Collective Conference Reflections

Alongside the Conference Report, we’ve brought together some reflections by conference participants, on how the conference unfolded and what it’s meant for their work. Thanks to all who contributed!

Julianne Boutaleb

This conference was such an amazing manifestation of all the work done recently in so many diverse areas of scholarship around pregnancy endings. Apart from the rich content of all of the contributions from art, poetry and film through to the legal and clinical, I was also struck by the urgency of our endeavours too. To find the right words and processes for diverse reproductive loss experiences, and to ensure appropriate supports are available for those living through them. Listening to our Irish and US colleagues in particular, it was clear that whilst great progress can be made, we should never take reproductive agency for granted. I look forward to being involved further in future collaborative efforts, and salute you Vic and Susie for this remarkable achievement.

Kirsten Leng

This conference was, hands down, the most amazing scholarly conference I’ve attended. The conference organizers brought together a brilliant international collective of interdisciplinary researchers, activists, clinicians, and artists, all intent on exploring the full spectrum of reproductive experiences. It is still so incredibly rare to encounter scholars and practitioners invested in understanding pregnancy endings in all of their messy multiplicity. The assembled presenters demonstrated how, through literature, policy, art, film, health care (physical and mental), and performance, we can create new stories and experiences of pregnancy and its varied outcomes.

Julia Bueno

I left each day feeling nourished by the impressive scholarship and wide-ranging thoughts, but even more so by the warmth and open-hearted spirit of the group that Vic and Susie both curated and modelled. I am honoured to have been a part, and look forward to what comes next. We will continue with our quest!

Gayle Letherby

What a wonderful two days full of inspiring multi-disciplinary and multi-professional wisdom and creativity. The event was skillfully put together, and thoughtfully facilitated, by Victoria and Susie and the warmth and generosity of participants in sharing their knowledge, practice and personal experience was truly beautiful. An event to remember. 

Victoria Newton

This was such a unique conference, bringing together researchers from a wide range of backgrounds to focus on an important and timely topic. It was inspiring to hear about the breadth and depth of work being carried out on early pregnancy endings, and a pleasure to make new connections that could lead to future collaborations. A huge thank you to Susie and Victoria for organising such a thoughtful and energising event. I’m excited to see what the next steps will be. Let’s keep the conversation going.

Isabel Davis

My main reflections after this radically interdisciplinary and stimulating conference: 1) the importance and bravery of using and managing humour in the dissemination space. 2) Also, I was left thinking about the complex interaction of miscarriage and termination, including following a difficult pre-natal screening. Whilst people in this overlapping care space might be having the same treatment, in the same space, but need different languages, and have different expectations. 3) I felt anxious through the papers about how much research there is across so many disciplines - much of which I hadn’t but should have read - and wondered whether one potential communal output might be some kind of ‘map’ of the field  so that those coming after us could appreciate more quickly some of the precincts and approaches in which great work is being done. Although what exactly such a map could look like so that it didn’t go out of date, I don’t know. Thank you to Victoria and Susie for all their brilliant work, and thank you to everyone for their papers and questions.

Aimee Middlemiss

Enormous thanks to Victoria and Susie for putting this event together. Now it’s happened, I can’t really believe there was never an interdisciplinary miscarriage (and abortion / pregnancy endings) conference like this before - it’s an enormously generative space for so many disciplines and people. I was almost overwhelmed by the scale of the event and the number of people with shared interests to talk to and connect with. I especially loved the way the conference was two days and therefore we had time for informal connection, and we didn’t have to choose streams and miss out on hearing about people’s work. Hopefully this will generate future thinking for us all, and future relationships with one another - it would be great to keep in touch as a group, either through Isabel’s map idea above or another format, and to keep this welcoming and stimulating space open in future.

Sian Beynon-Jones

This conference made me realise that I don’t think I have ever been in a space where it was possible to have these kinds of conversations before, i.e. being able to think carefully and productively across pregnancy endings. There were so many valuable connections across all the talks, and I learned a lot from listening to work across disciplines (I love Isabel’s suggestion above of a map – this would be brilliant). I also keep thinking about the complete narrative failure to normalise toilets as sites of miscarriage in public discourse (and all the amazing work people are doing that is challenging this). Huge thanks to the organizers for creating this important space. Looking forward to continuing to work together, and to see what comes next.

Claire Flahavan

Thank you so much to Victoria and Susie for bringing together this wonderful conference. The thought and care invested in curating each panel of speakers was evident, and I loved that we could hear all of the presentations. This brought me in contact with disciplines and voices that I might otherwise have missed. We were offered a kaleidoscope of perspectives across both days, and each panel brought different viewpoints, expertise and rich contributions. Ambiguities, overlaps and tensions within the subject matter could co-exist and be held within the shared endeavour to think collectively about complex, difficult experiences in pregnancy. Informal conversations within the breaks were equally of value in fostering new relationships. I have come away with a reading list that will continue to nourish and inform my clinical work. Warm thanks to all. 

Jessa Fairbrother

A really fascinating orientation for me about the work that’s being done around the topic and I would echo Claire’s description above of it being a kaleidoscope. Thank you so much Victoria and Susie for making the space and time for such a wide range of scholarship to come together that was so well curated. As an onlooker, I was particularly interested to see how abortion rights intersect with miscarriage care. Julianne’s answer to my question about IVF was startling - (why no one asks if you have changed your mind - they know, but the drive is for a healthy outcome, tied to funding). That was stark and informative.

I have begun to crystallise my thinking that there is work to be done about the distinguishing feature of those who have miscarriages who do not go on to have children. This is my interest. It is different to the process of miscarriage in and of itself, as it is about those who go missing, the non-legible body afterwards that has crossed a threshold and cannot return.

I continue to wonder how artists responding is a distinct category that sits adjacent to other disciplines. Artists are often porous, their work being contingent on maintaining a porousness to exploring the ephemeral and the intangible. How can we help support those who are making work about that, next to clinicians and legal experts who deal with hard lines, definitions and definitives? I continue to ask this in all settings, as a practice-led researcher trying to find ways to articulate some of the existential feelings that underpin actions. I came away with some wonderful connections and notes and reading lists. I also loved the panel on Monday too, which brought some new ideas to my thinking about how we ‘story’, tell stories and share stories. Thank you all so much.

Paul Ord

It was a real privilege, as a developing researcher, to have the opportunity to present my ideas to such an expert and welcoming audience. And to receive encouraging feedback from Victoria Browne, Susie Kilshaw, Linda Layne, Aimee Middlemiss, and many others (all of whose work has been central to my PhD literature review), was wonderful. One further word I would use to describe the event is ‘warm’; there was a real generosity on display, I felt, in how papers were received and acknowledged across the different speaker's presentations. This is especially important for those of us who are very early on in their careers, and whose first ‘great idea’ is at a fragile stage of development. From a personal point of view, the conference was also wonderfully timed, falling as it did just before the commencement of my thesis writing proper. I’m sure my memories of the conference, and the friendly faces I met, will be a well-spring of inspiration as I tackle the task. Fantastic too to make contact with so many interesting people in person for the first time. Thank you everyone. 

Heini Väisänen

This was the best conference I have ever attended. In addition to the excellent academic quality, I was emotionally moved multiple times as people shared personal experiences of pregnancy endings. I loved how academic and artistic work were woven together. Not having strands was an excellent decision, as that created a shared understanding and a continuity throughout the conference. I hope there will be more events like this in the future!

Niamh Howard-Jones

Thank you so much to Susie and Victoria for organising such an inspiring conference. I gained so much from the fascinating presentations and the generosity of everyone who shared their work and own personal experiences. It was particularly meaningful to be in a space where all pregnancy endings were acknowledged with compassion and respect. The conference has given me new perspectives that will undoubtedly influence my clinical work going forward, and the connections I made with colleagues and researchers were invaluable. Thank you both again. I look forward to attending the next conference!

Conference Report

On 18th - 19th June, the Feminist Miscarriage Project held our two-day in person conference – New Directions in Miscarriage Research: Intersectional, Interdisciplinary and Full-Spectrum Perspectives – with a final online panel on the 22nd.

The programme is available here; and the longer version with abstracts and bios is available here.

Executive summary

• The FMP conference brought together researchers, clinicians, artists, activists and campaigners, from across the UK, Europe, Canada and the US, to explore new intersectional, interdisciplinary and full-spectrum approaches to miscarriage and other pregnancy endings.

• Across two days and an online session, the conference examined miscarriage through historical, literary, legal, medical, sociological, anthropological, psychological, political and creative perspectives, demonstrating the value of interdisciplinary collaboration.

• A central theme was the need to recognise and support miscarriage without imposing singular or universalising frameworks, instead embracing ambiguity, diversity and the complexity of lived experience.

• Discussions highlighted the importance of language and representation in shaping public understanding, clinical practice and policy responses to miscarriage and other pregnancy endings.

• Speakers explored the multiple spaces and times of miscarriage, extending attention beyond the event itself to the time before pregnancy is established and the longer-term impacts of miscarriage that can stretch across whole lifetimes.

• The conference demonstrated the close connections between miscarriage and abortion, particularly in relation to law, healthcare and social stigma, while recognising the distinct experiences associated with different pregnancy endings.

• The programme identified priorities for future research, including greater attention to intersectionality, political economy and reproductive justice, and the need to continue integrating miscarriage into broader feminist scholarship and activism.

• Overall, the conference demonstrated and developed a dynamic and growing field committed not only to advancing academic understanding of miscarriage but also to improving the conditions under which pregnancy endings are experienced, represented and cared for.

Full Report

The conference brought together almost 80 people in total, including academics, clinicians, artists, activists and policy researchers from across the UK, Europe, Canada and the US, to explore miscarriage from a wide range of perspectives. Across all the sessions, and in the breaks in between, speakers demonstrated that miscarriage is a complex bodily situation which cannot be neatly categorised, measured, narrated or governed.

The opening panel, Miscarriage and the Imagination, set up a rich discussion of many of the themes that recurred throughout the conference. In her paper Miscarriage, Magnification and Mediation: Seeing and Imagining the Embryo, Isabel Davis challenged the assumption that scientific visualisation is the only way for feminists to counteract the foetal imagery produced by the anti-abortion movement. Engaging critically with bioethicist Jane Maienshein's argument that we have an ethical duty to look at microscopic images of embryos, rather than relying on imagined or ‘hypothetical’ embryos, Davis questioned whether modernity is ever really so clear-eyed. We cannot simply disavow imagination, she suggested, as reproductive experiences are always mediated through acts of imagining. The task, then, is not to try and eliminate imagination but to rewrite what Davis described as the ‘visual contract’, developing new visual and verbal languages that are capable of supporting people’s lived experiences. The paper made a compelling case that ‘cold hard science’ isn’t the only feminist alternative to anti-abortion imagery and language.

Questions of representation and imagination continued in Jen Cooke's paper Beyond Proleptic Pregnancy: Miscarriage in Contemporary Poetry. Drawing on Rachel Galvin's Uterotopia, alongside work by Maya Marshall and Holly Pester, Cooke examined poetic texts that refuse the tendency to understand pregnancy primarily through the proleptic figuration of the ‘mother-and-child’. Instead, these poets foreground the here and now: the physical pain, the bodily sensations, and the reproductive labour that goes into pregnancy endings. The presentation also showed how these texts evoke the mundane, pedestrian aspects of pregnancy endings, and the ‘flat affect’ that often characterises the quotidian – ‘skewering expectations of emotional heaviness’. Like Davis, Cooke proposed that we can’t prescribe how people imagine miscarriage, yet we can offer alternative images and languages that are more aligned with the values of reproductive justice and the actual lived experiences of pregnancy and its aftermaths.

