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.