Heeding the 'wild red flag' : listening to stories of miscarriage to grow our capacity for care : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand

Abstract

While common, miscarriage can be devastating and traumatic for women, both physically and emotionally, with women experiencing notable grief and distress that is often enduring and life-changing. Care received under the medical gaze of the health system is often constrained to women’s bodies and ‘products of conception’, disregarding and dismissing women’s emotional experiences and needs, and social support is often scarce, fraught, and inadequate due to pervasive processes of silencing and stigma surrounding miscarriage. Given that social support plays a pivotal role in how miscarriage is experienced by women, the aim of this research was to better understand the complexities of social support for women who miscarry and to explore pathways for improved care. Grounded in feminist standpoint epistemology and narrative inquiry, this research sought to resist the silencing of miscarriage through privileging women’s voices, experience and lives in the context of miscarriage. Through in-depth interviews, six women’s stories of miscarriage and social support were analysed using The Listening Guide to identify the plot, I poems and Contrapuntal voices. An additional analytic step involved bringing the women together to ‘speak’ in conversation with one another, enabling an exploration of the complexity and diversity of women’s experiences of support through and following miscarriage from the women’s collective standpoint. Four narrative threads were woven through their stories: You’re A Woman, You Have Children; No One Talks About It; We’re Women, We Suffer; and Something Good At The End. These narratives spoke to, and challenged, processes of silencing, social norms and expectations of womanhood, motherhood, and ‘healing’, urging us to transform the ways we can talk about, understand and respond to miscarriage. Listening to the women, for real, urges us all to open spaces for diverse and complex stories of miscarriage, enabling us to grow our collective story of miscarriage in order to honour women’s motherhood, their babies, and their grief, increasing our capacity for connection and care.