Sophie Jones's paper, Time, Tense and Miscarriage: Reproducing the Novel at the End of the World, similarly challenged future-oriented narratives through readings of Christine Smallwood's The Life of the Mind and Louisa Hall's Reproduction. Smallwood's novel, she argued, manages to contextualise miscarriage while resisting turning it into a symbol of a lost future or broader social crisis. Instead, the novel can be seen as an ‘an experiment in theorising time from a position of embodied contingency’, as it explores temporal experiences of suspension and stuckness through the parallel stalling of the main protagonist’s pregnancy and her academic career. Jones's discussion of ‘the gruesome slog of chronos rather than kairos’ was brilliant in capturing how miscarriage can be experienced not as a dramatic rupture but as an uncomfortable inhabitation of time plodding along, without a clear sense of direction.

Together, the papers offered powerful ways of thinking and imagining reproductive time beyond conventional narratives of progression and resolution, and each insisted that we mustn’t underestimate the complexity and power of our imaginations. The panel also demonstrated the importance of anchoring our discussions of miscarriage in both their everyday and wider social context. As Sophie Jones posed the challenge: how do we relate miscarriage to other crises – social, economic, ecological – without making it into a symbol of crisis or ‘the lost future’?

The discussion that followed the panel illustrated the profound value of interdisciplinary conversations when participants coalesce around a shared issue or object of concern: for example, when a clinician in the audience raised questions about the increasingly common practice of assigning foetal sex, reflecting on how this undermines the fundamental indeterminacy of pregnant embodiment and gestation. The conversation also highlighted the distinctive contributions that different artistic and literary mediums can make – such as poetry's capacity for interruption, slippage and humour, and the novel's ability to move across timescales and jump backwards and forwards in time.

The second panel, Policy and Governance, took up the question of context by shifting attention to the legal, institutional and political frameworks that shape experiences of pregnancy endings. In Informing Policy-making and Political Initiatives Around Miscarriage and Other Pregnancy Endings in the Republic of Ireland, Marita Hennessy reflected on the efforts of the Pregnancy Loss Research Group to shape policy in Ireland, discussing both their achievements and frustrations in translating their research into meaningful change. One of the most thought-provoking aspects of the presentation concerned unintended consequences, as Hennessy explained that while efforts to improve support for pregnancy loss are usually motivated by laudable intentions, they can sometimes reinforce ideas of ‘foetal personhood’ that undermine reproductive rights. She discussed Jax's Law as an example: a proposed piece of legislation in Ireland that seeks to legally recognise stillborn babies as individual victims of road traffic collisions. While we can understand the depth of emotion and sense of injustice behind this proposed law, feminists are concerned it risks taking Irish law back into the territory of the 8th Amendment – which had given an equal right to life to the pregnant person and the ‘unborn child’, but was repealed in 2018 after decades of dedicated feminist campaigning. I was also struck by the different temporalities evoked throughout the presentation: governmental rhetoric about a ‘revolution’ in women's healthcare was juxtaposed with the slower temporalities of incremental reform, and with a real sense of recurrence, stuckness and frustration, which emerged as Hennessy reflected candidly on the feeling of producing ‘report after report’ but seeing little actually being done in response.

Aimee Middlemiss's ‘Saving Babies’ Lives’: The Reproductive Governance of Pregnancy and Baby Loss in England continued in this vein of critical feminist reflection, through her analysis of the NHS’s ‘Saving Babies’ Lives’ policy package. Situating ‘this policy package within broader histories of reproductive governance, Middlemiss showed us how it is deeply biopolitical in scope, extending surveillance and sites of intervention across pregnancy/maternity care to achieve population-level outcomes. What really stood out for me was some of the language used by the architects of ‘Saving Babies’ Lives’: for example, describing miscarriage, stillbirth and neonatal death as a form of ‘lost human capital’, which clearly exposes the economic rationalities that shape reproductive governance. The presentation also directed us to consider ideological and economic forces at work that may not always be so apparent: pointing out, for example, that ‘Saving Babies Lives’ was introduced during Jeremy Hunt’s tenure as Health Secretary from 2012-2018 – a Conservative politician who has voted in favour of lowering the abortion time limit to 12 weeks, and played a key role in advancing the ‘back door privatisation’ of the NHS in the past couple of decades. So while ‘Saving Babies’ Lives’ may seem to be a straightforwardly moral mission, Middlemiss urged us to look both deeper and closer.

Victoria Newton's paper Early Pregnancy Endings and the Workplace: A Double Stigma then shifted our focus from healthcare policy to workplace policy,  exploring how early pregnancy endings at work can be subject to the dual stigmas of both ‘non-reproductivity’ and ‘non-productivity’, based on an assumption that pregnancy is antithetical to workplace performance. Drawing on findings from theEarly Pregnancy Endings and the Workplace project, Newton argued that workers often face an impossible choice between being fully absent, or present and performing at full capacity, with little room for the realities of how pregnancy endings unfold. She explained that some people seek the distraction of work following miscarriage and prefer to keep going, while others need dedicated time away, and others need a flexible approach that allows them to clock on and off as they go along. Newton was also critical of incoming legislation in Britain that will extend statutory bereavement leave to people who experience pregnancy loss before 24 weeks gestation. This state-mandated entitlement may seem like an unequivocal win; but as Newton pointed out, the leave won’t be paid, and the framing of leave for early pregnancy endings as ‘bereavement leave’ excludes those who have a different response and don’t see themselves as bereaved. She concluded by calling for more neutral terminology and ‘political listening’ – a way of engaging with people going through pregnancy endings that makes no assumptions about how they’re feeling, and refrains from imposing meanings from outside or above.

The final paper in the panel, Heini Väisänen's Measuring Social Inequalities in Miscarriage Experiences in Finland, France and the UK, made us think more critically about the extent to which miscarriages are actually reported. When people have a miscarriage, how many disclose it to their doctor, or even family, let alone their boss? Examining miscarriage reporting in surveys and administrative records in Finland, France and the UK, Väisänen interrogated statistics that are often cited without any qualification or thought for what lies behind them. Where do figures such as ‘one in four pregnancies ends in miscarriage’ actually come from? Which definitions underpin them? And which experiences remain invisible? By highlighting discrepancies between self-reported and administrative data, the presentation was extremely thought-provoking, and the discussion that followed once again reinforced the value of interdisciplinary exchange, showing how humanities scholars and social scientists alike need to be thinking as critically about numbers as we do about narratives.

After lunch, our third panel, Navigating Ambiguity, invited us to take a longer-term view, beginning with historian Jennifer Evans's fascinating paper ‘An Embryo ab[ou]t the size of a Bee was taken from her’: Early Miscarriage and Infertility in Early Modern England c.1600–1780, which offered a powerful reminder of the importance of historicising reproductive categories. Evans showed how early pregnancy endings were discussed in this historical period in ways which unsettle contemporary assumptions about ‘abortion’ and ‘miscarriage’ being clearly separate. For example, ideas about ‘menstrual blockages’, and how they could become ‘unblocked’, usefully blurred the lines between what we now treat separately as menstruation, miscarriage and abortion, enabling women to end their pregnancies without scrutiny. Evans also demonstrated the strategic utility of ambiguity in this historical period through other examples: like unmarried women exploiting the difficulty of confirming pregnancy to deny their ‘illegitimate’ pregnancies; and unmarried women using the same ambiguity to invite speculation about pregnancy as a way of signalling their fertility.

Beth Malory's paper Mind the Gap: Navigating Gaps and Categorization Challenges in Our Lexicon Around Pregnancy Endings then brought us back into the present by extending the discussion about ambiguity into contemporary debates around language. Her exposition of ‘lexical gaps’ surrounding terms such as ‘miscarriage’, ‘abortion’, ‘baby’ and ‘foetus’ highlighted the difficulties of finding language that neither minimises experiences of loss, nor reinforces universalising anti-abortion rhetoric about ‘foetal personhood’. The paper showed how attempts to draw firm distinctions often create new problems; and that categories which may appear straightforward frequently fail to capture lived experience. It concluded by advocating a form of linguistic relationality that can respect individuals' own conceptualisations, while remaining alert to broader political forces that seek to impose meanings on our bodies in service of anti-feminist aims.

Amber Griffioen's The Axiology of Ambiguity: Navigating the Evaluative Landscape of Pregnancy Endings also highlighted variation and uncertainty, but directed our focus away from the endings of pregnancy to its meanings as a situation in the present. Griffioen observed that anti-abortion, pronatalist, and even many reproductive rights discourses, all share a tendency to direct attention away from pregnancy itself, such that pregnancy becomes a site of value because of what it produces, prevents or protects. As a result, she claimed, pregnancy itself recedes into the background. But what if we understand pregnancy not merely a conduit through which something else happens, but as a mode of being that possesses significance irrespective of outcomes? What kinds of politics and ethics could become possible?

The paper was then followed by Sian Beynon-Jones's Becoming Unpregnant: Exploring Postpartum Temporalities as Sites of Solidarity. While Griffioen directed attention to pregnant embodiment itself as a way of countering instrumentalist ideologies focused only on outcomes, Beynon-Jones argued that experiences of post-partum embodiment can also serve as a site for countering the normative ‘success model’ of pregnancy as baby-production, and for building feminist solidarity. Focusing on first-person accounts of the bodily aftermaths of live birth, the paper showed how the ‘success model’ not only marginalises miscarriage but also obscures the physical and emotional labour that follows live birth, raising important questions about what the ‘end’ of pregnancy means.

This led to a fruitful group discussion exploring concepts such as the ‘fourth trimester’, and cultural practices of ‘lying in’ or postpartum convalescence that are customary within a range of countries including Algeria, India and China. We discussed how much there is to learn from these practices, in terms of giving post-partum bodies the time and care they need for recovery; but we also discussed how such practices can be experienced as constraining and oppressive when they are imposed, and the perils of romanticising non-western practices through a neocolonial orientalist gaze.

We then moved into artist Lucy O'Donnell's interactive session, our little earth bound tales: the colouring book, which centred the question of how we understand ourselves in miscarriage. First, O’Donnell presented drawings described as ‘certain in their ambiguity’ and ‘determinedly queer’, explaining her understanding of drawing as open-ended – a way to play with ideas of becoming and ‘failure’, and of her own lived body as an ‘unstable sabotaging dwelling’. O'Donnell then handed out crayons and colouring pencils scavenged from her children’s pencil cases, and invited participants to colour in images in the colouring book, our little earth bound tales, which she made for the conference, and to create badges based on her designs. This activity provided a welcome moment of quiet and calm, and embodied many of the conference's central concerns: creativity, contemplation, and the possibility of ‘sitting with uncertainty’ rather than rushing towards an end point. Participants literally became part of a ‘moving exhibition’, continuing to wear their badges out in the world once the conference was over.

This was followed by our first keynote presentation of the conference: Reflecting on Thirty Years of Miscarriage Research by eminent feminist anthropologist Linda Layne. The paper provided us with a rich historical overview of three decades worth of research on miscarriage, reflecting on the roles of religion and consumer culture in practices of meaning-making in the wake of miscarriage, as well as connecting her own work to papers that had already been presented that morning. Layne’s account of conducting this feminist work in the 1990s, in relative isolation, in comparison to the vibrant interdisciplinary community gathered at the conference, was extremely moving. Gayle Letherby's response similarly highlighted the importance of intergenerational feminist scholarship and solidarity. While acknowledging new challenges for feminists in this space – like the outsize role played by social media in shaping dominant narratives and expectations – Letherby emphasised the significance of the intellectual foundations built by pioneers like Layne. We may still be asking some of the same questions, as Letherby put it, but we now have so many more people asking them.

