If we were to create reproductive amalgams for the years prior to 1960—kind of like American Girl dolls but pregnant and way more likely to die—their bios would be pretty grim for most of those eras.
Meet Elizabeth! She’s a colonial mother who was pregnant twelve times from her marriage at age twenty-four until menopause at forty-seven. She had three miscarriages, two babies died as infants, and three more children died before age fifteen. She survived childbirth, but her sister, Sarah, did not. Will she collapse from exhaustion before she gets to see the new America that excludes her from its much-touted liberty?
Meet Clara! She’s a Victorian mother who stayed indoors during her last trimester of pregnancy because her big pregnant belly was too obscene for public eyes. She used a variety of contraceptives and had a safe, accessible abortion to keep her family size down to four children. She mourned deeply and wore black for years after her daughter died at age eight. Will her doctor cause untold pelvic damage with the forceps he’s not quite sure how to use?
Meet Dorothy! She’s a teacher in the Great Depression who can’t marry or become pregnant because either would cause her to be fired from her much-needed job. She can’t access any other contraceptives or a safe abortion. Will that Lysol she’s using to douche cause a deadly infection or just burn the delicate tissues of her nethers?
Meet Barbara! She’s a 1950s woman who experienced safe childbirth with all six of her children—all of whom survived into adulthood! She had a couple of miscarriages but put them out of her head when more babies came and continued to have dinner on the table by the time her husband came home from the office. Will her access to personal fulfillment be as limited as her access to contraceptives and abortion?
Well, it’s time to get a load of Susan! Outfitted in bell-bottom jeans and a floral wreath headpiece, she comes with optional accessories: peace sign necklace, granny glasses, and a little packet of birth control pills. Susan! can reliably prevent pregnancy, open her own bank account, and, if all else fails, have a safe, legal abortion. Will women have it all forever in an arc ever bending toward justice?
We know that’s a hard no. But now we’re going to get into how this one hopeful era of reproductive control landed us where we are today—at one of the bleakest moments in American reproductive history. When Elizabeth! was endlessly pregnant and women were dying in childbirth, there really were no other options. Women giving birth before the 1940s were at the mercy of their wombs because of lack of access to reliable contraceptives, tough living conditions, and no antibiotics and other medical advances. The medicine simply didn’t exist to save her or her children’s lives.
Now, restrictive abortion laws in about half the states are strangling access to reproductive care for those experiencing miscarriages, stillbirths, and terminations for medical reasons. Pregnant people are living in a world we haven’t seen in half a century, and in some cases, it’s worse. Increasingly, women are arrested when they have a miscarriage or stillbirth.1 A bounty law in Texas inspired by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 enables private citizens to sue anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion after six weeks, and they can collect a $10,000 award.2 Doctors can be charged with a crime for performing an abortion to save a woman’s life. And because the laws are so murky around when doctors can step in, some just don’t want to take the chance. A survey in 2022 by the Texas Policy Evaluation Project, for example, found that some doctors, while they avoided abortions, instead performed a more invasive “hysterotomy, a surgical incision into the uterus, because it might not be construed as an abortion.”3
Before abortion protections were codified and then stripped, the life and health of the mother—her future fertility and the survival of her living children—was prioritized over any individual pregnancy. Now, there’s a growing movement in some states to regard the fetus as a person with the same legal rights as the mother.
All that to say it would have been hard for bell-bottomed Susan to imagine how royally fucked her granddaughter Emma! was going to be.
Much of the backslide in reproductive rights is rooted in their unprecedented expansion in the 1960s and 1970s, which changed everything about pregnancy for American women. The proliferation of the birth control pill after 1960 and the legalization of abortion by the U.S. Supreme Court through the decision in the Roe v. Wade case in 1973 meant prevention could be reliable and an unintended pregnancy could be legally terminated. In the words of feminist author Katha Pollitt, “it changed how women saw themselves: as mothers by choice, not fate.”4
Prevention and “control” contributed to a narrative that all kept pregnancies were wanted pregnancies, wrote Jessica Zucker, a psychologist who started the “I Had a Miscarriage” hashtag on Instagram and wrote a book of the same name.5 This, combined with medical advances that translated to greater survival for both mother and baby, led to the idea that all planned pregnancies should be successful. (She “chose” this, and therefore, it should turn out fine.) Control it, plan it, see it through to its inevitable conclusion of a successful birth and a child who outlives the parent. Impossible across an entire population but a clean little story if you’re lucky.
