Policing Miscarriage: Infertility Blogging, Rhetorical Enclaves, and the Case of House Bill 1677

Blogging, or online journaling, has been an increasingly common practice since the late 1990s, hitting the mainstream in 2004, when MerriamWebster declared “blog” to be the word of the year. Bloggers often write about a single topic or set of topics, forming niche communities. Infertility bloggers make up one of these communities, and on their weblogs, they write about their emotional reactions to their inability to conceive or carry a pregnancy to term, as well as political issues related to reproduction and parenting, such as adoption, and in the case I will describe in this essay, privacy and reproductive rights. In a January 2005 case, infertility bloggers briefly mobilized and engaged in coincidental feminist activism to defeat a bill in the Virginia state legislature, House Bill 1677, which would have required women to report a “fetal death” to police within twelve hours of the death. If this legislation had passed, it would have effectively required women to report miscarriages to police and charged, with a misdemeanor, women who failed to comply. I argue that this case is an instance in which infertility bloggers, who rhetorically constitute an enclave of expressive personal writing, joined an activist effort with political bloggers and news media and intervened in a matter of public interest. In this essay, after a brief discussion of blogging as public discursive activity and reviews of infertility blogs as genre and of the proposed bill, I will explain the way weblog technology was used to spread the story about HB 1677 and the particular impact made by the infertility bloggers, who wrote their personal stories about miscarriages of wanted children and the intrusion of privacy that would have been the result of the bill. I then illustrate through a discussion of adoption on one infertility blog that, as argued by Patricia Roberts-Miller (2004a, 2004b), infertility blogging is indeed an enclave. However, while enclaves are rhetorically problematic and can promote pOLiCing misCArriAge: inFerTiLiTY bLOgging, rheTOriCAL enCLAVes, And The CAse OF hOuse biLL 1677