It was late at night at the airport where I was waiting to be picked up. Red and white lights twinkled from airplanes, from towers. I was tired. With my carry-on in one hand and my work bag in the other, I searched the line of cars as blood soaked through my pad.
“Can I go through that?” I asked the TSA agent at the body scanner, three days earlier. “I’m pregnant!”
I had just found out I was halfway through the first trimester. I didn’t know what to tell my friends and family, but I loved to share the news with strangers. I’d also told the head of HR at the design agency where I worked.
“I think I’ll need an intern… or a boss?” I said.
I’d joined the agency as their 28-year-old intern, and not even a year later, I was managing all the brand strategy and copywriting projects mostly on my own, while occasionally reporting to the chief marketing officer.
“Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves,” the HR manager answered.
I told her I understood. It was the second year of the pandemic, and we’d just come off another wave of layoffs and lost business. I was grateful to be employed, and to have the health insurance that came with it, but my heart hammered in my chest whenever I thought about balancing this job with pregnancy, and maybe later, motherhood.
Sitting on the tarmac at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, the three days in Cincinnati stretched gloomily before me. Even so, I couldn’t deny how free I felt heading away from home.
“I’m telling you,” the father said before I left. “If you get an abortion, we’re done.”
I held my tongue a lot back then, so I didn’t mention I had scheduled one the day after my first prenatal appointment. I wanted this baby, but I was unsure if we would be able to co-parent together, or if I could figure out how to balance work and parenting on my own. And while I waited to see which reality would reveal itself first, I took my prenatal vitamins and let myself — when I usually don’t let myself — be excited.
“It’s our first trip together,” I sang to the baby in the shower in the Airbnb in Cincinnati. The bathroom’s yellow light shone on the curve of my stomach. I imagined the curve expanding and the baby growing in there. It would be a lie if I said it didn’t make me feel a little less lonely.
The next morning, I walked to the office downtown. Pregnancy meant I could smell everything. Intensely. It was a few days before Halloween, and I was overpowered by the scent of fallen leaves, the soil, the soil inside the soil, and in the air, I smelled the hints of the summer that had left and the winter that was to come.
“This is a big deal, you guys,” the CMO said. He and my favorite co-worker, a creative director, had also flown in so we could join the three men on the Cincinnati team. While the CMO and the creative director were on other projects, I’d be leading an important meeting for a new client — one of our first after a string of rejected business proposals and frozen projects.
Despite the small number of clients, we were still swamped with work, and through the course of the day, the in-person meeting was moved to Zoom, and, one by one, the Cincinnati team could no longer attend the call.
“It’ll just be you,” the CMO said.
“All good,” I answered, and gave my stomach a small hug. I pictured the eyelash, the lentil, growing in there.
“No, you all go ahead. I don’t really want to go out,” I tried to beg off. My legs ached, and I longed to go to bed, as happy hour plans were being made.
“Why? Are you pregnant or something?” the Cincinnati designer asked. Evading a direct answer, I smiled and kept smiling as we went from bar to bar, the sticky beer smell running rancid in my nose.
I woke up the next morning and something was off. My heightened sense of smell — it was gone. I went to use the bathroom and heard a splash. What had fallen was brown, and small, and shaped like a thumb. Blood spun like lace in the water.
No amount of research convinced me whether this was “normal light spotting” or something more serious, so I slipped a pad on my underwear and continued getting dressed. I zipped up my carry-on and lugged it behind me for my flight later that day. At the office, I replaced my blood-soaked pad with another.
Looking back, I couldn’t tell you how long I waited at my desk, trying to decide whether I should or shouldn’t go to the hospital, or if I could or couldn’t lead the meeting first.
“And I’ve already emailed you my notes,” I rehearsed to myself, imagining myself asking for help. But the longer I deliberated, the more I lost my nerve. My Outlook chimed: 15 minutes.
Most of the meeting is blotted out from my mind — how I introduced myself, what we talked about.
“Let me just email you some examples,” I remember saying again and again, trying to offer something to end the meeting. After all, this brand is their baby, I justified to myself.
The creative director held my hand in the Uber on the way to the ER.