This had a profound effect on the perception of miscarriage and loss. No longer was a miscarriage just nature taking its course—it was a mother failing. This sense of failure made Americans more secretive about their losses, and that secrecy made loss invisible. The emotions we now associate with miscarriage, stillbirth, medical terminations, and to some extent perinatal loss fully took root: guilt, shame, and blame.
Put on that San Francisco sound as we welcome the dawn of the age of the birth control pill, which was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1960. Before this, almost all contraceptive practices were related to the act of sex—withdrawal, condoms, diaphragms, and sponges. Historian Elaine Tyler May wrote in America and the Pill, “for the first time, a method of contraception separated birth control technology from the act of sexual intercourse and was nearly 100 percent effective.”6 It didn’t require any cooperation from (or even the knowledge of) men. When the pill was approved, it ramped up quickly, and “practically every woman had at least tried it,” historian Lara Freidenfelds told us.7 Many used it for only a few years because early formulations blasted women with hormones and had numerous side effects, but that didn’t detract from the revolutionary nature of an effective, female control that had hardly existed for American women up to that point and certainly not all at the same time. Sure, the pill couldn’t guarantee sex without consequences—sexually transmitted diseases were still in the mix—but for the first time, women could have sex divorced from pregnancy. (Hot damn!) Plus, it turns out those large 1950s families and Jell-O salads weren’t the key to happiness. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique kicked off the women’s movement with the simple question Is this all?
The pill put control into a woman’s own hands. A woman before the 1860s may have had “knowing,” maybe a kind of mystical, liminal experience of pregnancy, but certainly no power. Feminists expanded on that newfound empowerment by kicking off the women’s health movement, gathering abortion, pregnancy, sexuality, childbirth, rape, menopause, and mental health under its mantle, with the best-known result being Our Bodies, Ourselves, published by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective in 1970. (If you know anything at all about this book, it’s almost certainly that it encourages women to stand on top of a mirror to look at their own vaginas.)
This newfangled power and control naturally influenced the abortion debate—if she could handle the responsibility of the pill, then she should be making decisions about her own body, a departure from the reigning argument of the previous one hundred years that only professional doctors (and their therapeutic committees) could handle abortion decisions “objectively.” Women came out of the shadows and publicly spoke about their illegal abortions at speak-outs to erase the stigma, ending what sociologist Kristin Luker called “the century of silence.”8 By 1969, NARAL (the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws) and the National Right to Life Committee had both been formed. The positions were staked. Neither side had any idea what was coming.
The common understanding of abortion—and who should be allowed to get one—started to change through a series of high-profile cases. In 1962, the host of Romper Room, Sherri Chessen (sometimes called by her married name, Finkbine), was pregnant with her fifth child when she took a sleeping pill her husband had picked up in Europe. It turned out to be thalidomide, a dangerous drug that had been linked to shortened limbs, brain abnormalities, miscarriages, stillbirths, and infant deaths overseas. (Americans were largely spared the horrors of thalidomide because FDA reviewer Frances Oldham Kelsey did not think the clinical trials showed it was safe enough.9) Chessen’s hospital board turned her down for a therapeutic abortion because it wouldn’t preserve her life (and the board got spooked when the press got wind of her petition), so she went to Sweden for the procedure, where it was revealed “the fetus was so deformed that it would not have survived.”10 When she returned home, she lost her job, the Vatican openly condemned her, and calls and letters dogged her for a long time.11 (A pre-social-media public pile-on.) Her case garnered a lot of national attention, and 52 percent of Americans supported her abortion.12 (This has been consistent for more than sixty years: most Americans, when actually asked, approve of some form of abortion.13)
Soon after, the rubella (German measles) epidemic in 1962–63 afflicted eighty-two thousand pregnant women in their first trimester. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists estimated that as many as thirty thousand babies were born dead or died in infancy, and another twenty thousand suffered from severe abnormalities.14 Rubella became one of the grounds for granting a therapeutic abortion, and that, along with Chessen’s case, primed the public to be more empathetic toward abortion and to see there were many reasons a woman might seek one. These cases—known today as terminations for medical reasons—still earn the most public sympathy.
