What Is a Miscarriage?

Take our Prolonged Grief Test

Find a therapist near me

"Miscarriage" carries a history of failure, implying the body or gestational parent has blundered.

Structural ambiguity in the term creates a gap between clinical labels and lived reality.

Clinical settings often prioritize medical procedures over vital emotional support.

Miscarriage. The word carries an etymological history of failure, misconduct, and mismanagement. Even before it was recorded in the early 1600s as meaning the “spontaneous expulsion of a fetus from the womb before it is viable,” it meant “[a]n instance of misconduct or misbehaviour; a lapse of conduct; a misdemeanour or misdeed”; a “failure; [and] a blunder”; in time it also denoted the “failure of a letter…to reach its destination” (OED). In the reproductive context, these circulating definitions risk implying that the body has blundered, faultily mis-carrying what it was meant to deliver. Coupled with the ambiguous way we define “miscarriage” itself and larger narratives about healing and recovery, this grammar of failure has psychological and emotional implications. Research highlights how people experiencing loss turn to metaphor and metonymy to constitute embodied knowledge when they find their experience being biomedically and narratively foreclosed.

Philosopher Jessalyn Bohn identifies a problem built inherently into the term “miscarriage” itself. She argues that the word is structurally ambiguous, referring to the fetus’s intrauterine death and/or to the physical process of its preterm delivery. She pulls definitions from Planned Parenthood, Miscarriage Association, Merriam Webster, and other sources to show how some definitions refer to........

© Psychology Today