The final panel of the day, Narratives, Humour and Horror, really showcased the vibrancy of contemporary miscarriage research, by exploring the wide range of mediums and genres through which pregnancy endings can be represented and understood. In her talk Products of Conception: Imaging and Imagining the Maternal–Foetal Relationship, Sabina Dosani discussed her own memoir Flesh and Blood, which reflects on her experiences of recurrent miscarriage, alongside her professional work as an expert witness, encountering families navigating illness, addiction and loss through the UK Court system. Exploring the overlaps between these roles – of patient, clinician, and witness – Dosani captivated us all, as she reflected on the vast differences between her own life and the families she has worked with, while also weaving together connecting threads and a deep sense of complex empathy.

Dosani’s plea for ‘more plural, and emotionally attentive ways of understanding reproductive loss’ was then taken up by Jemma Walton in her paper Witnessing Miscarriage: Male Memoirs, Structural Inequalities, and the Politics of Reproductive Care, which examined memoirs by male authors writing about miscarriage and raised important questions about inclusion, visibility and representation. The paper focused on two memoirs, Tom De Freston’s Strange Bodies: A Story of Love and Desire (2024) and Daniel Raeburn’s Vessels: A Memoir of What Wasn’t (2016), arguing that while they may be authored from positions of social privilege, they are nonetheless valuable to intersectional feminist analyses of reproductive loss and reproductive justice, because they illuminate patterns of marginalisation and care inequities from a different perspective. Walton stressed that bringing in men’s experiences need not dilute or detract from the feminist project, but can enrich our understanding: for example, when we see medical misogyny in these memoirs through male partners’ eyes.

Kirsten Leng's paper Gender, Loss, and Humor: Exploring Miscarriage and Baby Death on the Stand-Up Stage also explored male experience of reproductive loss, but this time through the medium of stand-up comedy, analysing comedian Michael Cruz Kayne’s Neflix show ‘Sorry for Your Loss’ (2023) as a ‘vehicle for public mourning’. Quoting George Bernard Shaw to great effect – ‘Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh’ – this was a ground-breaking presentation which showed how comedy can be used to generate collective catharsis and empathy, building a joyful sense of solidarity and shared belonging. In providing a socially sanctioned space to question social norms, Leng argued, comedy allows for a complex array of emotions to be explored, showing how things can be more than one way.

Sally Campbell then rounded off the day by turning to another genre that rarely gets discussed in relation to miscarriage and loss: horror. In her presentation Ambiguous Endings: How Horror Films Blur the Boundaries Between Miscarriage, Abortion and Birth, Campbell argued that the horror genre has a particular ability to address difficult subjects. While acknowledging longstanding tropes that associate reproductive ‘failure’ with monstrosity, she proposed that horror's fascination with ambiguity and transgression can also create space for more complex representations. Discussing films such as Possession, The First Omen and Immaculate, Campbell demonstrated how horror unsettles clear distinctions between pregnancy endings and invites audiences to confront uncertainty. She also discussed how these films demonstrate a strong sense of women’s embodied agency, because while the characters may lack choices, they are by no means passive, refusing to go away quietly and be silent. As Alex says in Fatal Attraction: ‘I’m not going to be ignored, Dan!’

This panel led to a lively discussion which we continued during our Drinks Reception, where participants could also look at a display of images from Jennifer Scuro’s graphic novel ‘Miscarriage or Abortion(Or, #shoutingmyabortion in a graphic novel). These intimate and unsanitised images offered another powerful documentation of the messy emotional and physical realities of miscarriage, challenging the neoliberal ‘blame and shame’ culture that surrounds not only miscarriage but pregnancy and maternity more generally.

We then took our drinks into the Lecture Theatre where film-maker Cheryl Furjanic screened a series of clips and discussed the making of her documentary in progress Adventures in Miscarriage (anticipated release: 2027). As the description says, the film calls on ‘the powers of dark comedy, absurdist performance, intimate interviews, and queer camp’ to take a deeper look at what miscarriage is like for those who go through it, and how it is treated by the societies in which it takes place. Furjanic’s presentation did a wonderful job at revealing the emotional complexities of making a film centred around her own miscarriage, and the messiness of making art from a place of grief and trauma. Following Jen Scuro’s galvanising response – which reflected on the politics of making art about miscarriage amid attacks on reproductive justice in the post-Roe US – and a thoughtful audience discussion, we left for the day feeling inspired and exhausted in equal measure!

Day Two

Our second day began with Panel 5, Practices of Meaning-Making, which explored how people make sense of pregnancy endings in a wide range of ways, including via encounters with their pregnancy tissue, commemorative objects and digital technologies. In her paper Working with Ambiguity: Drawing on Multiple Methods, Disciplines and Lenses to Ensure Equitable and Respectful Miscarriage Care with Specific Reference to Pregnancy Tissue, Niamh Howard-Jones drew on research conducted through the Pregnancy Loss Research Group. Through interviews with women who had experienced recurrent miscarriage, and surveys of bereavement midwives and specialist nurses, Howard-Jones examined experiences of encountering and handling pregnancy tissue following pregnancy loss. The paper focused on the diversity of meanings attached to the pregnancy tissue: for example, while for some it was understood as medical material or evidence for diagnostic testing, for others, it represented a baby and was the object of mourning. The women interviewed described navigating uncertainty about what they were seeing and making decisions with limited guidance, which highlights the need for dedicated national guidance and information resources, alongside improved staff training to deliver equitable and respectful miscarriage care.

Julianne Boutaleb's presentation Liminal Losses: Towards Enfranchising ART Related Loss Experiences then extended the discussion into the context of assisted reproductive technologies. Drawing attention to experiences such as ‘failed’ embryo transfers and decisions surrounding frozen embryos, Boutaleb explored forms of loss that often remain invisible within dominant miscarriage narratives. One of the most thought-provoking aspects of the paper was its challenge to conventional reproductive timelines, showing how embryos can acquire significance long before implantation through the hopes, expectations and imagined futures invested in them by intended parents. Boutaleb described how the language of personifying embryos – ‘embabies’ – is used not only by prospective parents but clinicians as well. Yet Boutaleb argued that those meanings are neither fixed nor universal, as feelings about embryos change over time; and she also emphasised the contingency of the process – the fits and starts, interruptions, uncertainties and unknowns. The paper importantly highlighted how decisions about what to do with stored embryos can become emotionally and ethically complex, revealing forms of reproductive labour that often escape public recognition. I was especially struck by a description of how some people develop a deep fear of implanting their embryos in case the process doesn’t work, even describing keeping their embryos on ice as a way of preserving them and ‘keeping them safe’.

While Boutaleb’s presentation stretched the time-frame back to the period before conception, in the next, Susannah Shaw expanded it to incorporate the time beyond the initial period after a miscarriage or stillbirth has occurred. In her paper Parents' Experiences of Continuing Bonds Following Reproductive Loss: A Systematic Review and Meta-synthesis of Qualitative Studies, Shaw examined the concept of ‘continuing bonds’ within bereavement scholarship and used it to explore the ways relationships with lost pregnancies may persist over a whole lifetime. Rather than treating grief as something that should be resolved or overcome, the studies Shaw reviewed suggest that ongoing connections often remain meaningful and significant.

The panel concluded with Paul Ord's paper From Melancholy to Restless Objects: Miscarriage, Remembrance and Grief after Algorithms, which considered how memory and loss are mediated within the digital age. Ord compared the use of tangible and durable remembrance objects – like ‘memory boxes’ or commemorative jewellery – with algorithmically mediated forms of remembering through social media platforms and fertility-tracking applications, which can be slow to catch up when a pregnancy ends in miscarriage.  Unlike memory boxes or keepsakes, which are generally revisited intentionally, digital reminders can appear unexpectedly in ways that can be disruptive and disturbing. Ord compellingly likened algorithmic memory to a subconscious that has a background reality which surfaces in unpredictable and strange ways, having a restless temporality in comparison to physical objects that allow for what he called ‘dynamic remembrance’. Yet he also resisted simple oppositions between online and offline remembering, reminding us that algorithmic memories remain shaped in some way by the choices we make, through what we search for and what draws our attention.

We then moved into a beautiful session with the journalist and former BBC correspondent Tulip Mazumdar: Where Grief Goes: Love, Beauty and Loss. To begin, we watched the opening of Mazumdar’s BBC documentary Miscarriage: The Search for Answers (2022), which she made after experiencing the second-trimester losses of her sons, Rivah and Rae, exploring how different cultures and healthcare systems support pregnancy endings. She then shared with us how her journalistic reporting helped her to make meaning out of her own experience – out of which came a real sense of purpose to raise awareness, improve understanding and bring about change. Mazumdar’s reflections on inequality were especially insightful, as she recalled conversations with women she met who had been through similar physical and emotional experiences, but had so much less material and emotional support than she did as a resident of the UK with access to NHS healthcare, imperfect as it is. In the second part of the session, we went on to discuss Mazumdar’s subsequent collaboration with artist Sue Bridge, whose work she came across at a seaside town in Kent where she had taken up cold water swimming as a way of processing her losses, practicing remembrance and reconnecting with her body. This provoked a rich group conversation about the value of physical practices like swimming and hiking, and the possibilities of artistic practice for capturing emotional and bodily experiences that resist straightforward narration and reporting.

After this, Panel 6 on Law and Criminalisation, shifted our attention towards the role of law in both securing reproductive rights and entitlements and punishing the ‘wrong’ kinds of pregnancy. In her paper Legislating Miscarriage: Global Legal Responses to Early Pregnancy Loss and Reproductive Justice Implications, Megan Bradley presented a much-needed comparative analysis of miscarriage-related legislation across multiple jurisdictions. Drawing on Judith Shklar's distinction between ‘misfortune’ and injustice, she argued that state legislation can be effective in moving the public beyond the perception that miscarriage is just a matter of individual bad luck, of no concern to the wider society. It can also make modest improvements to miscarriage care and support: for example through state-mandated leave for employees. Indeed, Bradley explained that in the global context, most laws relating to miscarriage are related to employment leave; and interestingly, that miscarriage leave laws are more plentiful in countries where abortion is liberalised. However, Bradley also characterised the law as a ‘blunt tool’ for responding to an aspect of reproductive life that carries very different meanings for different people. Like Victoria Newton the day before, she pointed out that laws which frame miscarriage leave as ‘bereavement leave’ come with confining emotional scripts for interpreting the meaning of early pregnancy endings. Bradley also emphasised that such laws do nothing to address the social structures of inequality that determine unequal rates of miscarriage among different social groups and hierarchies of treatment.

Sheelagh McGuinness's paper What Does It Mean to Be Pregnant? Law, Stillbirth, and Clinical Thresholds extended these concerns through an examination of how the law designates pregnancy, using stillbirth registration in England as a lens. As there is no specific legal definition of pregnancy in English law, she explained, it has to be inferred from different pieces of legislation, and what emerges is significant conceptual instability and a lack of clarity. McGuinness argued that the legal treatment of pregnancy and stillbirth in this context reflects the dominance of a medico-legal paradigm that fails to capture the complexities of lived experience. Yet she also raised the question of whether law is bound to fail in this arena, when its role is to try and fix the very categories and binaries we are resisting.

