Read on Twitter
It's clear to me from the number of news headlines, well-intentioned tweets and IG comments, etc, referring to "miscarriage" that the pictures Chrissy Teigen posted couldn't have been more important for us as a public to see. It turns out we don't even know what we're looking at.
Swipe and there's a story, one you'll recognize if you've given birth in an American hospital, especially, or been with someone who has.
When I had my daughter at Mt Sinai, they gave me those same tic-tac grip socks. I remember the sheet of plastic they spread over my back for the epidural, and I remember wondering why (I have no idea still). In these photos, in other words, they're prepping a woman to give birth.
My birth story ended with life. I have the receiving blanket tucked into a drawer. I have the wrist band, snipped and saved. I have the little hat with a dash of blood dried on it. (I have the kid, running through my house.)
CT's photos show these trappings of labor—the socks, the IV, the blanket—evoking a physiological memory for me, and a cultural familiarity at large, but with an outcome so devastating, we don't even recognize it. We call it by a wrong name.
In this tragedy, in this black-and-white short, the hospital paraphernalia pairs with death instead of life. Stillbirth is the correct name—but it's more than terminology we are after. It's the right to tell this story and be heard.
To end a bit more lightly (because I, too, cried very hard for a woman I haven't met, but whose humor gives me grace), when Judd Apatow makes the dumbest version of pregnancy and labor in "Knocked Up", let's, like, turn it off and go make something better.
