Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month

October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month.

Before I started teaching prenatal yoga I didn't hear much about pregnancy loss. Part of that was circumstance. I was simply around fewer people who were currently navigating the journey of having children. Part of it was something else. Something more cultural. We just don't talk about it.

When it does come up it tends to be in passing. A parent mentioning that their mother had a miscarriage decades ago. A family member announcing a pregnancy and then quietly going silent. A friend sharing something briefly and then moving on. I was more aware of pregnancy loss than I realized. I just hadn't been invited to stay in it with anyone.

The First Trimester Rule

Most people know the unwritten rule: wait until after the first trimester to announce a pregnancy. The risk of loss is higher in those early weeks and so you wait.

I never questioned that until recently.

Now I wonder if waiting to announce is less about protecting the pregnant person and more about protecting everyone else from having to know how to respond to a loss. If nobody knew, nobody has to navigate the awkwardness of not knowing what to say. But that means the person who experiences the loss carries it alone. Or with only the people they told before the announcement. Which can be a very small circle.

That seems worth questioning.

What I've Learned as a Prenatal Teacher

Since beginning this work I have been much closer to pregnancy and infant loss than I was before. People have reached out excited to participate and then something has happened before the series began. I have not always known what to say. I am still learning.

What I have learned is that this grief is unlike most others.

You have never met them. There are no stories to tell. No memories to share. Only the hopes and the vision of what could have been. That is a particular kind of loss that deserves its own acknowledgment.

What Pregnancy and Infant Loss Includes

Part of why this topic is so under-discussed is that it encompasses such a range of experiences, each with its own medical reality, timeline, and grief.

Miscarriage is the most common, affecting roughly one in four recognized pregnancies. Most occur in the first trimester but miscarriage can happen at any point before twenty weeks.

Ectopic pregnancy occurs when a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus, most commonly in a fallopian tube. It is not viable and requires medical intervention. It is also a loss.

Molar pregnancy is a rare complication in which abnormal tissue grows instead of a typical pregnancy.

Stillbirth is the loss of a baby at or after twenty weeks. In the United States roughly one in one hundred pregnancies ends in stillbirth.

Infant loss refers to the death of a baby after birth, within the first year of life. This includes SIDS, medical complications, and other causes.

Each of these is a different experience. Each carries its own medical pathway, its own grief, and its own complicated intersection with the world's expectations of how a person should look and act after loss.

What I Still Don't Know How to Do

I want to be honest about this because I think it matters.

I do not always know what to say when someone shares a loss with me. I have said the wrong thing. I have defaulted to silence when a word would have helped. I have watched someone carry something alone because I didn't know how to step toward it.

What I have learned, imperfectly and still in process, is that presence matters more than the right words. Acknowledgment matters more than solutions. Saying I'm so sorry for your loss and meaning it, not immediately trying to fix or reframe or silver-line, is more valuable than most people realize.

Checking in again after the initial conversation matters. Losses are often acknowledged once and then quietly dropped from conversation as if the grief has resolved. It hasn't. The person is still carrying it. Coming back to it weeks or months later, simply saying I've been thinking about you, is a gift.

Asking what they need rather than assuming. Some people want to talk about it. Some don't. Some want help with practical things. Some want to be left alone. Asking without pressure gives them agency over their own grief.

October Wave of Light

Every year on October 15th, Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day, families around the world participate in a Wave of Light. At 7pm local time they light a candle in honor of the babies they have lost. The candles are lit in every time zone creating a continuous wave of light around the world.

If you have experienced a loss, or if you love someone who has, lighting a candle that evening is a simple and meaningful way to mark the day.

Support and Resources

If you are navigating a loss right now or have in the past, you are not alone. This is more common than our silence around it suggests. The grief is real and it deserves real support. Reaching out to a therapist who specializes in perinatal loss is worth considering, not because something is wrong with you but because this is genuinely hard and you deserve support that is proportional to what you are carrying.

Locally the Colorado Birth Collective has skilled maternal mental health therapists who serve the Grand Valley. We listed their contact information in this post. [Link to You Just Birthed Two People blog]

A future post will explore somatic and movement-based practices for navigating grief specifically in the context of pregnancy and infant loss. Because the body carries grief too and it deserves attention alongside the emotional and psychological dimensions.

For now I just wanted to name it. To say that this is real, it is common, and we can do better at holding space for the people who are living it.