Jill Wieber Lens then concluded the panel with The Right and Wrong Ways to Lose a Pregnancy, one of the most powerful presentations of the day. She focused on how criminalisation of pregnancy is on the increase in the US, emphasising that the arrests are sometimes for abortions managed outside the law, but are mostly for other charges related to causing and/or mishandling miscarriage or stillbirth. This reveals all too clearly that anti-abortion laws impact all pregnant people, and therefore must be resisted from all sides. But Lens also argued forcefully that laws alone (some of which already prohibit these arrests), are not the answer, because of the pernicious cultural assumptions that shape legal responses to miscarriage – coding certain kinds of miscarriage as suspicious, including those of people who miscarry on the toilet, who continue their normal activities, or who respond without obvious grief. These examples all made highly visible the extent to which criminalisation operates not only through legislation but also through cultural expectations about how miscarriage ought to be experienced. The panel as a whole, and the following discussion, made an important intervention in showing up the limitations of law in bringing progressive change – an important reminder when new laws are so often the focus of public campaigns.

Following lunch, the author, NHS Consultant and founder of the Reproductive Justice Initiative, Annabel Sowemimo, delivered the conference's second keynote presentation. In her talk – There’s No Justice, There’s Just Us: Lessons Learnt About Justice from the Managing of Miscarriage – Sowemimo shared her reflections on reproductive justice as a process which requires us to break rules and overstep boundaries when they are harmful. Pregnancy, she insisted, is messy and complicated, and so is the struggle to build systems that can give all pregnancies the time and care they deserve. Rather than imagining justice as something simply delivered by institutions, Sowemimo urged that each of us can make a sizeable difference, encouraging us to step up and be bold when required, but equally to know our limitations and stay grounded in communities and networks of solidarity. To illustrate, she drew on her own experience as a clinician as well as an activist, generating a lively conversation about how care can be improved for all pregnancy endings including abortion, without reproducing hierarchies of loss or need. 

The next panel, Clinical Perspectives, continued this discussion about how to provide quality care within clinical structures and frameworks that don’t always allow for complexity and variation. Julia Bueno's paper Moving Beyond the Expectation of Mourning drew on decades of work as a psychotherapist, during which she has witnessed a significant social shift – as miscarriage has gone from being routinely trivialised and ignored to being elevated as an issue that demands to be taken seriously. This shift is to be welcomed, Bueno argued, but with it has come an increasingly dominant ‘bereavement narrative’ that can constrain support options for those who don’t experience grief, engendering ‘a sense of alienation, confusion or even anger for those who experience their pregnancy differently’. The point, Bueno emphasised, is not to diminish all that has been achieved, but to insist that we mustn’t allow the hard won recognition of certain kinds of miscarriage to crowd out recognition of other kinds.

Hélène Malmanche's paper Ordinary or Tragic? Women's Experiences of Miscarriage in the Context of Changing Medical Norms in France also charted a similar shift to what Bueno observed in the UK – from miscarriage being viewed as a routine medical event to being increasingly framed through narratives of grief and bereavement within clinical spaces and the wider society. Yet like Bueno’s patients, the participants in Malmanche's research rarely conformed straightforwardly to either framework, often occupying positions somewhere between. One particularly interesting point raised during the presentation, and group discussion afterwards, was the relative absence in France of support structures equivalent to organisations such as the Miscarriage Association, highlighting how cultural and institutional contexts shape available forms of support.

The panel continued with an incredibly moving presentation: Claire Flahavan's ‘Fugitive Meanings’: Fieldnotes on Miscarriage from a Therapist's Perspective. Drawing on her experience as a perinatal therapist at Ireland's National Maternity Hospital – where she regularly encounters people going through miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, termination for medical reasons, intra-uterine death and stillbirth – Flahavan described her practice of ‘holding space for the unique, sometimes ambiguous meaning(s)that an individual or couple will make of their particular experience’, which can be challenging within an Irish setting in which taboos around abortion ‘continue to reverberate strongly, sometimes colouring the ways in which narratives around miscarriage are structured internally and presented to others’. One observation in particular stood out to me, regarding people who must contend with difficult decision-making following a diagnosis of ‘foetal anomaly’. For this group, there may be a protracted period of diagnostic uncertainty whilst waiting for test results, often against a backdrop of anticipatory loss, and a  miscarriage might be imagined, or even longed for, as a means of bringing relief from excruciating uncertainty, and from the decision of whether to end the pregnancy. What Flahavan showed us, with such gentleness and care, is that all kinds of emotions can coexist and shift over time, depending on the personal, familial and wider socio-cultural contexts in which a pregnancy ending occurs.

Concluding the panel was Jayne Kavanagh and Lesley Hoggart's presentation Addressing Stigma Across Reproductive Healthcare: Reflections on Abortion and Miscarriage Care. Drawing on Hoggart’s academic research into abortion stigma, and Kavanagh’s clinical experience as an NHS abortion provider, they explored what miscarriage care might learn from the field of abortion provision,  which has long been developing effective forms of compassionate care: such as using neutral language, refraining from making assumptions about circumstances and feelings, and providing support for decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. Their intervention was extremely valuable as it offered practical pathways and encouraged us to think across the full spectrum of reproductive healthcare rather than treating miscarriage in isolation. If we want to develop more responsive and inclusive care, they compellingly argued, we have to move beyond rigid distinctions between ‘wanted’ and ‘unwanted’ pregnancy outcomes.

Somehow we had come to the final panel of the day: Once Upon a Time, There Was a Miscarriage: How to Build Narratives on Pregnancy Loss. Speaking at the end of a packed programme like this is no easy task, and the speakers did a wonderful job at keeping things lively and throwing new perspectives and questions into the field. Manna Mostaghim’s paper challenged conventional understandings of reproductive loss by extending the meaning of pregnancy loss beyond miscarriage to include infertility and assisted reproduction. Mostaghim persuasively proposed that infertility can be understood as a form of pregnancy loss, which she characterised as a ‘loss of pregnancy opportunity’. She also drew attention to the specifies of undergoing miscarriage during fertility treatment, observing for example, that miscarriage during fertility treatment may sometimes be experienced not only as loss but also as positive evidence that conception was possible. The paper thereby complicated familiar distinctions between ‘success’ and ‘failure’, and highlighted experiences often excluded from discussions about pregnancy endings, encouraging us to think about pregnancies that end before they ever begin.

Sam Yosef’s paper then highlighted the significance of reproductive language through a comparison of terminology across European languages. For example, he showed that in Italian, there is no separate word for miscarriage: both miscarriage and abortion are described as aborto, distinguished only by modifiers such as ‘spontaneous’ or ‘induced’, which are often omitted in everyday speech. He reflected that this ambiguity can help destabilise rigid distinctions between miscarriage and abortion, while noting on the other hand that aborto also functions as a common insult. Other languages embed different assumptions: the French fausse couche (‘false birth’) and the German Fehlgeburt (‘mistaken birth’), like the English miscarriage, all imply that something has gone wrong. Yet finding better alternatives is far from straightforward, as our conversations throughout the conference attested.

Zaina Mahmoud concluded the panel with a vital discussion of surrogacy and miscarriage. Drawing on interviews with surrogates, she explored the legal and emotional complexities that arise when miscarriage or stillbirth occurs within surrogate pregnancies. One particularly striking example she spoke of concerned a surrogate who was required to arrange a funeral for a stillborn baby she had never intended to parent, because according to English law, she was the mother. The paper offered a powerful illustration that legal categories are themselves productive – creating relationships and obligations rather than simply describing or naming them.

The day closed with a performative presentation by artist Sofie Layton: Materialising Loss: The Artistic Remediation of Post-mortem Foetal Micro-CT Medical Data as ‘Care-ful’ Creative Methodology. Returning participants to questions of visualisation and representation that had recurred throughout both days, Layton explored how artistic practice can create new ways of engaging with pregnancy endings and reproductive loss. We were asked to respond to 3D prints of foetal medical data that had been made into objects to see and hold. The discussion that followed was both charged and hesitant, as these artistically rendered objects were more literal than the representations encountered elsewhere during the conference, prompting serious questions about visualisation and reproductive politics. For many in the room, the objects brought us to an uncomfortable point where commitments to exploring the multiple ways of encountering and processing reproductive loss brushed up against concerns about the visual politics of abortion rights. Some participants worried that visual representations of foetal remains risk reproducing anti-abortion imagery, especially when presented as inert and ‘beautifulised’ aesthetic objects; and some found the objects provoked painful personal emotions and were unable to engage. Yet there were others who felt that the objects offered a new way for people to process experiences of pregnancy loss, and that the presentation of the artwork had opened up a productive space for reflection. It was a fitting way to end the in-person part of the conference: not with a comfortable sense of completion, but a reckoning with discomfort, thoughtful disagreement, and continued questioning and conversation in the pub afterwards! What emerged was the need for trust, care and community as a prerequisite for any project of feminist exploration.

Finally, after a weekend break, we held our online panel on Monday: afternoon for those joining in the UK, and first thing in the morning for our US speakers. Madhumita Lahiri, in her paper Motherhood and Miscarriage in the US after Dobbs, discussed how the overwhelming majority of recent US miscarriage memoirs unfold from the retrospective position of a mother describing earlier miscarriages as a ‘detour’ on her journey to motherhood. Meanwhile, she pointed out, the miscarriages that make the US news are usually defined either by their criminal allegations or by their medical complications, highlighting the social inequalities and disparities that undergird hierarchies of pregnancy endings. Christine Hume also explored how miscarriage is becoming increasingly dangerous in the US, in her paper What Art from the Year of Roe Can Tell Us About Maternal Ambivalence in the Wake of Dobbs. Taking us through a series of images drawn from Joanne Leonard’s 29-page photo-collage, Journal of a Miscarriage, which was created in the year of Roe (1973), Hume’s presentation showed how Leonard’s multilayered Journal is a ‘much-needed complex address of maternal ambivalence and the internalization of the abortion/miscarriage false binary’.

Abby Lacelle then continued the discussion by foregrounding the economic dimensions of contemporary reproductive politics, in her paper For Sale: Babies, Never Born: Surrogacy, ReproTech, and the Means of Reproduction. The focus of the paper was the case of Cindy Bi, a venture capitalist, who prosecuted and cyberbullied her surrogate, Rebecca Smith, after she miscarried, alleging that Smith’s ‘slothfulness and laxity regarding matters of gestation’ amounted to killing ‘Bi’s fetus’. With careful nuance, Lacelle considered the extent to which pregnancy has become commodified within capitalist economies and social relations, posing vital questions about what kind of feminist resistance is required under such conditions. Finally, Laura Lazzarri concluded the conference with her paper Miscarriage Narratives and Storytelling as a Tool to Bring Awareness in Society and Improve OB/GYN Care, which highlighted a corpus of recent transnational texts and films that address the topic of miscarriage from a range of perspectives. The paper made a strong case for the growing field of Medical Humanities as a site for interdisciplinary dialogue across disciplines and professions, with the aim of improving reproductive healthcare as well as wider public understanding.

This was a perfect note on which to end the conference: an event that had clearly demonstrated the value of interdisciplinary discussion and exchange. The programme in its entirety showcased the breadth and vitality of a growing field committed not only to understanding the complexity of miscarriage and other pregnancy endings, but also to transforming the conditions under which pregnancy endings are lived, represented and cared for. The conference thereby offered a powerful demonstration of what feminist miscarriage research can achieve, and as one participant commented, it has really ‘put miscarriage studies on the map’.

Closing reflections

Looking back across the conference, four reflections stand out to me in particular:

First, the conference demonstrated how productive interdisciplinarity can be when it is organised around a tight focus and shared problem. Bringing together scholars and practitioners from literary studies, sociology, history, law, medicine, psychology, politics and the arts did not produce the fragmentation and cross-talking that can sometimes come with interdisciplinary events. Instead, the sharp focus on miscarriage, combined with a shared sense of urgency, created an atmosphere of collaboration and a strong feeling that everyone was engaged in the same larger project. The conference format itself helped to foster this, as we had reduced the length of individual presentations in order to avoid parallel sessions, which we feel was a trade-off worth making. Although it required strict timekeeping, keeping everyone together meant we all encountered papers we might otherwise have missed, including approaches outside our own disciplinary comfort zones that often proved some of the most stimulating.

