Maureen Doris Cheung,.
If you look at a picture of my family, you will see me as a mother of one beautiful daughter. However, if you asked me truly to describe my family, I would tell you I am a mother of two, but I never got to hold one of those babies.
October marks Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness month.
One in four pregnancies ends in a loss. An estimated 285 miscarriages occur every day in Australia. Despite how common this devastating life event is – it remains a taboo topic. So many women around you grieve in silence unsupported because of this. It’s past time to end the stigma and do better.
I lost my first pregnancy in 2022 at ten weeks. During a massive pitch- of course! I caught COVID right after my D&C procedure and had to self-isolate. The Australian borders were closed with COVID restrictions so I couldn’t see my family back in Ireland and they couldn’t travel to me. It was a rock-bottom time in my life. Watching my body return to normal, the grieving process, the months ahead of not managing to conceive again all took a huge toll on my mental health.
The grieving process is different for everyone.
In the case of losing a pregnancy – the biggest struggle for me was having begun the process of becoming a parent, but not having a baby to cuddle, to nurture, to raise. It is something so impossible to reconcile.
I won’t ever be able to shake the memory of the silence of no heartbeat at the scan. From the denial of thinking maybe their heart could start beating again, to finding it difficult to see a newborn - the intensity of feelings is extreme. The complicated emotions of loving and honouring the baby you lost but wanting to get pregnant again.
Grief is a long journey and I don’t think I have fully made it to the acceptance stage yet. It just gets easier to live with over time. I carry them in my heart always. I think about what they might have looked like, sounded like, their personality. The anniversary of their passing and their due date is difficult still. It happened the week of Mother’s Day and it remains a bittersweet day for me now since my daughter was born.
My experience is not unique.
More and more when I mention having had a miscarriage someone around me has shared the same pain. At the time, I made the decision to keep working through the pitch. In a moment where I felt a complete lack of control on my life and my own body, it was one small thing I could feel like I had some control over. But I did decide to tell my manager and the people working on the pitch team with me what had happened so that they would understand why I might not be bringing my A-Game. I was lucky to have such supportive colleagues around me and it helped that there was a small amount of people in the business who knew what I was going through.
Someone told me that it was brave to speak about my miscarriage. But, I don’t want to be the brave one, I just want it to be normal.
Some of us work through it. Some of us take leave. Some of us resign. Few of us speak.
Especially for women, it’s hard to even admit that we are trying to start a family in the first place. We fear that if people think we will be taking parental leave soon we will be overlooked for new opportunities and promotions.
With our culture of the “12 week rule” we also typically don’t disclose a pregnancy until after the first trimester when the risk of miscarriage significantly decreases. We endure the rocky first trimester with nobody around us understanding why we’re not quite our usual selves at work. In the event of a miscarriage, this then compounds the isolation of a loss nobody knows anything about.
When a living family member dies, we rally around that bereaved person and offer our condolences, our support and hold space for their grief. When grief is ignored, we risk serious mental health outcomes for our people.
The workplace has a huge role to play in fostering a caring environment and offering support when returning to work after a loss.
The right support and policy for pregnancy loss and infertility is just as crucial to protect women’s participation in the workplace as parental leave and return to work policy. Being a family-friendly employer goes far beyond offering flexible work arrangements around school pickup.
How can we do better as an industry to support people undergoing pregnancy loss and fertility challenges at work?
- Normalise: Acknowledging how common the experience of pregnancy loss and fertility difficulties is across your workforce and promoting the normalisation of this issue is key. We have made huge strides in our industry in normalising conversations around mental health, neurodiversity, disability, gender, sexuality and more. This has created safe spaces for discussion and disclosing experiences and allows businesses and managers to offer better support than ever before when the right training and policies are in place. The same must be done for fertility and pregnancy loss
- Fertility Literacy: Anyone who is or aspires to be a people leader will manage women and parents in the workplace. To be an effective leader it must be mandatory to educate yourself and the leaders in your business on issues which impact a huge volume of your workforce. A corporate culture that understands the complexities and diversity of ways how individuals form families will be best placed to support their team through the ups and downs of the journey to grow a family.
- Language of Grief: We ask people to bring their whole selves to work – but are we ready to have the conversations that requires? People experiencing a pregnancy loss will be going through a lot of complicated emotions, the same with those navigating IVF or other fertility treatments. A new pregnancy after a loss may trigger feelings of anxiety and fear. Are your people leaders equipped to hold space for this? Similar to how we have rolled out training to have conversations around mental health, we can learn how to have better conversations around loss. Avoiding statements like “at least you know you can get pregnant”, “at least it happened early”. These sentiments, while maybe well-meaning, serve only to diminish someone’s very real grief for someone they love. Some people may never meet their rainbow baby.
- Leave Policy: Managers should be trained in your full company leave policy covering every kind of leave including fertility, bereavement, domestic violence – anything falling out of annual or carers leave – so that they can immediately know how to guide their employees on their entitlements and where to find the information when they need it. Employees by law are entitled to two days of bereavement leave in the event of pregnancy loss however many companies are starting to create their own leave and support programmes around loss. Consider where you are housing this information – it is triggering for someone to have to consult a Parental Leave Policy document when facing a pregnancy loss.
We need to challenge norms that don’t serve us anymore. This isn’t a “women’s issue” or something that just concerns “mothers”. This is a workplace issue for any industry that prides itself on inclusivity and positive change as much as we do in the media industry.
In the event of a pregnancy loss someone is not only going through a complex period of grief, they are also physically going through postpartum changes in their body and need to rest and recover. There is no “six week check-up” when you don’t deliver to term. A shift in perspective on the intersectionality of pregnancy loss and fertility challenges and how this impacts mental health needs more visibility and discussion. We are the changers – let’s do better.