tubal pregnancy - awareness of what it likely was prevented me from having to be rushed to the hospital but instead being able to choose where I wanted to go and prepare to be there for a few days, and being in a country (Germany) where there was no question that the pregnancy needed to be ended and the only question was which method I preferred after being given information about all my options made it a lot easier to deal with long term.

I think women (and men) need to know that miscarriages are very common and completely normal. My wife had, at least, one before each of our children (possibly another very early one). The vast majority of the time, when they occur, it is as you say: they weren't viable in the first place. For that reason, in my mind, you aren't pregnant before about 11 weeks, and I think it is perfectly fine not to tell anyone earlier. In fact, I think it is advisable not to tell anyone earlier than that.

I am sure it affects everyone to some extent, women and men, and some more than others. I would never tell anyone that what they are feeling is wrong. Just know that you are not alone, not by a long shot.

>Do you think it would have helped if you would have known about the possibility in advance?

Can we really assume we do not know about the possibility ? Why do you think there are so many ultrasounds and medical checkups during pregnancy ?

Modern life is denial towards mundane risks of life.

Well, there is knowing and knowing. When people hear more about things they assume them to be more likely. Which is why the news is so bad nowadays, we think WW3 + global ecological collapse is more likely than a miscarriage.

Because tempering people is frowned upon, see in this very thread people complaining that doctors talk about a fetus when for them it's already a baby. People know better, right ?

Not sure how you meant that, but on a timescale of a lifetime or a couple of multiples there of, IMHO global ecological collapse (right after WW3) feels pretty likely too me. :-/

I see stark difference of say current generation and 2 generations ago. We are much more emotionally sensitive (for better or worse), I can see that even generation of our parents is much less used to express their emotions, and are kind of 'hardened' emotionally. But then again they endured WW2, direct fighting of germans vs russians and 40+ years of harsh communism. Life wasn't worth as much as it is now.

This change brought tons of empathy in our culture that led to equality for women, LBGT, minorities and so on, but it also makes us weaker when facing proper pain, be it physical or psychical.

My grandma lost a boy, first baby, after few weeks when it got diarrhea and doctors couldn't save it even with antibiotics of that day. She 'moved on' and had 2 healthy babies afterwards, my father included. Around Halloween we have the tradition of visiting graves of our close ones, and I can see that bond is still strong when we visit his grave. She is a happy cheerful person, no dark shadow of this ever visible.

As a young father a month-old baby, the very idea that something like that would happen to him makes me shiver, I don't think I could handle it. Today I saw an article on BBC about British NHS mistreatments, and there was a picture of a cute newborn boy that died after 6 days due to viral infection that got to his heart. I feel no shame as a man to admit I cried quite a bit after seeing that cute face that didn't get a chance for proper life.

Complicated topic...

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