Miscarriage: Why doesn’t anyone talk about it? | Ariel Levy

When I was 38, I accepted an assignment in Mongolia. I had been writing stories for The New Yorker, and before that New York magazine, for 20 years. This was going to be the last adventure like this for a while because I was about to start on another kind of adventure: I was five months pregnant, and I was about to have a new kind of life. And I wasn't worried about it. My doctor had said it was fine to fly until the third trimester, and I was not concerned.

But the second night I was in Mongolia, I went into labor in my hotel room, and I gave birth. For ten minutes, I was somebody's mother. When I got home from Mongolia, I was so sad I could barely breathe. Friends or women who knew what had happened to me would take one look at me and literally burst into tears. I actually understand how that felt for them now because now women come to my readings and things, and I see them. I look at them, and I immediately know what they're going to tell me. They have a particular kind of look; they just look blown apart.

The reason I wrote about it in this essay for The New Yorker called "Thanksgiving In Mongolia" was that I felt like: why doesn't anybody talk about this? This is an incredibly intense experience that a lot of women have. When it happens to you, there's no literature about it; there's very little. So you feel insane. You feel like a crazy person that you're having that level of grief for a baby who wasn't even quite a baby. Are you the only person who's having this reaction to this experience? The answer is no.

At this reading that I gave for my book The Rules Do Not Apply last week in San Francisco, this lady raised her hand, and she was like, "I have three children who are alive; I've lost four babies; I'm at 77 years old, and I miss every one of them." And that was amazing to me. More and more, I'm meeting women who are older, who are like, "Oh yeah, it's never stopped hurting." It goes away. At first, you sort of live in grief, like in a tunnel of grief. Then eventually, grief lives in you, and it's just something you take with you. You're not walking around about to cry.

But it is a big thing. I think that in more general terms, things that have to do with this business, with this animal experience of being a woman—you know, not every woman is going to have a child, not every woman is going to lose a child, God knows. But every woman at some point in her life is going to have some kind of intense experience around menstruation, fertility, childbirth, child loss, menopause, all this stuff, all this animal stuff about being a woman. We don't talk about it. It’s an enormous part of the lives of half the human population. We should talk about it, I think.

So when I got back from Mongolia, I wrote this essay about the experience of losing my baby there. The reason I did that—well, there was no reason, it just happened. It sort of came out of my fingers, and I didn't think about it. But if I were to think about it subsequently, part of the reason I did it was because just like anyone else is proud of their offspring, I was proud of mine.

I mean, I think if you have children who are alive—most people I know who have kids spend a certain amount of time looking at them and being like, "Oh my God, I made you. You're a person. Like, look at you, you're beautiful!" And I did that. Only for ten minutes, but I did do it, and I was proud. I was like, "World, I made a person! No one knows but me, no one met him alive but me. I'm going to write about this because I feel compelled to. For whatever it's worth, I want to proclaim this person's life happened." And that was why I wrote it.

Now, why I published it was that I thought it was a matter of feminism—that that should be a legitimate subject for writing, for literature, for publication. The response I got to that made me realize I should write about it more...