A second key theme was ambiguity. Across the conference, ambiguity emerged not as a sign of vagueness, indecision or woolly thinking, but as a serious methodological and political commitment. Speakers repeatedly challenged the desire to fit miscarriage into a simple or singular framework, arguing instead for approaches capable of holding contradiction, multiplicity and uncertainty together. There was also a strong reminder throughout the conference not to underestimate people's powers of understanding and imagination. Patients, practitioners and wider publics are perfectly capable of engaging with complexity, and the conference showed that simplifying reproductive experiences in the name of clarity can be counterproductive and harmful. As many speakers suggested in different ways, ambiguity is not a problem to be solved but something that care systems, scholarship and politics must learn to articulate and account for.

Third, the conference consistently highlighted the multiple overlaps and connections between miscarriage and abortion, challenging the tendency to treat them as separate, even opposite, reproductive experiences. Across discussions about history, law, healthcare and language, it became clear that the boundaries between miscarriage and abortion are politically and historically constructed and difficult to maintain. Recognising, exploring and building on these connections, while remaining attentive to the differences between reproductive experiences, emerged as a vital direction for future feminist scholarship, advocacy and clinical practice.

A fourth recurring theme concerned time and temporality, as the conference repeatedly expanded the temporal boundaries within which miscarriage is usually understood, and showed that miscarriage is fundamentally a polytemporal experience. Speakers examined the political temporalities of reform, revolution and justice; the experiential temporalities of waiting, recurrence and being ‘stuck’; and the legal and medical thresholds that try to pinpoint when pregnancy begins and ends. These are coexisting timeframes and temporalities that all warrant critical attention, and it was striking how discussions stretched backwards and forwards in time, encompassing both the time prior to conception, and the long afterlives of pregnancy across all its endings.

This opening out of the time frame — beyond the duration of pregnancy and its immediate endings — is in many ways important and fruitful. It allows a wider range of experiences and players to come into view, suggesting ways of understanding miscarriage as relational and embedded within wider communities and structures, rather than solely as an individual event, happening only for the person who is/was pregnant. But at the same time, it raised a real question for me. As attention shifts more towards networks of relationships and wider social bonds, do we risk turning attention away from pregnant embodiment itself, and the messy, material, physical realities of miscarriage that remain so stigmatised and so determinedly avoided?

Finally, while the conference demonstrated the richness of contemporary miscarriage scholarship, it also pointed towards work that remains to be done. The programme was especially strong on emotional, experiential and imaginative dimensions of miscarriage, but there is still a need for more explicitly intersectional work and greater engagement with questions of political economy. As the discussion with Annabel Sowemimo highlighted, miscarriage still doesn’t occupy the same place within reproductive justice frameworks as abortion, birth and parenting, and so continuing to establish miscarriage as a reproductive justice issue remains an important task for the field. Yet the conference was an encouraging reminder that this work builds on decades of feminist scholarship and practice. As the keynote session with Linda Layne and Gayle Letherby demonstrated, an intergenerational community of feminist researchers, practitioners, campaigners and activists is already in place and growing. The challenge now is to build on these foundations and take the FMP to the next stage.

Blood of the Lamb

Blood of the Lamb: a play by Arlene Hutton

Brought to the ReproSalon by Occasional Drawl

Performed by Meredith Garretson, actor (Nessa) and Christa Scott-Reed, actor and Chief Creative Officer, Occasional Drawl (Val)

Photo credited to Henri T @documentedbyhenrit

On Friday May 29th, I had the pleasure of attending the annual ReproSalon warmly hosted by Lucy van de Wiel and the Reproduction Research Group, King's College London. Those of us in attendance were treated to a performance of the New York Off-Broadway theatre production Blood of the Lamb. A provocative play set in a post-Roe America, Blood of the Lamb has been described by The Guardian as “the best of political theatre” and praised as “a powerful piece of activism” that vividly exposes infrastructural reproductive injustices with “admirable subtlety, control and power.” As the play deals with pregnancy endings, I was asked to be part of a panel responding to the play. Following the powerful performance I joined on stage the actors, Brian Letchworth, Occasional Drawl’s Founder and Producer, and Mira Michels, a theatre lover and reproductive health researcher at King's College London, who organised the event after seeing the play's premiere in New York City in 2024. 

The play touches on many issues that are central to both my research and the aims of the FMP. I therefore want to reflect on three themes that resonate most strongly: foetal personhood, approaches to pregnancy tissue following miscarriage, and the often-hazy boundaries between miscarriage and abortion.

I was immediately struck by how plausible the play’s fictional scenario felt. Rather than presenting a distant dystopia, Blood of the Lamb imagines a future that appears to be a logical extension of post-Roe abortion restrictions in Texas, the growing influence of foetal personhood legislation, and state power over reproductive healthcare. This dynamic became especially visible following the 2024 Alabama IVF ruling, which treated frozen embryos as legal children and temporarily disrupted IVF services across the state. As Risa Cromer has shown, personhood laws are not merely abstract debates about when life begins; they form part of a broader political and religious project that uses embryos and foetuses to reshape ideas of citizenship, family, race, and reproductive rights. Through evangelical Christian activism around IVF, embryo adoption, and anti-abortion legislation, embryo and foetal personhood is actively produced as a social and political reality.

Several moments in the play hinted at the connection between personhood movements and white evangelical visions of America, particularly in exchanges where Val questions Nessa about her partner. As Cromer argues, personhood laws are closely tied to conservative Christian nation-building projects that promote heterosexual family-making and reinforce traditional gender roles. These interactions also underscore the extent to which Nessa’s pregnancy was wanted. As a lesbian couple, she and her wife invested significant emotional, financial, and practical resources in becoming pregnant, echoing themes explored by Christa Craven in her work on reproductive loss among LGBTQ+ families.

Nessa’s detention rests on the premise that her foetus is a separate legal person endowed with independent rights. Under these laws, the foetus is considered a baby and, following its death, a corpse. The legal issue therefore becomes about the treatment and transportation of human remains, which impact miscarriage management. As Val explains, the charge concerns “disturbing or damaging a human corpse … or transporting a corpse,” both felony offences.

This legal framework has significant implications for miscarriage care. Uterine aspiration—the procedure commonly used to manage missed or incomplete miscarriage—necessarily involves the removal and fragmentation of foetal tissue. In the UK, this procedure is generally referred to as Manual Vacuum Aspiration (MVA) when performed under local anaesthetic, or surgical management of miscarriage (SMM) when performed under general anaesthetic. Importantly, the procedure is medically identical to a surgically managed abortion, highlighting the profound entanglement of miscarriage and abortion in clinical practice. At one stage Val goes into detail explaining to Nessa what happens during an abortion in graphic terms.

I was struck by the play’s omission of medical management, which uses medications such as mifepristone and misoprostol to induce uterine contractions and expel pregnancy tissue. This absence is understandable given the narrative focus on the legal consequences of “damaging” a foetal corpse; medical management often results in the expulsion of tissue that remains relatively intact. Nevertheless, the omission may also reflect broader cultural differences in miscarriage care. In the UK, surgical intervention would be uncommon for a second-trimester miscarriage, making the play’s scenario feel particularly rooted in an American medical and legal context, perhaps.

The play’s focus on the foetal body resonated strongly with my own research on the handling and disposal of pregnancy and foetal tissue following early miscarriage. Like Blood of the Lamb, my work examines how institutions and individuals attribute meaning and value to the biological material of pregnancy endings. I have found that disposal practices in clinical contexts in England are increasingly shaped by assumptions of bereavement and construct forms of foetal personhood that do not necessarily align with how women themselves understand their pregnancies, their pregnancy endings, or the tissue involved.

In the play, legal ideology overrides concern for Nessa’s health, safety, and bodily autonomy. The dignity of the dead foetus is prioritised over the wellbeing of the living woman. Similar dynamics emerged in my own research. Practices intended to demonstrate respect and sensitivity toward foetal remains appeared to take precedence over the needs and wishes of women themselves. Moreover, interventions designed to be compassionate were often experienced as distressing, inappropriate, or alienating by those who encountered them.

The play’s preoccupation with the dead foetal body is particularly timely. In recent years, several women in the United States have been arrested for “abuse of a corpse” after disposing of miscarried foetuses outside formal medical settings. Historian Lara Freidenfelds argues that such prosecutions, accelerating in post Dobbs America, are a means for prosecutors to criminalise women who miscarry at home on the grounds, they have not handled foetal remains as though they were a corpse and to punish them for not interpreting miscarriage as the loss of a baby.  Risa Cromer and Sophie Bjork-James make a related argument in their work on foetal burial and “foetal funeral” legislation, describing the legal construction of dead foetuses as grievable human life in US law as “an anthropological curiosity. ” These laws seek to normalise particular forms of mourning and to legislate emotional responses based on assumptions about foetal personhood.

Foetal disposal laws vary considerably across the United States. Several states require healthcare providers to treat tissue from abortions and miscarriages in ways similar to deceased human remains, mandating burial or cremation and prohibiting disposal through standard domestic or medical waste systems. Texas, the setting of Blood of the Lamb, has some of the strictest requirements, alongside states such as Indiana, Ohio, Louisiana, Arkansas, and South Carolina.

A final striking resonance between the play’s message, mine and Victoria Browne’s work, and a key aim of the FMP, is the entanglements between miscarriage and other pregnancy endings. Recently, Vic and I have explored the lived experiences of pregnancy endings to demonstrate the complexity of distinguishing between miscarriage and abortion. Our work highlights the porous boundaries between these categories and argues for a maximally inclusive, full-spectrum approach to pregnancy endings. Blood of the Lamb, like the documentary Zurawski v. Texas screened by the FMP last year, offers a powerful illustration of these entanglements. Both show how laws designed to restrict abortion inevitably affect those experiencing miscarriage. As Vic and I argue, meaningful social support for miscarriage cannot be achieved while abortion remains stigmatised, restricted, or excluded from reproductive justice frameworks.

Recent research published in JAMA reinforces this point. The study found that state-level abortion bans were associated with significant changes in miscarriage care, including a shift away from medication management and toward expectant management, as well as continued reliance on less effective misoprostol-only regimens in states with abortion restrictions. The authors conclude that abortion bans do not remain confined to abortion care alone; rather, they reshape the entire continuum of pregnancy care. In this respect, Blood of the Lamb serves not only as political theatre but also as a stark warning about the far-reaching consequences of reproductive regulation.

Whilst there hadn’t been such input at the time of writing, ongoing discussions with clinicians and academics have helped the team to shape the performance, something which is ongoing given changes in the landscape of reproductive politics in the US. In this way, Blood of the Lamb is an example of how collaborations between creatives, academics, clinicians and activists can produce powerful and compelling work. Indeed, theatre is a particularly powerful medium for exploring reproductive politics because it transforms abstract legal debates into lived, embodied experiences. By inviting audiences to witness Nessa’s fear, confusion, and vulnerability in real time, Blood of the Lamb makes visible the human consequences of reproductive legislation in ways that statistics, policy reports, and legal arguments alone often cannot. In doing so, it creates space not only for critical reflection but also for empathy, which in turn can construct more doors, as Mira suggested, and provide people with the freedom and support to choose which reproductive path they wish to follow.

Pregnancy Endings exhibition

Last week, our exhibition Pregnancy Endings was on show at the Bomb Factory Art Foundation gallery in Central London (April 28 – May 4). The exhibition is a collaboration between the FMP, photographer Tara Todras-Whitehill, and artist-curator Meg Ferguson, bringing together portraits of people wearing t-shirts with self-devised statements that reflect the full spectrum of pregnancy endings, including birth, abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth, and more.