This turn in public opinion was already well underway among the medical community. Doctors, who had been instrumental in making abortion illegal in the 1860s, were equally consequential in the push to loosen and reform abortion laws by the 1960s.
Physicians were seeing firsthand the devastating consequences of self-induced and botched abortions—women coming to emergency rooms with pierced uteruses, deadly infections, and butchery performed by illegal practitioners. By 1967, a survey by Modern Medicine magazine showed 87 percent of American doctors favored a liberalization of the country’s antiabortion policies,15 with doctors and women alike frustrated by the discriminatory and dangerous system. Part of the reason this was successful in swaying public opinion was it portrayed women as victims, a damsel-in-distress tale that was “palpable to the white middle-class majority.”16
Abortion laws have usually rested on a cultural ideal of who is deserving of this care, whose tragedies matter. Today, restrictive abortion laws that only allow for exceptions for rape or incest show hostility toward those who do not meet “the socially accepted role of victim.”17 (The antiabortion movement also used this tactic in the 1980s by purporting women were as much the victims of abortion as fetuses. More on this later, but “woman as victim” has always played in America, and the proliferation of modern-day true-crime podcasts shows that not much has changed.)
In the run-up to Roe, abortion was illegal but not necessarily political, at least not in the way we know it today. This change was kicked off by a cynical, political choice made by everyone’s favorite not-a-crook, former president Richard Nixon. During his presidency, he oversaw an expansion of federal family planning and required military bases to perform abortions for military members and their families.18 This wasn’t even controversial. But facing a tough reelection in 1972, he reversed course. Senator Ed Muskie, a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, denounced legal abortion. Nixon feared losing conservative Catholic voters (the Kennedy family really left a psychic mark on this guy), so he announced himself to be opposed to “abortion on demand,” overturned his own military policy, and condemned a groundbreaking report that he had commissioned that concluded that abortion should be legal.19 (Only Nixon can go to China, but selling out women for political gain is for everyone.) Nixon had discovered a way to siphon off conservative voters who may otherwise have voted for Democrats for economic reasons20—a position he stuck with even when his opponent turned out to be George McGovern. (Nixon won.) This would have lasting consequences, to say the least. Do you feel a certain way about abortion and by extension miscarriage because of Nixon? Not entirely yes. But not entirely no.
Before Roe was decided in 1973, the Supreme Court warmed up with a series of landmark cases regarding reproductive rights—gateway cases, if you will—that erased the last vestiges of the Comstock laws. In 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court granted married couples a right to birth control without state interference. Impediments to birth control were many—married women needed prescriptions for diaphragms. (The health clinic at the University of Illinois in Chicago insisted on seeing a marriage license before providing birth control.)21 Then in 1972, the Supreme Court struck down a Massachusetts contraception ban for unmarried individuals. The birth control pill that had been available since 1960? Well, now even single ladies could legally access it with few impediments. (You owe knowing if you’re a Samantha or a Charlotte to this landmark case.) Just one year before Roe v. Wade, birth control was a guaranteed American right for anyone, regardless of marital status.
And now we’ve arrived at the main event. In 1973, Roe v. Wade was decided in a seven-to-two decision that declared that abortion should be free from government intrusion under the right to privacy. Roe required that each state make abortion legal until viability (which then was roughly twenty-eight weeks), and laws that had stood for one hundred years were voided. Though it is next to impossible to believe now, Justice Harry Blackmun hoped the Roe decision he authored would de-escalate the abortion debate, because recent Gallup polling showed more than two-thirds of Americans thought abortion should be left to a woman and her doctor.22 Abortion and birth control were now legal, safe, and reliable—a trio that had never before been true of both abortion and contraceptives at the same time. For the first time a woman could control whether (and when) she got pregnant. And if she was and didn’t want to remain so? She could access an abortion.
Roe v. Wade was a watershed moment in American history and the watershed moment in American reproductive history. Metric tons of ink have been spilled on the mechanics of the Roe decision, so forgive us for boiling down this historic moment to the elements relevant to our cultural attitudes about pregnancy loss. First, Roe set out the trimester framework that still governs access in the states where access remains. In the first trimester, most abortion restrictions were deemed unconstitutional. In the second trimester, states could regulate abortion only to advance patient health (something that would later be tested and manipulated with restrictions like requiring parental permission), and the state could only prohibit access after viability—when a baby could survive outside the womb, put somewhere between twenty-four and twenty-eight weeks. (Viability has been a constant source of debate as medical advances allow more premature babies to survive—a record broken in 2020 when a preemie born at twenty-one weeks survived.23 Antiabortion activists have argued that if a baby can survive in neonatal intensive care, abortion shouldn’t be allowed at that gestational age. But does viability mean survive or thrive? Does it mean live for one, five, or twenty days? You see the conundrum.)
