Okay y'all. We HAVE to destigmatize pregnancy complications & loss. We have to discuss it & understand it & stop treating it as something that must be endured behind closed doors. It doesn't help families mourn or women recover. It only helps other people control the narrative.

At any point during any pregnancy, something can go wrong. There could be no fetal heartbeat, fetal abnormalities, genetic disorders, low fluids, preeclampsia, the list goes on and on and on. And what's crazy is that most women only learn about these risks AFTER they're pregnant.

Pregnancy is a HUGE health risk for women (& the US maternal mortality rate is on the rise!). And regardless of its outcome, what it does to your body can cause longterm (ie preexisting!) health issues. Complications along the way only add to that. And they are incredibly common!

Yeah, it's hard to hear. But if you're okay with women sharing pictures post-delivery with their healthy babies, then you need to shut up when women are also honest about the flip side to this, including when that pregnancy doesn't have its desired outcome.

It benefits all the wrong people when we don't have an open and honest discussion about this. Because those wrong people want to control the narrative. They want to make it a black and white issue, as if pregnancy is two-dimensional when it's anything but.

But here's the deal: we can't have an honest conversation about the health & welfare of 50% of this country if we can't be honest about ALL the realities surrounding pregnancy & childbirth. Not about the politics or the religious agendas, just about women and the truth.

Women's health is multi-faceted. It's pregnancy and pelvic exams and hormone therapy and just THERAPY and no one part is extractable from the whole bc as much as it upsets some people's "idea" of women, we are are not simple. We are complicated and weird and GLORIOUS.

So don't you dare fucking censor a woman for being honest about her experience just because it makes you uncomfortable. Don't tell the world she's wrong for sharing pain that isn't new, just new to you. This is reality. So please wake up and start living in it.

For more info, this is a great thread re: different types of miscarriages: https://twitter.com/kpanyc/status/1311694585672929282