Interrogating Pregnancy Loss: Feminist Writings on Abortion, Miscarriage, and Stillbirth





Price: $34.95

Page Count: 252

Publication Date: November 2017

ISBN: 978-1-77258-023-5

Whereas biomedical and feminist literature treat abortion, miscarriage, and 
stillbirth as differently conceptualized events, this collection explores the 
connections between these three categories. How have feminist debates and 
strategies around reproductive choice invigorated the cultural conversation about 
miscarriage and stillbirth? How can we imagine more nuanced engagements with 
the spectrum of experiences that are at stake when a pregnancy ends? And how can 
we effectively create a space where pregnant people contend with the ways that loss 
makes meaning for those who grieve and/or celebrate the end of pregnancy?  
 
This collection centres pregnancy loss as an embodied and social phenomenon 
within a framework that understands pregnancy as a process with no guaranteed 
outcomes.  Interrogating Pregnancy Loss considers pregnancy as an epistemic 
source, one that has the capacity to reveal the limits of our collective assumptions 
about temporality, expectation, narrative, and social legitimacy. By interrogating 
loss, this collection argues that the lessons learned from loss have the capacity to 
serve our collective understandings of both the expected and unexpected rhythms of 
social and reproductive life. 

“Interrogating Pregnancy Loss addresses with poignancy and nuance topics that are
too often discussed myopically or ignored completely by feminist academics. By
delving into the socially and emotionally complex dimensions of abortion,
miscarriage, and stillbirth, this volume provides a truly groundbreaking
contribution to feminist motherhood scholarship.”
—VANESSA REIMER, editor of Angels on Earth: Mothering, Religion, and Spirituality,
and
blogger at Loss Mama

“Interrogating Pregnancy Loss challenges its readers to think about pregnancy as a
state of being—as an embodied social phenomenon—as experiencing rather than
merely expecting. As such, through scholarly literature as well as through narrative,
we understand pregnancy loss more than an object to be studied. This edited text is
written in such a way as to be useful to theorists, scholars doing empirical research,
as well as practitioners, and lay audiences.”
—DEBORAH DAVIDSON, Associate Professor, York University

Introduction
Toward a Feminist Epistemology of Loss
Emily R.M. Lind

I. BREAKING THE SILENCE

Chapter One
Communicating Miscarriage:
Coping with Loss, Uncertainty, and Self-Imposed Stigma
Masha Sukovic and Margie Serrato

Chapter Two
Timeline of a Maternal Breakdown:
A Feminist Mother’s Blog Post About Her
Abortion Experience
Angie Deveau

Chapter Three
Grief, Shame, and Miscarriage
Nancy Gerber

II. PREGNANCY AS RELATIONAL

Chapter Four
Believing Is Seeing Is Believing:
Elective Abortion and Visual Closure
Mary Thompson

Chapter Five
The Ambiguous Space of Motherhood:
The Experience of Stillbirth
Maya E. Bhave

Chapter Six
Full Circle:
Exploring the Maternal Ambivalence of a
Motherless Daughter
Natalie Morning

III. REFRAMING PREGNANCY LOSS

Chapter Seven
Reframing the Devastation and Exclusion Associated
with Pregnancy Loss:
A Normal and Growth-Enhancing Component of the
Physiological Female Continuum
Keren Epstein-Gilboa

Chapter Eight
failing
j wallace skelton

Chapter Nine
Fatphobia, Pregnancy Loss, and My Hegemonic Imagination:
A Story of Two Abortions
Emily R.M. Lind

Chapter Ten
Missed Miscarriage
Robin Silbergleid

Chapter Eleven
Full-Term Baby Loss: A How-to Guide for Mothers
Rachel O’Donnell

Chapter Twelve
How to Hear a Story: Reflections on the
Anniversary of My Rape
Rhobi Jacobs

IV. INTERROGATING THE MEDICALIZED LOGICS OF
PREGNANCY LOSS

Chapter Thirteen
A Death Certificate, an Autopsy Report,
a Pile of Insurance Claims
Elizabeth Heineman

Chapter Fourteen
Failing Infertility: A Case to Queer the Rhetoric of Infertility
Maria Novotny

Chapter Fifteen
A Feminist Perspective on Selective Termination

Brittany Irvine

V. MEMORIALIZING LOSS

Chapter Sixteen
Enacting Acknowledgment, Meaning, and Acceptance:
Personal Ceremony and Ritual as Helpful Ways to Engage
with Feelings of Loss After Abortion
Miriam Rose Brooker

Chapter Seventeen
Queering Reproductive Loss:
Exploring Grief and Memorialization
Christa Craven and Elizabeth Peel

About the Contributors

Emily R.M. Lind is a doctoral candidate at Carleton University’s Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture. Her research examines the intersections between identity, materiality, power, and knowledge production in interdisciplinary contexts. She is currently writing her dissertation on settler colonialism, Canadian art, and early twentieth-century Toronto.

Angie Deveau is a graduate of York University’s Women’s Studies M.A. Program and has been working for the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement for nearly five years. Previously, she provided research assistance for York University’s Gender & Work Database, York University’s ‘Women’s Human Rights, Macroeconomics and Policy Choices’ project and the ‘Adolescent Health and Wellbeing Study’ at UNB. In addition to her background in research, Angie has worked as a Case Management Assistant for the Province of Nova Scotia’s Department of Community Services (Social Assistance Division), and as the Community Development Coordinator for the Victorian Order of Nurses/Help the Aged project in Fredericton, New Brunswick. She is currently in the planning stages of co-editing a collection on Mothering and Yoga, Meditation, and Mindfulness.