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 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, 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 rely 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 texts that refuse the tendency to understand pregnancy primarily through the proleptic figuration of the ‘mother-and-child’, or the anticipated birth and maternal future. Instead, these poets foreground the here and now: the physical pain and reproductive labour that goes into pregnancy endings, as well as meditating on the mundane and invoking the ‘flat affect’ of 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 juxtapose different temporal modes and experiences.
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 really 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 framework. Situating the 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 clear exposing 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 the Early 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 that will extend statutory unpaid bereavement leave for people who experience ‘pregnancy loss’. State-mandated time away from work 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 don’t have a bereavement response. 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 people disclose it to their doctor, 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, clearly 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 own pregnancies without scrutiny. Evans also demonstrated the strategic utility of ambiguity with 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 own 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 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 models 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 traditional 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 of non-western practices through a neocolonial or 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 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 role of religion and of 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 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, took up the mantle 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 herself 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 the 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 lively 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 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, she 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, highlighting 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 of loss 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 time. Rather than treating grief as something that should be resolved or overcome, the studies she reviewed suggested 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 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 those going through it. 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 legal recognition and governance. 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 move 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, for example, 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 as a lens. As there is no specific legal definition of pregnancy in the UK, 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 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 evoked decades of work as a psychotherapist, which have 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 as Bueno has 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 individuals who are pregnant after recurrent miscarriages, for whom the onset of another miscarriage can bring a kind of relief from the excruciating uncertainty that pregnancy after loss can bring. 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 developed 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 autonomy and 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, as the discussion suggested, finding better alternatives is far from straightforward, particularly given the limitations of the increasingly dominant language of ‘loss’ when it is treated as a universal framework for understanding pregnancy endings.
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 productive – creating relationships and obligations rather than simply describing 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 triggered 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 lively conversation in the pub afterwards! What emerged was the need for trust and care 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 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 and pregnancy loss 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 has 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 through which pregnancy is defined as beginning and ending. These are coexisting 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, and expansion of miscarriage beyond the duration of the (un)pregnant body, is in many ways important and fruitful. It allows a wider range of experiences to come into view and suggests 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 emotional 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 or 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.