I Never Thought It Would Happen to Me

Far from a stalled start on the journey to motherhood, miscarriage can be a deeply traumatic experience, and one that's still greatly misunderstood, writes Jennie Agg

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Like countless women before and after me, I only learnt about the realities of miscarriage once I was in the middle of one, as I bled into a chair in an A&E waiting room, my body violently unmaking what it had previously made.

There are an estimated 650 miscarriages every day in the UK. And yet it remains a profoundly misunderstood experience. Even if people are sympathetic, it’s still treated as little more than a blip – a bump in the road on the way to parenthood – something you’ll get over quickly once another baby comes along.

But such assumptions brush aside all kinds of complicated emotions, leaving people with little space to process what they actually feel. Before I had a miscarriage myself, I could never have imagined just how deeply it would affect me – and change me.

To be honest, I never imagined it would happen at all. Contentedly pregnant for the first time, back in 2017, I’d assumed miscarriage was a remote possibility. It was something that happened to other people – and, even then, only rarely.

I’d naively believed that because I’d done all the ‘right’ things, following the rules about what you should and shouldn’t eat, drink, and do while pregnant, I was safe. Given that there was so much advice to follow, I think I also thought that meant we knew how to prevent miscarriage these days.