Public health experts estimated in the mid-1970s that approximately the same number of abortions were being performed in the United States after legalization—between one and two million a year—but the death rate plummeted from sixty to eighty deaths per one hundred thousand cases in the decades prior to legalization and sank to 1.3 by 1976–77 due to the decline in self-induced abortions, a truly astonishing decline in mortality.24 Legal abortions before sixteen weeks were now safer than any alternative, including continued pregnancy and childbirth.25 Women had more economic, social, and sexual freedom than ever before. They could build careers, delay marriage and childbearing, or never do them at all. Sisters were doing it for themselves! But the backlash was almost immediate and never-ending.
For three short years, access to abortion was relatively equally accessible, covered by insurance, and safe. But the rights granted under the Roe decision were chipped away with the passage of the Hyde Amendment in 1976, which made it illegal for Medicaid (the nation’s public health insurance for low-income Americans, a program then only a decade old) to cover any abortions that were not medically indicated to save the life of the pregnant person.26 This is the only legal medical service for which this qualifier is included—no one’s hernia surgery is denied because it isn’t lifesaving. The Hyde Amendment has been reaffirmed every year since, though it now includes very qualified exceptions for rape or incest and possibly the health of the mother if two doctors agree.27
This is the part of Roe that many people don’t know or at least don’t fully appreciate. The two-tiered system of abortion that had existed since the nineteenth century returned just three years after it was overruled. As many reproductive justice advocates have said, poor women were living—and have lived—in a post-Roe reality since 1976. Because those seeking abortions post-Roe were more likely to be young, poor, unmarried people of color, legal historian Mary Ziegler wrote that “limiting access for the poor promised to force a major decline in the abortion rate.”28 Roe had not guaranteed a right to the procedure—a woman still had to find a provider and pay for it—and the high inflation of the 1970s had caused a marked disdain for the “welfare state” that was racialized through political propaganda. Antiabortion groups (and plenty of others) blamed a woman’s inability to pay for abortion on her own bad decisions and poverty.29 Those who could afford abortion had a “choice”; low-income women did not. (And remember, low-income people of color were already disproportionately sterilized without their consent.)
Women’s health activists of color bristled almost immediately against choice-based feminism, and in the 1990s, twelve Black women developed the concept of reproductive justice, which broadened the movement from being just about abortion to include the right to bodily autonomy, to decide when and whether to have children, and to parent their children in safe, healthy, and sustainable communities.30
The Hyde Amendment had a long tail. It enshrined subsequent restrictions on federal funds for abortion to prohibit access for Indigenous women, federal employees on government insurance, Peace Corps volunteers, Washington, DC, residents, military personnel, veterans and their dependents, federal prisoners, and those in immigration detention facilities.31 As of 2023, the Hyde Amendment is in effect across thirty-four states and the District of Columbia while sixteen states use their own funds to pay for abortion under Medicaid.32 In 2019, that amounted to about 7.5 million American women, 3.5 million of whom are low income.33 Diana Greene Foster, the author of the revelatory abortion work The Turnaway Study, noted that by 2014, this may have resulted in as many as a quarter of women who wanted an abortion carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term. For the three-quarters who do obtain an abortion anyway, Foster wrote, “the result of not covering it via public or private insurance is that abortion is delayed to a point where the fetus is more developed and the procedure is more difficult.”34 Those affected can pay for abortion services privately, but costs as of 2023 can range from $580 for an abortion pill at Planned Parenthood to a couple thousand for a first- or early second-trimester abortion, up to $23,000 or more in cash for a third-trimester abortion in one of a handful of private clinics equipped to provide them. The price tag can be crushing, especially when travel, childcare, and lodging are heaped on top. (Keep in mind that nearly six in ten Americans cannot afford an unexpected $500 expense.)35
It’s hard to imagine now, but before the 1980 election, neither political party had staked out a definitive abortion position, and the makeup of antiabortion and abortion rights coalitions had been more fluid, with Democrats and Republicans in both camps. It was also a new concept in the 1970s that “pro-life” was a religious position and “pro-choice” a largely secular one.36 As we saw, Catholic clergy in the late nineteenth century had settled on a “no abortion, no matter what” position, and they didn’t have much more patience for contraceptives, but lay Catholics had a more nuanced understanding. Dr. John Rock, for instance, who helped develop the pill, saw no conflict between his devout Catholicism and his support of birth control.