The idea for the exhibition came from a passage in my book, Pregnancy Without Birth, which insists on the inescapability of ambiguity in pregnancy. By this I mean not only that pregnancy is open to multiple meanings and lived in different ways, but also that it’s a fundamentally uncertain bodily situation. Pregnancy is lived through shifting meanings, partial knowledge, and indeterminate outcomes, which is why experiences like miscarriage can feel so disorienting. It’s not only the ending itself that can throw us off course, but the way it exposes something already true of pregnancy. The not-yets,not-quites, almosts, kind-ofs and alsos that emerge in miscarriage are also there throughout pregnancy, however and whenever it begins and ends, and however much we like to tell simple stories about “having a baby”.

In this part of the book, though, I acknowledged that simplicity is often more effective than ambiguity when it comes to political campaigning. “‘Ontological ambiguity now!’ is unlikely to take off as a t-shirt slogan,” I wrote. But at the same time, I wanted to resist the idea that ambiguity belongs only to academic theory. As Brittany Leach argues, accounts of pregnancy that make space for ambivalence, uncertainty, variation and contradiction, can in fact strengthen political claims for reproductive freedom precisely because they resonate more closely with how pregnancy is actually lived.

So after the book was published, I found myself returning to that line. Was “Ontological ambiguity now!” really such a bad t-shirt slogan? What kinds of slogans might begin to express the complexity and variability of pregnancy without collapsing it into a single, simplified narrative?

I thought about powerful stigma-busting campaigns like I Had an Abortion — a photographic series by Tara Todras-Whitehill, in which reproductive rights and justice activists, including Loretta Ross and Gloria Steinem, were photographed wearing T-shirts declaring “I had an abortion” — and the I Had a Miscarriage campaign on Instagram led by writer and psychologist Jessica Zucker. The simplicity of these slogans is precisely the point: they make clear statements that demand recognition and invite questions about the stories behind them.

But for many people, such simplicity isn’t easy. Experiences don’t always fit neatly into categories like “abortion” or “miscarriage.” What about someone who has had an abortion but understands it instead through the lens of “pregnancy loss” because it was a wanted pregnancy and a decision they felt they had no choice about? Or someone who feels they have lost a pregnancy but isn’t sure if they were ever pregnant? Or someone who rejects the term “miscarriage” altogether? And what about those who have experienced both miscarriage and abortion – which campaign do they belong to?

These are not unusual cases; they are part of the ordinary complexity of reproductive life. And I began to wonder: Could we create a project that reflects the full spectrum of pregnancy endings, all at the same time, and that amplifies ambiguity rather than covering it over? So I contacted Tara, the creator of I Had an Abortion, to ask what she thought about making a new series along these lines, and was delighted when I received an enthusiastic response.

The next step was to recruit participants. Susie Kilshaw (FMP Co-Lead) and I knew we needed a wide range of experiences. We initially hoped for around 15–16 people, but the project quickly grew. I reached out to people we knew, people who had spoken publicly, and others I found through their online profiles. We wanted diversity not only in terms of personal experiences, but also perspectives: people speaking about their own pregnancies, as well as clinicians, doulas, activists, friends, and family members who support others through them.

One experience that proved particularly difficult to find was miscarriage experienced with relief. This response is largely absent from public narratives, in part because expressions of grief have become so dominant lately. But Susie, with her anthropologist’s commitment to staying true to lived experience, found people willing to share these stories.

We left the t-shirt statements entirely open — no word limits, no templates. And in the end, nearly 50 people took part. We were amazed by how many people came forward, with participants spreading the word among their friends and networks.

The photoshoots took place over four days in November 2025 and January 2026. Organising it all was a steep learning curve as I’d not organised anything like this before. Academic conferences and workshops, yes. Hiring lighting equipment and choosing colour backdrops, no. Thankfully, my brilliant friend, artist and curator Meg Ferguson, led on the aesthetic side — designing the t-shirts and selecting a beautiful colour palette, as well as going on to curate the exhibition in the gallery.

The shoot days themselves in East London were unforgettable. Tara brought such a calm presence, quietly inviting participants to share as much or as little as they wanted to. People chose how they wanted to be photographed based on how they felt that day, and there was a strong sense of camaraderie. Some looked through the t-shirts on the rail and read the slogans of others; some recognised each other and had a catch up; people shared tips for being less shiny (blotting paper!) and helped each other pin back t-shirts that needed adjusting, waiting patiently and respectfully when schedules overran.

One especially memorable moment was photographing a group of NHS staff at Homerton hospital, organised by Jayne Kavanagh from the FMP advisory board. Many of her colleagues couldn’t come to the studio due to shift work, so we brought the shoot to them. Luckily Tara, a documentary photographer who travels the globe, was up for the challenge and we had Susie’s research assistant Caroline to help as well. We had the full lighting kit delivered to the hospital carpark and met Jayne in the Gynaecology department, where she marshalled together ten of her colleagues who gamely put the t-shirts on over their uniforms, helped us clear a space and put up a backdrop in an examination room, and posed for the picture around a bed I may well have lain on during my own pregnancies.

I’m now writing this the day after the exhibition has closed. It’s been deeply moving to see such a range of people and statements displayed on the gallery walls, side by side, all week. Statements by two teenagers about the need for honest education have been displayed across from a statement reflecting on a miscarriage that took place forty years ago. A statement about a traumatic experience of stillbirth has sat alongside one describing a miscarriage as a relief.  At times, these kinds of positionings may feel uncomfortable, and we would never try to dictate how anyone should respond, or judge those for whom such proximity is too much to cope with. But what the exhibition has shown is the possibility of connection across difference — a form of solidarity not based on uniformity, but on a shared commitment to reproductive justice, health equality and mutual support. And creating the space itself has also enabled that solidarity to be built. At the opening evening, participants met and shared stories of the photoshoots and being part of the project, photographing each other in front of the portraits. Friends, family members, partners, colleagues and children came along to support them.

The t-shirt statements themselves aren’t always easy to read at first glance, but this has turned about to be a real strength. The viewer has to take time to look closely and take them in, and think through their implications. Over the week, I’ve watched people pause at the gallery windows and peer in, coming in and taking time to look, and to read carefully through the exhibition booklet where participants have so generously written longer pieces about their experiences. And we certainly had a range of people coming in: a jogger who stopped by during the opening evening in full running outfit and later got in touch; a couple visiting London from China who wrote a message in the visitors’ book in Mandarin; a family whose young daughter ran around the gallery choosing her favourite portraits; an elderly man who spoke about his late wife’s fertility struggles and gave me a handmade bracelet.

I feel incredibly privileged to have had these experiences, and deeply grateful to everyone who contributed to making this exhibition possible. This is a beginning as well as an ending, and I’m excited to see where it goes next.

As one person commented in the visitors’ book: "I walked past this exhibition exactly when I needed to. Thank you". 

Review of the BBC series ‘Babies’

Susie was invited last week by The Conversation to review the new BBC fictional drama ‘Babies’, which tells a story of a couple living in the UK experiencing recurrent miscarriage.

“Babies portrays the [visceral] reality of miscarriage”, she writes, “including toilets, where most miscarriages occur and are disposed of. The drama also gives a sense of the range of feelings that accompany miscarriage: hope, fear, anger, frustration, optimism, sadness and grief”.

However, “the portrayal of clinicians is more problematic”, as it constructs an overly simplistic narrative of insensitive care. “Over 15 years of research”, Susie writes, “I have encountered accounts of poor and insensitive miscarriage care. However, more recent research suggests that particularly within the NHS, care has improved significantly, with women reporting compassionate and sensitive support. During 20 months of fieldwork in a large NHS foundation trust in England, I consistently observed responsive and empathetic clinical care. This is not to suggest uniformity across and within settings, but rather to question whether Lisa’s experience reflects the norm in many NHS contexts today. As I have argued elsewhere, an understanding of miscarriage as bereavement increasingly underpins NHS care, reflecting a broader cultural shift that recognises miscarriage as a significant loss”.

Susie also points out that the series “reinforces a dominant narrative in which miscarriage is always experienced as traumatic and devastating. While this will resonate with many – and such validation is important – it risks marginalising those whose experiences fall outside this, including some of the women I have interviewed in my work”.

You can find the full review — ‘Babies: raw, nuanced, real – what this BBC drama gets right about recurrent miscarriage’ — here.

Miscarriages aren’t always a tragedy

In March, Victoria and Susie were commissioned by the Fuller Project to write a piece for their special issue on Motherhood. Here is an extract from our piece, titled ‘Miscarriages aren’t always a tragedy’:

As miscarriage has increasingly been framed as the tragic loss of a baby, grief is becoming the expected response. For some people, this resonates deeply with their experience. But for others, like Alex, it does not. Some people feel sadness, frustration or disappointment, but not a sense of grief. Some feel ambivalent. Some feel relief. But the way miscarriage is now treated within the UK National Health Service often assumes a particular emotional script, a shift which is also evident in the US and elsewhere. Referring to a ‘baby’, offering counseling, and providing options such as burial, cremation or memorials can be profoundly meaningful for those who feel they have lost a child. But when one narrative becomes dominant, other experiences are marginalized or excluded altogether.

You can read the full piece here, and also this response on Instagram:

This is the first time I’ve seen my own experience of miscarriage (and ectopic pregnancy) somewhat reflected. For me it wasn’t one of grief and devastation, even though we were actively trying for a baby. I mostly felt frustration, guilt at having to ‘end’ that life (with the ectopic) and annoyed that we were set back by time… thanks for widening this conversation because I definitely always felt unusual in my experience.

In conversation with Cheryl Furjanic

In September 2025, the Feminist Futures platform led by Narges Bajoghli and Sareh Afshar organised a conversation on Zoom between myself and Cheryl Furjanic: Director/Producer of the forthcoming documentary Adventures in Miscarriage, which we’ll be screening at our upcoming conference in London in June 2026.

The conversation has now been published - ‘Miscarriage as a Feminist Issue: A Conversation Between Cheryl Furjanic and Victoria Browne’ - and I look forward to further collaborations with Cheryl in the year to come!

Interview with aracelis girmay

We are delighted to share our interview with aracelis girmay (Knight Family Professor of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Stanford University). aracelis is author of the poetry collections GREEN OF ALL HEADS (BOA, 2025), the black maria (BOA, 2016), Kingdom Animalia (BOA, 2011), and Teeth (Curbstone, 2007); and editor of the anthology So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (Haymarket Books, 2023), which is the focus of our dialogue below.

What inspired you to put So We Can Know together at this particular moment in US history? Can you explain something of the context out of which it has been forged?

First, I really want to thank you for this ongoingly incredible resource and for attending to the ground and creating space for us to have these public conversations.

I began thinking toward this anthology a little over ten years ago, in 2014, when moving through the terrain of planned pregnancy and then maternity. I read everything I could find and everything that was recommended to me. As I note in the anthology, I was a Black, cis woman pregnant in the United States, a country built on genocide and brutal labor extraction. A country in which Black and Native American people, as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention announced in 2019, are two to three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than their white counterparts. A country of eugenics-based sterilization laws and campaigns that resulted in more than 37 percent of women of childbearing age in Puerto Rico (most of them in their twenties) being sterilized, as reported in 1976 by the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. In the twenty first century, forced sterilizations have been recorded in California prisons and in for-profit ICE detention centers. And so, from the moment that the US begins as an entity and all the way up to now, we can see the ways that the bodily autonomy of women and people of color and poor people is structurally denied. I thought it would be vital to hear from writers who think critically about gender, race, class, history, power, beauty – not necessarily and only as thinkers, historians, artists, but as “dwellers in the world” to borrow from Cristina Rivera Garza – on their experiences of pregnancy, loss, abortion, and/or birth.

