Help After Miscarriage: Be Pro-Life

A while back someone I know, in speaking about a friend’s grief after her miscarriage, said “I don’t know why she is so upset. She wasn’t even that far along.” At the time I remember thinking it was insensitive, but I also had no categories for it. I knew it was wrong, but I just couldn’t pinpoint why besides the fact that I thought it was rude.

Thankfully, no one has said anything remotely close to that. But I know people who have had something very similar said to them, so it’s probably not an uncommon statement. For the observer of the woman who miscarried it can seem like she is grieving too long, or too much. Often there are no tangible reminders that she was pregnant. Or maybe you didn’t know that she was pregnant until after the miscarriage.

As believers the loss of life at any stage should make us sad and sorrowful for the one suffering the loss—after all we are “pro-life.”

We grieve and fight for the babies lost at the hands of abortionists, and we should. This zeal for life from conception forward should cause us to grieve and embrace our brothers and sisters experiencing a pregnancy loss at any stage. We have been so blessed by “pro-life" people who have done this with us. They have cried with us. They have talked about our baby like he was a person—an image-bearer of God. There have been moments where I tried to “qualify” my grief, like I shouldn’t be this sad because I wasn’t very far along. But a dear friend of mine said to me, emphatically, “no matter the stage, he was still your baby!” To have a friend acknowledge his life meant the world to me.

It’s really important to not de-legitimize the life that was growing inside of a grieving woman. To her (and to God), this baby was not a blob of tissue, or a fetus—he or she was a life. To be pro-life means not only fighting for the unborn lost through murder, but grieving for the life unwillingly lost regardless of gestation. It means allowing a mother to grieve after miscarriage in the same way that we allow a mother to grieve remorse over an abortion. Life lost is sad, especially when it is a child.

The important thing is that we don’t treat a miscarriage as some fluke accident that proves pregnancy is at least possible. One of the most tangible ways to help after a miscarriage is to practice what we preach about life. Allow your friend to talk about her baby in the same way you would if she were carrying the baby to term. Let her know that you care as much about her little one as you do the ones that make it into the nursery at the local hospital.

Life matters. It begins at conception. For every baby.