My mom's miscarriage story

Mom lost two pregnancies in Louisiana in the late 80s. The procedure that cleared her uterus and enabled her try again for my brother is now effectively banned there, and she wants to talk about it.

My mom and me in 1988

I always knew that my mom had three miscarriages between me and my youngest brother, and that one of them was particularly traumatic. In 1988, she lost a pregnancy at 20 weeks—a girl she would’ve named Caroline. We never discussed the two miscarriages she had before that, mainly because I didn’t want to cause more pain by asking.

But the topic feels a bit more urgent and relevant now to both of us. As some of you may know, I grew up in an extremely Trumpy area of South Louisiana - a small Cajun town about two hours west of New Orleans. My mom has always been pro-choice, and her left-leaning politics have always put her at odds with her community. She’s always treaded a bit lightly when talking about abortion or any other issue that whips up some of her friends and neighbors into a self-righteous frenzy. They consider abortion to be a pretty cut-and-dry matter of “baby murder,” with very little room for nuance or reasonable discussion.

More recently, as the fallout of Roe v. Wade being overturned decimates reproductive health care throughout the South, my mom finds herself feeling compelled to speak out about abortion and what she sees missing in the local discourse around it. So last night, after I shared a devastating AP story about pregnant and miscarrying women being turned away from ERs and forced to suffer needlessly due to their states’ total abortion bans, my mom texted me to talk about her first two miscarriages and how they connect to Louisiana’s recent total ban on the procedure. “I don’t think people really understand the consequences of what this has done,” she wrote. “I’m happy to share my story.” She agreed to let me tell it here.

The story of my mom’s first two miscarriages is not a complicated or traumatic one, and that’s exactly the point: In both situations, she very much wanted the pregnancies but was devastated to learn at the 12-week ultrasound that she was carrying a blighted ovum—essentially a growing placenta and embryonic sac that has no developing embryo in it. Her OBGYN told her she was miscarrying and immediately scheduled a D&E (Dilation & Evacuation) procedure for the next day, to clear the tissue out of her uterus so that she could immediately start trying for a baby again and avoid the pain and anguish of waiting for her body to clear the miscarriage itself. Her doctor did not hesitate to give her the procedure—which is the same one often used for surgical abortions—or frame it as being in any way politically problematic. He put her under anesthesia, evacuated the tissue, and sent her home without incident.

“It was a relief,” she told me. “The miscarriage was sad, it was horrible, but the procedure itself was definitely a relief. A cleansing of the body and soul to be able to start over again.”

Since Louisiana banned abortion almost entirely in 2022, with just one narrow, confusing exception for “life of the mother,” D&Es have been effectively banned for miscarrying women as well. Doctors essentially have to wait for women to be visibly dying in order to give them the procedure. An NPR story from earlier this year detailed how the abortion ban has disrupted all pregnancy care in the state, denying women swift treatment for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies out of the fear of even being perceived as having given an abortion. The same is true in Alabama and Texas, where women have been “turned away from ERs and negligently treated” since Roe was overturned, according to the damning AP report. One Texas woman was handed a pamphlet on miscarriage, told to “let nature take its course,” and then discharged without treatment for her ectopic pregnancy. Two other women were left to miscarry in public restrooms, and an Arkansas woman went into septic shock with a dead fetus inside her after an ER sent her home.

None of this is to suggest that there are “good” D&Es and “bad” ones and that only miscarrying women deserve the full range of reproductive care. I remember in 2012, when Georgetown student Sandra Fluke was called a “slut” for trying to make the case that health insurance plans should be required to cover birth control because some people need it for medical reasons. I always felt the need to underscore that using contraception to prevent pregnancy is also a perfectly valid and worthy reason to have the medication covered in your insurance plan, just as I say now that it’s perfectly valid to use a D&E to end an unwanted pregnancy. For whatever reason. But I also understand, as does my mom, that it’s more difficult to make the latter case in some parts of the country and that underscoring the devastating effects these abortion bans have across all pregnancy care may go a long ways toward reaching certain voters.

“Even women who want babies are suffering because of stupid, archaic laws that are preventing them from getting care that could help them and let them start over,” she said at the end of our call today. “They’re delaying D&Es til someone rots inside. The whole thing is absolutely ridiculous.”

It’s frustrating to me that we even need women to lay bare their pain and personal medical stories publicly in order to convince a certain segment of the population that we deserve to control our own reproductive health decisions. But here we are in a post-Roe country, in the middle of another high-stakes election year where abortion is on the ballot yet again—and I’m grateful to my mom for deciding to share this when she did.