I could not have imagined what stories and analyses people were moving with, but I knew that it was vital and could help us to understand not only the daily structures of our lives but also the ways that our strategies, dreams, lifeforces have always been beyond the architects of these deprived systems. Even as these very systems shape us and diminish so much of what is possible, it is also always true that each of us – our relationships to the world, our humanness, intellects, histories, idiosyncracies, ways to love – exceeds what the state imagines. I am thinking about Toni Morrison’s talk “The Site of Memory” and this moment when she says: “the act of imagination is bound up with memory. You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and liveable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be.” I think about stories and sociality, how we shape our lives according to stories, despite them, and in refusal of them. Hearing from each other continues to be one of the ways we build power and make relational paths, sometimes where we thought there were none, and so on. I hope that the anthology contributes to that building of power, that making way.

Even ten years ago, I could not have imagined that we would find ourselves here with the court overturning Roe v. Wade and thus, according to the law, eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion. But others were paying better attention than I was. I am thinking about the brilliant historian Jennifer L. Morgan (who, with her daughter Emma Morgan-Bennett, is a contributor to So We Can Know). In August of 2022, Morgan published her article “Reproductive Rights, Slavery, and ‘Dobbs v. Jackson’” in which she helps us to understand that since 1662 “the founding legislators of this country were erecting a legal system in which, among other things, the expansion of the slave economy rendered women’s reproductive lives as matters of political, legal, and economic intervention.” As she notes, these conditions of slavery and enslavement continue to erode legal claims to bodily autonomy into this century, as she says it: “expanding exponentially into the lives of poor and dispossessed Americans across the racial spectrum.”

Though statistics showing the racial disparities in pregnancy outcomes are becoming more widely reported, the lived experiences behind these numbers are often missing, which makes books like this so vital. How did you go about curating and organising this collection, and were there perspectives or voices you felt were particularly important to include?

For a few years I gathered the names of writers whose thinking about class, gender, race, and community I’d long admired, and whose writing on pregnancy, loss, abortion, and/or birth was, or would be, lucid and brilliant in ways I could not imagine. I wrote to people – a few at a time – without knowing, for the most part, their relationships to any of these experiences or, if they said yes, what they’d choose to write about. I hoped that the anthology would be intergenerational and include a range of perspectives and experiences; and to the extent that I could, I thought about this when inviting writers to submit work. This said, I decided at the start of my curation that I would not say no to a single submission and for that reason I decided against an open call for submissions. The work included in the book was almost all previously unpublished work, I could not guess what people would write about and how. So, I received one large wave of submissions and read and took notes and then invited a few other writers to contribute, here and there, thinking always of how we might make the text more intricate, various, and capacious. Still, there are major gaps in this anthology including when it comes to trans pregnancy experiences and the experiences of Indigenous writers.

To your question about organizing the collection: it was immediately evident to me that I could not organize the anthology with discrete themes in mind. There could be no section only about abortion or only about colonial interventions, etc. Each submission is prismatic and teeming with so many themes, and I was increasingly interested in the challenge of variousness and what thinking with this variousness might make possible. So many complex ways of reading and thinking are foreclosed by categorization, and in this anthology, I tried to honor the texts’ expansive and varied resonances as I chose what would come first then next and so on. As I point to in the intro, it was important to me to think of these works as resisting one order and as stunningly entangled. And so, while I did not organize the book into themed sections, I thought of the sections as mini arcs within the larger book. I was interested in what thinking and questions the works, side by side, helped to pose or make possible. For those wanting to locate specific themes, my hope was that the index would be a useful tool for them, even as I understood the project of the index to be more unending, challenging, and extensive than its current version in the anthology. I am thinking now of artist and critic Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s new book INDEX 2025, its citations, references, repetitions, and entanglements in which I feel called into confrontations with my own imaginations and ways of interrogating my reading practices. My sense is that there is more work to do with this anthology’s index in particular, to further study the overlaps of structures and strategies discussed, and to further emphasize that entangled quality out of which each text and the overall body of the book is forged.

It was great to read Shannon Gibney and Kao Kalia Yang’s contribution to So We Can Know (co-editors of What God is Honored Here? Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss by and for Native Women and Women of Color, published in 2019).  How do you see your collection as being in relation and dialogue with theirs, as well as other landmark feminist works and collaborations?

I was very moved to find their anthology, kind of late in my own process with this book. I read it front to back and spent several quiet days in its wake. I knew immediately that I wanted to thank them and to tell them about the anthology, and to ask if they might be interested in submitting a text. I was humbled when they said yes – and very moved by their contribution, which is a co-written essay called “The Beginning and the End,” which reflects on the beginning of their undertaking to create the What God is Honored Here? anthology, but also the process of bringing it into the world – editing the tender, difficult work of others and gathering for readings once the book was released. It is an essay that honors the voices of others, some of the uses of language, and the fact that sometimes language and story can bring us into community with others. I also felt especially thrilled by their contribution because it was one example, among many (I think), of how the book exceeds itself and is reaching toward other communities, collaborations, gatherings, and projects. Similarly, I think of this book as being in constellation with This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, and Revolutionary Mothering, edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams. I keep learning more about works with whom the book is in constellation, as is the case with Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance, edited by Sophie Hamacher with Jessica Hankey.  

A central theme in the collection is that of knowing. What does it mean to know, and why is knowing in these ways so important? Relatedly, is there also a place for not knowing, or for practices of forgetting and unknowing? 

This is one of those questions that touches – exactly – the struggle for me in life and in this work in particular. Especially when thinking about the brutality of systems and their myriad resultant traumas, it seems to me critical that tenderness, beauty, strength, “the body’s whole expressive repertoire” as John Edgar Wideman calls it, and imaginative strategies are all a part of what we know and learn to read within any present or history, brutal as it may be. I am also thinking of Kamau Brathwaite’s words, ever since m nourbeSe philip carried them into his virtual memorial five years ago. Brathwaite says: “There is so much undone to be undone.” So much forgetting has been forced upon people by ruling classes who inflict this forgetting as a way to maintain power and the status quo. This is not the unknowing or forgetting I have time for. But the forgetting forged by people who sought to protect generations after them from the traumas of their histories, traumas that can psychically derail us and sometimes do. I understand these impulses. I don’t know that I have a clear way of thinking about that kind of work except that it seems to me to be the result of a kind of vigilance that I do understand.

For me, there are stories I wish I did not have to know or tell but knowing them is a critical part of how I know to not only keep myself vigilant and alive, but to more rigorously think about the structures in place that depend on such horrors. This knowing is part of my analysis and part of how I understand my reality, my complicity, and my work. But with this must also come the discipline of dreaming, softness, joy, celebration, pleasure, otherwise we are left with brutality alone. I am also thinking about another kind of knowing, which has to do with having access to the multiplicity of experiences to pregnancy, abortion, loss, and/or birth. I am thinking about the crystal-clear words of Elizabeth Alexander who describes a decision to have an abortion as being “an unpleasant but untragic experience. It was an experience of self-determination…” So, to encounter distinct voices in distinct relation to their reproductive choices is critical and vital. To know that even across a single life, our stories and choices and the conditions out of which we decide or do not decide, might be complex and various.

On another note, I am also thinking about the relational aspects of this discipline as carried in the words of Vanessa Angélica Villareal in her essay “The Water Clock”: “I want to spare you from the future and its silences, tell you all the names I know that made you possible, place your birth in a timeline that doesn’t begin with you.” And also this: “So in this way, this is my gift: a document that will give you access to answers I never had, reconstruct a timeline that would be lost without my testimony. A point of your many origins. A record of something repeating in me, repeating in you. It’s not your fault.”

What kind of reception has the book had so far? And what kinds of conversations and actions do you hope the collection will catalyse?

The book has quietly but steadily moved into the world. It has been on a few resource lists that I know of – a couple for healthcare providers and community programs, and at least one put out by the public library. We were committed to the idea that this gathering would be a valuable, useful companion and tool for people thinking about pregnancy and/or involved in birth work, and I should mention that every writer donated their contribution so all royalty proceeds will be donated, yearly, to reproductive health and justice organizations that center people of color. In terms of conversations: when the book was newly out, we had a very special reading with the incredible Charis Books and a gorgeous reading at the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn and a few workshops and events led by the amazing Maria Hamilton Abegunde and Mahogany Browne and hosted by my dear friend Patrick Rosal at Rutgers-Camden just before the labor strike in 2023. More recently I was invited to be in conversation with Evie Shockley and The Brigid Alliance abortion access project. I also participated in a powerful HUQ discussion organized by cultural worker and photographer Ashima Yadava and hosted in a community space in SF last year. There, folks from i need an a, Maitri, and Access Reproductive Justice presented on their works and strategies and I briefly read excerpts from the anthology. It was not a poetry reading but a think-tank/network meeting, and I felt in that space that the words of these writers changed the air in the room. Their breaths, histories, and specific bodily experiences charged the air and grounded the work, and the stakes, in testimony and analysis. Their voices, that day, increased my clarity about the importance of reading our stories in true relation. That immigrant rights, public education, trans rights, access to food and safe shelter and healthcare, reproductive justice, are all absolutely connected and that it is vital that we understand them as such.

Another thing that has happened, that I did not foresee, is that people have asked me – in person and via email – if they could contribute their stories to a second volume. Maybe people feel compelled to make new volumes as books or zines, or plays and theatre. I have received a few letters from people sharing stories that they hadn’t shared before because they thought they were irrelevant or that it was too late for anything to be done with them. It is very simple and yet I am stunned each time: hearing the stories of others can not only call us out of the perceived isolations of our lives, it can also challenge us to name the larger forces at work, the “secret hands of history” as Sandra Guzmán writes in her fiercely lucid “Then They Came For Our Wombs.” The work of these writers, over and over, denies these structures their invisibility and instead calls them into scrutiny. I think such scrutiny informs action. I am thinking of the opening sentence of Audre Lorde’s “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” in which she writes: “The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives.”

On the complexity and diversity of miscarriage experiences

When my first pregnancy ended in miscarriage at 13 weeks, I was devastated. Over the years – and after experiencing two more pregnancy endings – I came to understand what anthropologist Linda Layne meant when she described the ‘taboos and silences’ surrounding miscarriage in her 1997 article ‘Breaking the Silence: An Agenda for a Feminist Discourse of Pregnancy Loss.’ Nearly 30 years later, much has changed. Miscarriage is no longer hidden from public view. Celebrities now openly share their experiences, and events like Baby Loss Awareness week have helped bring the topic into the spotlight.

However, as the silence has faded, it’s been replaced by certain dominant narratives. For the past 15 years, I’ve followed Layne’s lead by conducting anthropological research on miscarriage. During this time, I’ve seen a shift in how miscarriage is treated in both medical and non-medical settings. In the past, it was often seen as an unfortunate but routine event, something women were expected to recover from quickly. After my own miscarriages, I received no aftercare – I went straight back to work, and there was little or no recognition of any potential physical or emotional effects.

Thankfully, things have improved. Today, there’s more empathy in how miscarriage is handled. In my recent research, I’ve observed healthcare providers regularly giving women information about specialist counsellors they can contact. This kind of dedicated support shows a change in how miscarriage is understood – there is more recognition of its potential impact. Such changes are supported by recent UK government initiatives, which reflect the broader societal move to emphasise the seriousness of miscarriage. Last year, the UK government launched the Baby loss certificate scheme so that people could receive official recognition, and more recently, it announced that people who experience pregnancy loss before 24 weeks will have the legal right to bereavement leave.

