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The Truth About Miscarriage

© Lauren Picker

I read this article in my June 2002 magazine of Parents Magazine. I found it really informative and with information that I would never have guessed possible and found the need to just publish this unchanged. The article is poignant, fantastic and with all hopes of perhaps preventing a miscarriage and so many heartbreaks...

**Mischele**

The Truth about Miscarriage

By Lauren Picker

It began with a little blood. I was eight weeks pregnant, but despite the light spotting, I didn't even allow myself to think that something was wrong. As my stack of already well-thumbed pregnancy books noted, staining and even bleeding in the early months of pregnancy are not uncommon. But by the day's end, as the staining continued sporadically, I could barely contain my rising panic. "I think I'm having a miscarriage," I moaned to my husband. When we called the doctor, she advised a sonogram, which showed a perfectly formed gestational sac -- with nothing in it. There was black space where my baby should have been; the embryo simply hadn't developed. The doctor called it a blighted ovum. And on hearing the news, I had a blighted heart to match.

Though my loss was uniquely painful -- as all losses are -- the experience itself was not. While medical science has an ever-increasing understanding of pregnancy, miscarriage remains a more mysterious, but very common, fact of reproductive life. According to the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, one in five pregnancies ends in miscarriage, with most occurring in the first three months after conception.

After experiencing a miscarriage, many women wonder what they did wrong. Was it that hour on the treadmill? The computer screen at work? The glass of wine at dinner last month? It's important for you to know that a miscarriage is almost never your fault. Indeed, the vast majority of miscarriages, roughly 70 percent, are attributed to random chromosomal abnormalities, a genetic fluke unlikely to repeat itself the next time around. About 4 percent of women, however, suffer three or more pregnancy losses in a row, a devastating condition known as recurrent miscarriage. Doctors are able to identify a medical cause and treat the problem in about half of these women, and even those whose repeated miscarriages are unexplained have a good shot at a successful pregnancy. In fact, an impressive 60 percent of women who have endured four successive miscarriages go on to have a baby.

Just what causes a miscarriage is not always clear. But half a dozen factors seem to be implicated in the majority of cases.

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