Guest Author - Krissi Danielsson

I've written in the past on how insulting it is that so much of the medical literature out there still refers to miscarriages as "abortions." If you read a medical text, for some reason it is still so common to view any terminated pregnancy -- natural or unnatural -- as being an "abortion." But obviously with the common meaning ascribed to the word, calling a miscarriage an "abortion" feels like calling an apple an orange, or worse.

In reading comments submitted to me in my recent survey, it seems most women find the term "abortion" offensive when applied to miscarriages except for a few who work in the medical field and were used to hearing it used as such prior to their own experiences. It was recently pointed out to me that the word "miscarriage" could also have negative connotations. If you pull apart the word, it could carry the subconscious message, of implying that a woman carried the baby wrong, and that's why she miscarried.

I hadn't thought of that before. It was definitely interesting food for thought. I wonder if using the term 'pregnancy loss' might be better as a practice. I'm figuring I'll continue to use "miscarriage" because it seems more specific, but I'd be interested in hearing readers' thoughts on this. (Use the editor contact features if you want to send me some thoughts.)

In creating the manuscript for my upcoming book, I found myself again pondering some of the medical terms that are used for pregnancy issues. It made me wonder where people come up with this stuff. In addition to the "abortion" term, you also have terms like "fetal demise" and "incompetent cervix" and the incessant referring to the lost baby as being a "fetus," an "embryo," or "products of conception." why does medical lingo need to be so impersonal and cold? I'm sure it maybe helps doctors to do their jobs to be able to use detached terms when discussing patients. If they had personal attachments, then they might not be able to sleep at night with the types of things they see. But I wish more doctors would take care to not use these terms when actually addressing patients.

But medical terms aside, this wasn't what I was thinking of when I first started this article. I find that, when thinking of miscarriage, or pregnancy loss if you will, that there aren't really any good words to describe it at all. When I was creating my book, I specifically wanted to avoid references to the "pain" and "devastation" of miscarriages. Although they may be accurate, they have started to feel trite to me. So many articles out there overuse them, saying lines like, "Miscarriage may be the most devastating experience in a woman's life." If you Google that line or something like it, you'll probably get loads of results. But what I have wondered about is why the articles would start like that. If someone is reading an article about miscarriage, chances are it's because they have miscarried and if that's the case, using those lines is kind of ridiculous. The reader already knows about what miscarriage can do to a person.

I'm trying to think of what would be a better word for the feelings that accompany miscarriage. It stands out in my mind that in a discussion with my publisher, the word "aftermath" was deemed to be most similar to the results of something like a hurricane. I do think that miscarriage causes something like that to women (or couples) that experience it. I know that after my first loss, my world was completely rocked. It caught me so offguard and left me reeling so much that to this day I still don't remember how I managed to pick up the pieces and move on. The second loss was even worse since I believed the doctors when they said it would probably not happen again.

I suppose this article is mostly a ramble. But I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on linguistics and pregnancy loss. Have you ever been bothered by the term "miscarriage," (even though I think it's infinitely better than "spontaneous abortion")? And how would you describe the emotional aftermath of miscarriage?

Please share your thoughts in the forum or by sending me a note. Although I've now completed my book on miscarriages, I'm still collecting comments that I will try to put together into an ebook to really capture moms' words on the experience of miscarriages. I'm hoping it will do some good in spreading the word.