After Nixon’s reelection in 1972, the Republican Party started its shift toward a focus on “family values”—an emphasis on heterosexuality, marriage, and stay-at-home moms and opposition to homosexuality, divorce, and abortion.37 (The divorce rate more than doubled for women in the United States between 1960 and 1980.38 Starting in the 1960s, women were allowed to open their own bank accounts, and in the 1970s, they were allowed to have credit cards in their names. That doesn’t feel like a coincidence.) On a parallel track, attorney and conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, who worked to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, was connecting the dots between women’s changing societal roles and abortion. In a 1972 essay, she wrote that “women’s libbers” were “anti-family, anti-children and pro-abortion.”39 Paul Weyrich, an architect of modern conservatism, was testing abortion as a campaign issue with evangelical Christians, and wow, did that have traction. Around the same time as Roe, segregated white Christian schools lost their tax-exempt status and were no longer able to dodge Brown v. Board of Education.40 A lot of various anxieties about the sexual revolution, the feminist movement, and racial integration were channeled onto Roe. It was no longer just about abortion. It was a series of issues linking arms to form an entire political identity.
The religious coalition that joined forces against abortion was formed in 1979. Before then, the movement had been mostly Catholic. Catholics, Christian evangelicals, and Mormons—three religious groups that hadn’t been terribly fond of one another if not outright hostile—were united by Jerry Falwell into the “Moral Majority,” a new coalition formed for the express purpose of motivating evangelicals to vote.41 (Nothing brings people together like a common enemy, and there are few enemies more Biblical than “Woman.”) The newly formed religious right fundraised like hell, and the 1980 election was the first time antiabortion and abortion rights groups invested significant amounts of money in a presidential campaign.
That campaign? Ronald Reagan, a former abortion rights supporter, and his running mate, George Bush, also a formerly staunch reproductive freedom advocate, ran as a “pro-life ticket” on a platform that also capitalized on the “stagflation” of the late 1970s. Being antiabortion was how evangelical Christians justified supporting Reagan over incumbent Jimmy Carter—an evangelical Christian.42 Formerly Democratic southern whites and northern white Catholics helped deliver a decisive victory to Reagan43—he won a staggering forty-four states and a 9.7 percent vote margin. Their success made the Republican party officially the antiabortion party44 or, in their own parlance, the Party of Life. The abortion debates as you know them were formed.
The movement’s original goal was passing a constitutional fetal life amendment, and when that didn’t pan out, the movement focused on limiting access, emphasizing fetal life, and moving the argument toward (debunked) claims that abortion had dire emotional and physical health costs for women and families.45 The new strategy was to change hearts and minds and focus on the laws later. And, in the meantime, build a Supreme Court that would overturn Roe. You gotta hand it to them—they played the long game.
The final major shift that really influenced the new perception of pregnancy and loss was the over-the-counter pregnancy test, which was approved by the FDA in 1976 and began to be widely marketed and available in the following years. In 1978, readers of Mademoiselle saw an ad for a “private little revolution”—a home pregnancy test. Sarah A. Leavitt, associate historian of the office of National Institutes of Health history in 2006, collected oral histories of Americans’ experience with pregnancy tests. In Leavitt’s analysis, a home pregnancy test allowed women to reclaim some of the personal autonomy and feminine knowledge that had been stolen by the medicalization of birth. (A truly incredible fact she shares in her research: director David Lynch directed an advertisement for Clearblue Easy in 1997 because “it involves the psychological torture of a beautiful young woman.” There’s a lot to unpack there. Laura Palmer by way of Clearblue Easy.)46
Maybe women reclaimed some of the intimate “knowing” that the eradication of quickening had erased, but home pregnancy tests also brought us closer to our present moment because they could find out about a pregnancy much earlier and possibly be aware of a miscarriage they otherwise might not have known about. “[Miscarriage] took on an increasingly tragedy-laden language in the late 20th century that it had not carried earlier. Pregnancy tests have contributed to this change by relocating the time frame of pregnancy identification and making early information of nonviable pregnancies more widespread,” Leavitt wrote. Pregnancy tests made invisible miscarriages visible. This changed the way pregnancy was discussed, framed, and encountered on both a narrative and experiential level.