“Should we have brought our bags?” I asked.
“Don’t worry about that now,” she replied.
So much about being a woman is waiting: waiting your turn for a promotion, waiting for the right time to bring something up in your relationships, waiting in hospital beds everywhere — if you’re lucky enough to make it to one.
There are about 1 million reported miscarriages in the United States every year, and there have been over 100 reported cases of pregnant women being turned away from emergency rooms since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.
“Has it always looked this way?” the ER doctor asked me. The speculum he’d pulled out from between my legs was dripping with blood so bright it looked fake.
“I don’t know,” I answered, panicking. “I was working.”
He left to take the sample to be tested and I received an ultrasound. As I was wheeled out, I craned my neck to check the screen. I didn’t know what I was looking at, but my body knew before my mind that something was wrong.
“We took a peek at the ultrasound,” the nurse said gently, the ER doctor at his side.
The creative director and I waited.
“There was a sac, but not a fetus.”
It was a blighted ovum, a type of miscarriage where there’s not enough genetic material to turn the egg into an embryo.
“There was nothing you could do,” the ER doctor told me.
Nothing? I could have done everything differently. I thought about the six weeks I had been pregnant without knowing. And before that, all the years I treated my body as if it were a machine. The skipped meals, the endless caffeine. The nights I stayed up late, and the mornings I woke up early, or the hours in between spent tossing and turning, thinking about work, as my heart and mind raced. And for what? To design packaging — which, if we’re being honest, is just more landfill.
“You’ll have to stay so we can make sure all the tissue comes out and you don’t get an infection,” the doctor added.
I felt the creative director trying not to check the clock on the wall, the same one I’d been staring at for hours.
“I don’t think we can wait,” I answered. “Our flight is this afternoon.”
We made it to the airport in time for me to change into sweatpants in the bathroom. As I threw my blood-stained tights into the trash, I realized what was off about the gaping black oval on the ultrasound. I hadn’t been bonding with a baby. I had been bonding with nothing.
The sky was bruised blue when I woke up in my own bed the next day.
“Take all the time you need,” the HR manager’s message read. Empty words, and we both knew it. I pulled my laptop into bed and emailed the client like I promised I would.
Then whole days went by where I watched the sky lighten and darken through the rips in the blinds. I stopped bleeding on Halloween and the laughter of the trick-or-treaters floated up to me through the window. The father held my stomach while we slept, and it was one of the last moments of tenderness we had.
It would take months to change jobs and leave the father. Near the baby’s due date, Roe v. Wade was overturned.
“Having it all is like toxic masculinity for women,” writer and educator Lisa Mangini tells me over Zoom.
I’m in my new apartment — the first time I’ve ever lived alone — and I’m interviewing women who have had similar experiences with miscarrying at work.
Mangini was a teacher and experienced what is referred to as a “missed miscarriage.” At first, her body exhibited no signs of pregnancy loss, and it was only after receiving bloodwork that she realised her pregnancy hormones were falling. Her doctor prescribed mifepristone, also known as the abortion pill, to help her pass the nonviable pregnancy and prevent the risk of infection or other complications.
While Mangini had originally decided to wait until winter break to administer her dose, her body had other plans, and she had to cancel her class and take her pill right away.
“I pretended like it was any other day,” she says, recalling that she ordered takeout while bleeding and cramping on the couch.
“I was grateful I had an office with a door,” Sofia Ali-Khan tells me about her pregnancy loss. She is the author of A Good Country: My Life in Twelve Towns and the Devastating Battle for a White America, but at that time, she was a lawyer and had used up all her leave while moving to a new home. She had no choice but to stay at work as she suffered intense cramping and passed the nonviable pregnancy without medical supervision. “I worked the rest of the day, though,” she clarifies.
“Being a classroom teacher during a crisis is dicey — you’re responsible for 25-30 kids only one digit old, and everyone in the building is doing something, so coverage or help is hard to get,” writer and retired schoolteacher Ann Morgan writes to me in a shared Google Doc.