I must note, though, that these initiatives typically don’t come with real material change such as paid leave for those experiencing early pregnancy endings. While I welcome increased support, I’ve also noticed a new problem, as these initiatives demonstrate: miscarriage is now framed as the loss of a baby, and the assumed emotional response is grief or bereavement. For some people, this is welcome and resonates with their feelings of loss. Yet for others, this framing doesn’t reflect their experience. As a result, they may feel out of step with the dominant narrative and with the care that is offered.

My most recent research into the ‘remains and remnants’ of miscarriage, broadly conceived, has included an exploration of how the physical remains of miscarriage are handled. This work has revealed that bereavement narratives and memorial practices promoted by charities and other groups play a dominant role in shaping public understandings and inform clinical care of miscarriage in England. Hospital practices around what happens to pregnancy tissue, however, can be inconsistent and contradictory with disposal practices producing foetal personhood. Most hospitals offer ceremonial disposal, such as cremation or burial, which reinforces the idea that a baby has died. But these same institutions may also use processes that don’t support that framing.

I’ve argued that structuring miscarriage care around the assumption of grief can be problematic. It doesn’t consider the complexity and diversity of lived experience. When hospitals focus on ceremonial disposal without offering real choices, this approach isn’t inclusive. Many of the women I spoke to did experience grief after miscarriage, but not all did. And that matters – because in focusing so heavily on grief and memorialisation, current care models risk making those who don’t feel that way think there is something wrong with them. Some women end up feeling alienated or abnormal when their response doesn’t match the expected one.

I’ve seen firsthand how current clinical practices can offer real comfort to those who experience miscarriage as the loss of their baby. Using the term ‘baby’, providing counselling, and offering options like burial, cremation, or memorials can be deeply meaningful for people in grief. But not everyone relates to their miscarriage in this way. Some people – even those who feel grief – find ceremonial practices like funerals or burial unsettling. They don’t necessarily see the biological remains as central to their loss. Others feel sadness, frustration, or disappointment, but not grief. And some feel relief. One woman I spoke to had planned to terminate her pregnancy, and her miscarriage meant she didn’t have to go through with an abortion with conflicted feelings. What my research consistently shows is that there is no single way to feel after a miscarriage. One woman, firmly committed to ending her pregnancy, was shocked by her unexpected grief after miscarrying before her appointment for an abortion. Another, who had an abortion, was devastated – and went on to mourn and memorialise the loss of her baby.

These stories reveal a crucial truth: when care systems assume a ‘right’ or ‘normal’ emotional response to miscarriage or abortion, they risk excluding and even harming those who don’t fit the mould.  Miscarriage care needs to be more flexible, more inclusive, and more responsive to the wide range of experiences people have – not just the ones we expect them to have.

The Feminist Miscarriage Project was born out of real people’s stories – like those described above – that reveal just how blurry the boundaries can be between miscarriage, abortion, and other forms of pregnancy endings. These categories, while useful in some contexts, often fail to reflect the complexity of lived experiences. One of our central goals is to challenge and rethink these fixed labels, and to explore how care, advocacy, and academic work on pregnancy endings might be more connected, inclusive and responsive to diversity.

Take the National Bereavement Care Pathway for example: it’s a national programme designed to guide healthcare providers in delivering compassionate, consistent care to those who experience pregnancy loss. While this kind of support is essential for those who are grieving, it must be accessible to all who experience pregnancy endings – no matter the stage of gestation or the circumstances of the end of the pregnancy. Counselling and sensitive hospital services like cremation can bring real comfort to those who need them. But my research has shown that when healthcare assumes every miscarriage is a bereavement, it can do more harm than good. Many women I spoke to didn’t relate to this model of care. Some even experienced distress when faced with language or practices that presumed grief or treated their pregnancy as the loss of a baby.

As Vic wrote in her first blog post, ‘the contemporary challenge is less about “breaking the silence”, and more about making feminist interventions into how miscarriage is spoken of – by complicating, challenging, and adding to the narratives already circulating.’ That’s exactly what The Feminist Miscarriage Project is working to do: to broaden the conversation, to include a diversity of voices and experiences, challenge dominant assumptions, and to ensure that every experience of pregnancy ending – whether marked by grief, relief, or something else entirely – is considered and respected.

A Reproductive Justice approach to miscarriage

In 1997, feminist anthropologist Linda Layne published ‘Breaking the Silence: An Agenda for a Feminist Discourse of Pregnancy Loss’: a landmark article that explored the ‘taboos and silences’ surrounding miscarriage. Layne recognised the efforts of pregnancy loss support groups to create ‘a space in which to speak’ but was also clear that women-led advocacy and mutual support does not necessarily align with feminist principles. In fact, some of the pregnancy loss groups and individuals she encountered in her research were actively anti-abortion. Accordingly, the article identified a pressing need for an explicitly feminist framework for researching and understanding miscarriage. Though feminists may be fearful that acknowledging miscarriage-related grief might strengthen the anti-abortion movement, Layne argued that maintaining a ‘studied silence’ is not an option, as this simply ‘[gives] the field to the antichoice activists while adding to the silence members of pregnancy-loss support groups find so painful’. The article therefore concludes by laying down a challenge to feminist activists and scholars as well as healthcare providers and clinicians – to articulate a robust feminist agenda and ‘invent a new and more liberatory discourse’ on miscarriage and other forms of pregnancy loss.

Nearly three decades later, the Feminist Miscarriage Project is taking stock and assessing the extent to which this agenda has been realised within the changed cultural and political terrain we now operate within. When feminist academics were writing about miscarriage in the 1990s and 2000s, they did so against a backdrop of relative cultural silence; though as Layne demonstrates, the pregnancy loss community had already achieved a lot in terms of making themselves heard by a broader audience. Today, while miscarriage is still often described as ‘taboo’, it’s actually discussed much more frequently in the public arena, with celebrity miscarriage stories, for example, being regularly shared and reported, and well over a million Instagram posts using #miscarriage and #miscarriageawareness by late 2023.

The contemporary challenge, therefore, is less about ‘breaking the silence’, and more about making feminist interventions into how miscarriage is spoken of – by complicating, challenging and adding to the narratives already circulating. As media scholar Zelly Martin shows, for instance, miscarriage stories in news media and magazines often perpetuate conservative ideas about gender and reproduction, inscribing a formulaic narrative of miscarriage as ‘the worst thing that can happen to a woman’, which bolsters the ‘cult of true motherhood’ and ‘racialized notions of women as domestic, submissive, pious, and pure’.

Since Layne wrote her article in the 1990s, a small but growing body of feminist scholarship has been established across various disciplines, though it remains rather fragmented. One core aim of this research has been to challenge the false binary between supporting abortion and supporting miscarriage, and hence to dissolve feminist anxiety about broaching the subject. For example, anthropological studies adopting what Layne calls the ‘cultural model of personhood’ show how the process of constructing or ‘calling into’ personhood may be undertaken with some embryos/foetuses and not others. This model is complemented by work in feminist philosophy taking a relational view, which proposes that the ontological and moral status of an embryo/foetus – the kind of being it is – is not absolute. Instead, it depends upon how the pregnant person, within whom that particular foetal being is enmeshed, relates to and understands it. In other words, because a foetus is not independent of a pregnant person’s body, its status is not independent of that pregnant person. Such perspectives affirm that one can advocate for abortion and for miscarriage support without contradiction, as long as we put the people who actually are, or have been, pregnant at the centre.

Feminist researchers also emphasise that miscarriage carries different meanings for different people. For some, it’s a source of profound grief and trauma; for others, it may be a relief, or pass with minimal emotional impact. Moreover, as sociologist Gayle Letherby noted back in 1993, these different meanings will be affected by ‘commitment to and expectations of individual pregnancies, as well as specific medical, social, and material circumstances’. Feminist research, she argued, needs to examine how miscarriage experiences are ‘mediated by things such as class, race, and disability’ and develop deeper understandings of how the ‘negative aspects of the experience of miscarriage are compounded by patriarchy and capitalism’.

Yet while the number of studies has been growing, much of the research on miscarriage continues to disproportionately focus on white, middle-class, cis-het women, even though marginalised groups often experience higher miscarriage rates. For example, it’s been estimated that Black women in the UK are 43% more likely than white women to experience miscarriage, and without centring these lived experiences, the statistics can erase the people most affected. This persistent imbalance reflects a broader issue in miscarriage scholarship: a lack of thorough attention to power, privilege and structural inequality. While there are increasing calls for recognition and awareness, material change requires addressing the systemic forces – racism, capitalism, patriarchy, ableism – that determine who is most at risk, who receives adequate care, and whose experiences are counted.

This is why the Feminist Miscarriage Project is calling for a renewed feminist research and activism agenda that fully incorporates miscarriage within the wider movement for Reproductive Justice (RJ). Developed by Black feminists and women of colour in the 1990s, RJ is grounded in three core principles: the right to have children, the right not to have children, and the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments. Although miscarriage and stillbirth weren’t explicitly named in the original RJ framework, the philosophy behind RJ provides a crucial foundation for including them. As RJ advocates like Loretta Ross argue, abortion doesn’t stand alone – it must be understood within the full scope of reproductive experiences, which includes miscarriage and stillbirth as well as live birth and parenting.

This ‘full-spectrum’ approach goes further than demonstrating that advocating for both miscarriage and abortion is a consistent position to take. Rather, it insists that support for one kind of pregnancy ending requires support for all others. Legal scholar Sheelagh McGuinness underscores this point, explaining that it’s not always straightforward to distinguish between induced and spontaneous pregnancy endings, and so in contexts where abortion is criminalised, suspicion is cast ‘across the piste’, leading to invasive scrutiny and criminal investigations of miscarriages and stillbirths as well as abortions. In West Virginia in the US, a state with a total abortion ban, a prosecutor has even suggested that people report miscarriages to law enforcement pre-emptively to stave off potential investigation.

Such cases demonstrate how closely linked pregnancy outcomes are, and why solidarity across pregnancy’s many possible endings is essential. Full social support and acceptance for miscarriage can’t be achieved until abortion too, in all its forms, is supported and accepted. But RJ isn’t only about fighting for legal rights and decriminalisation, as rights can’t be exercised where there’s no meaningful access to vital support systems. The RJ approach therefore directs our attention to broader socioeconomic structures, demanding that all people are enabled to access reproductive services and care as well as basic necessities such as nutritious food and clean water. This structural approach is grounded in an understanding of intersectionality drawn from the Black feminist tradition of scholars and activists – such as the Combahee River Collective – who have shown how gendered, sexualised, and racialised systems of domination combine to produce inequality at all levels of capitalist societies. Recent studies, for example, indicate that factors like night shift work, air pollution, and job loss can all increase the risk of miscarriage.

The RJ approach, therefore, is about seeing miscarriage not just in terms of social taboos and individual experiences, but also in terms of the socioeconomic inequalities and injustices that shape them. Moreover, it means connecting the local to the global, as miscarriage is affected not only by domestic politics but also by geopolitical relations and conditions. In Gaza, for example, healthcare workers have reported a huge rise in miscarriage under the Israeli government’s blockade, bombardment and attacks on healthcare facilities. As the collective statement ‘Resistance is Fertile: No reproductive justice without freedom for Palestine’ makes clear, occupation, invasion, and genocide are clearly ‘in direct violation of reproductive justice and should therefore be a matter of concern for all advocates for reproductive justice, health, and freedom’.

So as we build a renewed liberatory agenda for miscarriage research and activism, we need to be asking how we can connect up with broader struggles for truly universal care systems, situating miscarriage within broader national and international political contexts and understanding it as part of a complex web of reproductive experiences, each shaped by power, inequality, and resistance.