Making Sense of Miscarriage Online

The idea that the institutions and practices of medicine shape our bodies and bodily experiences is by now familiar. Being “pre-hypertensive,” living with cancer, having a disability or a chronic illness, and even being male or female are all bodily states and experiences that are thoroughly mediated by medical institutions, routines, procedures, and meanings. Not only does conventional medicine intervene on most bodies in developed nations, through surveillance, testing, diagnosis, and treatment, but it imposes a temporally complex narrative structure on our embodied lives. This structure is often demarcated in precise quantitative terms. As we are brought into the fold of medicine, we come to structure our lives around the times between appointments, between doses and labs and stages, and between receiving readings we get on various tests and screens. Consider how the life cycle of women and men is medically differentiated: many women have annual pap smears for decades, then mammograms, then tests for osteoporosis; many men begin their lives with circumcision, are routinely checked for testicular cancer after puberty, and launch late middle age by entering their prostate testing years. These medical units and markers of time and bodily status are not enclosed within a bounded medical space. Instead, they are integral narrative signposts within rich social and personal identities that are essentially bound up with medicine. Being a depressive, or a cancer survivor, or a diabetic, or someone trying to conceive involves inhabiting a social identity embedded in clusters of narratives and meanings that are given meter and determinacy by medicine. Miscarriage, against this background, is a strange event—one that many women experience as uncanny. In one sense, it is an event with medical significance: going from pregnant to not-pregnant because of fetal demise constitutes a significant shift in medical status. And yet, in an important sense it happens outside of medical space and attention, or perhaps more precisely, it often signals the end of medical attention. Not only does medicine offer no tools for reliably predicting or preventing miscarriage, but also, when women stop being pregnant, they typically cease to be of medical interest. From the point of view of health care professionals overseeing a pregnancy, miscarriage constitutes the end of a medical narrative rather than an event within one. Routine miscarriages are accompanied by no particular follow-up care, despite being bloody events that are often painful and traumatic. When fetal demise is detected from a screening test such as an ultrasound, often women are sent home to wait out the expulsion of the fetal body in their own domestic space. Sometimes they are