“I had no support from my department, none,” a PhD student who wishes to remain anonymous tells me. She miscarried during an especially stressful time teaching students and defending her dissertation at a university in the southern United States. “Mifepristone wasn’t available at my regular pharmacy, and I had to go to two others until I could finally get it,” she says. “The pharmacist actually came out and gave me a hug, saying she knew what I was going through.”
Despite the prevalence and horror of these stories, there are no nationally codified polices that recognize miscarriage as a traumatic physical and emotional event — or help those experiencing this loss to heal.
“I had generic support,” Mangini reflects, “but I wished for something more specific — ‘Here’s the policy for when you’re passing a miscarriage.’”
Ali-Khan adds, “I really wish that pregnancy came with its own set of personal leave time and money, whether or not it results in a child, so that I could have taken care of myself properly.”
“I had to use sick leave that I’d rather not have lost because of a loss,” Morgan writes, broaching the nuanced issue of whether miscarriage falls under sick leave or bereavement leave. (It should be both, or fall under its own category entirely.)
Some countries, such as New Zealand and the United Kingdom, have put forward legislation for miscarriage leave, but it’s only for three days, which is the absolute minimum a person would need, at least physically, if their miscarriage goes “right.” (Spoiler: This is rarely the case, and often there are unexpected complications that require multiple follow-up medical appointments.)
The emotional toll can be even more difficult to manage and last much longer.
“The hormonal cascade of losing a pregnancy is one of the most intense things I’ve ever experienced — like falling off a cliff,” Ali-Khan remarks.
Mangini agrees: “It was certainly one of those ‘before and after’ events that extraordinarily disrupted my life.”
The anonymous student I spoke with had her miscarriage in a similar time frame as I did (approximately a year before our interview), and we’re still brought to tears when discussing our experiences.
These stories demonstrate the vastly negative impact of miscarriage at the workplace. All of us, except for Mangini, now work in entirely different fields.
“I’m definitely more discerning [about] what extracurriculars I’ll pick up at work,” Mangini shares. “I don’t feel the pressure to achieve or the fear of missing out if I don’t apply to every single thing like I did before.”
The anonymous Ph.D. student echoes those feelings. “For the first time in my life, I’m prioritizing my rest,” she says.
The data, though burgeoning, is also alarming. A recent study found the economic devastation of miscarriage to be roughly $611 million per year in the United Kingdom. (No comparable study has been done in the United States.) Another study found that women who had miscarriages worked fewer hours the year they experienced their loss and then up to 200 hours less per year thereafter.
“Capitalism needs workers. It also needs consumers and soldiers,” wrote the feminist scholar Silvia Federici. It’s no surprise that Donald Trump hails himself as the “Fertilization President” while billionaire Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance spout hateful rhetoric about women — calling them “childless cat ladies” or encouraging them to “breed” — without also putting forth actionable change to improve the conditions of pregnancy, childbirth and work. What’s more, these conditions have become even more dangerous as mifepristone becomes harder to come by and hospitals in conservative states turn women away while miscarrying.
Women are in a “double bind of mechanization,” Federici writes, where they are forced to contribute to today’s workforce while bearing the burden of creating tomorrow’s workforce. As this becomes more unsustainable, we’ve experienced declining birth rates not only in the U.S. but also across the world.
It’s been four years since my miscarriage. The gaping black hole of my ultrasound image still visits me, but less often than before. It changes shape: I wasn’t bonding with nothing, I was bonding with myself.
I was bringing to term a new consciousness — my true first-born — who I must raise with all the love and care I’d imagined I’d give to a baby. My grief changes shape, and my healing: they’re not only personal, they’re political, too.
S. Ferdowsi is a writer continuing her work on miscarriage. If you’ve had a similar experience and would like to be interviewed, please contact her on Instagram at @sferdowsi27. Find more of her nonfiction in Best of the Net, The Rumpus, the 2nd Story podcast and the anthology Millennial Feminism at Work.
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Help and support:
- Sands works to support anyone affected by the death of a baby.
- Tommy’s fund research into miscarriage, stillbirth and premature birth, and provide pregnancy health information to parents.
- Saying Goodbye offers support for anyone who has suffered the loss of a baby during pregnancy, at birth or in infancy.
