I miscarried a baby not a ‘foetus’, but I now support women's right to abortion access more than ever

Sign up for the View from Westminster email for expert analysis straight to your inbox

Get our free View from Westminster email

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice

Two weeks ago, I found out that I’d had a miscarriage – a “missed” or “silent” miscarriage to be specific. It means that the pregnancy had stopped developing but that my body hadn’t realised. I was still having morning sickness, still declining glasses of wine, blithely unaware that my baby had died.

See, right there, in the previous line. I’ve called it a baby. I have referred to a very early-stage pregnancy as a baby. Which is exactly the kind of inaccurate language that is used by the anti-abortion lobby. And therein lies the problem.

Being pregnant caused me to abandon the carefully selected language that I – as a staunch pro-choice believer and campaigner – had always chosen to use.

Before I was pregnant, it was always foetus and never baby. I understood that a heartbeat wasn’t a heartbeat, but activity around the fetal pole dubbed a “heartbeat” to create a more emotionally appealing narrative.

But in my joy, swept away by the concept of becoming a mother, I abandoned all of my carefully regulated language in favour of calling it “the baby” or “him” (I was convinced that it would have been a boy).

During the scan where we found out that I had miscarried, the doctor told us that the pregnancy had stopped developing at six weeks and one day. Which just so happens to be the exact date that abortion “reform” in Georgia now uses as a cut-off for abortion.

Even lying on the table wearing a sheet as a skirt and with a probe in my vagina, that was the first thing I thought. How many times had I retweeted a comment saying, “It’s not a baby at six weeks!” How often had I referred to a six-week-old pregnancy as “a late period” or “a clump of cells”?

And then I lost one of those “clumps of cells”, and it was devastating.

To me, and to my husband, it was a baby. Not technically, but emotionally. We had already talked about names, thought about primary schools and argued about whether they should support England or Wales in rugby.

I try to be consistent in my beliefs, for my own sanity if nothing else. So I can’t lie, it’s hard to reconcile these two conflicting ideas: that I lost my “baby”; but that other women, if they want to, should feel no concern in aborting theirs.

In the end, all that I can tell myself is this: a wanted pregnancy is different from an unwanted one. When you want a pregnancy, you mentally transform the embryo or foetus inside you into a person. You imbue them with all sorts of imagined characteristics and elevate them from the potential to life to a complete and fully formed human being.

For the most part, when you don’t want to be pregnant, you don’t do that. It’s a pregnancy, not a person. It’s hard to accept that most of what made my embryo a baby came from inside my own head. But it’s true. And it doesn’t make my loss any more painful or profound.

Since my miscarriage I’ve encountered people who assume that I will now view abortion differently, as if my loss would transform my world view overnight. Often the assumption seems to be that having lost a pregnancy I would resent those who chose to end theirs. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Another woman’s choice to end a pregnancy has no bearing on my own ability to go full term. I don’t suddenly view women who have abortions as selfish or ungrateful for rejecting something I want. I see them as brave, pragmatic people making the choice that is right for them.

Miscarriage is horrific. It’s frightening, panic inducing and surprising painful. I would not wish it on my worst enemy. But it has not changed my views on the essential nature of safe, accessible abortion for all women.

Which is lucky, I suppose. I’ve already lost something that I valued deeply, I can’t to say goodbye to my longest and deepest held beliefs as well.