Miscarriage and stillbirth were brought to public attention because of two developments around the environmental justice movement in the 1970s. Love Canal, New York, resident Lois Gibbs convinced her neighbors to help research the effects of living atop a former chemical dump and uncovered higher than average rates of miscarriage, stillbirth, and crib deaths. In the case of miscarriage, a 300 percent increase.47 Then Bonnie Hill, a western Oregon teacher who miscarried in 1973, uncovered links between an herbicide sprayed in the nearby national forest to rising miscarriage rates. The EPA eventually banned the chemical, which was derived from Agent Orange.48 But the focus on miscarriage as a community ill or even just evidence of corporate malfeasance was short-lived. Merely a pit stop on the way to the blame paradigm.
Miscarriage completed its metamorphosis into an issue of individual responsibility by the early 1980s. Popular and health media “reported on the hazards posed by individual behaviors—particularly consumption of coffee, alcohol, illegal drugs and tobacco—to fetal development.”49 (Think how different this focus was from the 1950s, when women would balance ashtrays on their pregnant bellies to keep their hands free for a cocktail—an actual photo Rebecca’s former gynecologist had of her own mother.) Yes, the official word from the medical community and even most mainstream publications aimed at women was “it’s not your fault,” but the growing focus on the fetus, the seemingly limitless nature of science that made IVF possible (Louise Brown, the first so-called test tube baby, was born in 1978), and coverage of all the ways women could endanger their baby were starting to tell a different story. It’s unsurprising that guilt, shame, and blame became the accompanying emotions.
Something else was at play here too. Because the home pregnancy test allowed women to find out they were pregnant earlier than ever before, they now also had the means to make decisions earlier than ever before. This was true since the late 1970s but accelerated after 2000, when the morning-after pill became available—she didn’t even need a doctor’s appointment to end the pregnancy. Now, two-thirds of abortions take place before the eighth week of pregnancy, according to the Guttmacher Institute.50 What does that have to do with miscarriage? Historian Freidenfelds lays out the gymnastics at play here in The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy: with women aborting earlier, a “substantial proportion of abortions represent what would have been miscarried pregnancies in a previous generation,” meaning that a greater proportion of miscarriages are happening to “wanted” pregnancies.51 A so-called unwanted pregnancy is terminated before she even has a chance to miscarry—she’s intervening before nature can—so miscarriages are no longer evenly spread among all pregnancies. This reduces the number of “oh, phew” miscarriages and tips the balance to affect proportionally more “wanted” pregnancies. See what we mean? As miscarriages lost their status of providing occasional relief in a world without reproductive control, they moved into tragic territory in a world with it. (Science giveth, culture taketh away.)
In the 1980s, miscarriage was solidly in “personal tragedy” territory. This was due in no small part to the antiabortion movement being highly successful in changing the narrative on abortion, and it seeped over into miscarriage. For example, “precious feet” pins were the symbol of Catholic pro-life campaigns. Decidedly religious with a side of political mission. Religious hospitals started using footprints on their miscarriage literature, and now they are common across secular hospitals as well.52 (Inked footprints are routinely now given as a keepsake to parents who lose pregnancies far enough along for it to be possible.) Support groups (mostly among white and middle- and upper-class parents) started to focus on women’s grief in the 1980s.53
Historian Leslie J. Reagan cites an example of the creep of antiabortion language in a hospital that encouraged those who survived potentially fatal ectopic pregnancies to remember and mourn the loss of their “babies” at a bereavement ceremony—“the sympathy offered by this medical institution teaches women to think of ectopic pregnancy as a life lost rather than a life saved—their own.”54 (An ectopic pregnancy cannot under any circumstance grow into a healthy baby.) This doesn’t mean that a pregnant person shouldn’t grieve their miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy, shouldn’t cherish the footprints of their stillbirth. Many do. But the culture of the antiabortion movement has undeniably permeated the culture of miscarriage.
And the implications of that—in particular the ubiquity of the fetus—have loomed large.