EA - Suggestions for how to talk about pregnancy losses by Michelle Hutchinson

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Suggestions for how to talk about pregnancy losses, published by Michelle Hutchinson on September 8, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. The advice on how to talk to a person who’s experienced a pregnancy loss seems generally pretty bad to me. That’s a great shame because these losses are a hard thing to talk about but also a common occurrence. Having had a miscarriage and a late term stillbirth, I’ve thought a bit about ways of communicating about them in ways that land well for people, and I thought that might be useful to share. ‘Pregnancy loss’ covers a wide range of experiences, including early stage miscarriages, abortions and still births. Most of this is aimed at how to talk to the person who was physically pregnant. What follows is most applicable for people you know well - for talking to friends or colleagues. If you’re meeting someone you don’t know too well at an event who you know has suffered a pregnancy loss, it’s quite likely that the right approach is simply to let them go about the event as normal, rather than bringing it up. Talking about it can be pretty hard for people, particularly with someone they don’t know that well and when they weren’t expecting to. People’s experiences differ widely People experience pregnancy losses really differently on the spectrum from ‘I’m sick in a particularly painful/private way and my future suddenly looks really different’ to ‘a person I’ve been thinking a lot about for months has died’. That means people’s ideal way of talking about it / being comforted is pretty different. On the other end you want to focus just on the people losing the pregnancy: ‘How are you feeling? Are you in a lot of pain?’. On the other end are things like ‘I’m sorry for your loss. Did you name her?’. The ideal is to figure out how the person is experiencing the pregnancy loss, and try to mirror that. Before that, you might want to keep with general comments along the lines of ‘I’m really sorry; that must be really tough; how are you doing?’. Also, people’s experiences can change day to day. And they don’t necessarily even know themselves how they’re experiencing it. So the ideal is to be open-mindedly sympathetic and hold space for the person to feel anywhere from fine to awful. Beware of escalating grief narratives A failure mode that happened with me a bunch after the stillbirth was a kind of escalating cycle of everyone upping the amount to treat the pregnancy loss as a death. For people talking to me, it may have seemed better to err on the side of acknowledging the loss of a baby because it’s worse to fail to acknowledge a loss than to acknowledge one that didn’t happen. But that caused me to feel callous to not match their level of acknowledging a loss. That’s actually pretty bad. The reason is that the people undergoing the pregnancy loss don’t actually know how to feel about it, feel differently at different times, and so can be quite affected by different narratives. The more other people treat it like someone you know died, the more it can feel like they did. That can feel more sad than the alternative (because you start feeling an increased sense of loss) or it can cause guilt (‘given that someone I know died, shouldn’t I be feeling more grief for them and less upset about the effects on me and my future?’). As far as I can tell it used to be that people’s sense of ‘losing a person’ was mostly ignored, so now there are various things put in place to try to compensate for that, and medical staff are trained to try to acknowledge people might be feeling it as a death. Society also is more used to talking about good things and also to pregnancies being successful. So narratives that avoid talking about the pregnancy loss as a death feel less available/salient. Specific narratives people might be experiencing Here’s some ways p...