Break the 12-week Wait Rule to Cope With Pregnancy Loss

After pregnancy loss women feel the silence of miscarriage reverberating throughout their life. This silence limits the ability of family, friends, colleagues, and health professionals to support women and their partners to reconfigure their lives after early pregnancy loss.

This silence started with the long-held belief that women should hide their news until after the third month of pregnancy.

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‘We need to be more open about talking about pregnancy and the things that can go wrong.’

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This rule also exacerbates the silence around miscarriage and permeates much Australian health and medical guidelines and legislation where miscarriage is not explicitly mentioned or acknowledged.

October being Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month, it is time to discuss the need for change in the narrative of miscarriage.

Perinatal loss practitioners suggest that health professionals encourage families not to wait to share their news and do away with this “12-week rule”.

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If the news of a baby early is not shared, it minimizes the early pregnancy experience. This creates an environment where people minimize that baby in the first 12 weeks and just see it as a pregnancy.

It also reduces the support the couple receives if something goes wrong.

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However, this rule acts as a kind of double whammy because when the pregnancy news is shared, and then most people find it harder to support back of bad news versus being there for the journey.

As a society, we find it difficult to talk about pregnancy loss. Even after a miscarriage, many people don’t share their loss with family and friends, reinforcing a sense of shame.

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Health professionals certainly need to talk more about pregnancy loss. The more comfortable we are with it, and the better education about it will help many couples to cope with it.

The protocols to manage women sensitively and refer them to an early pregnancy assessment need to be reshaped.

The miscarriage experience will also depend on the treatment they received such as insensitive care, little acknowledgment for their loss, and the sadness that accompanies the shock of that news.

The experience can also affect their mental health in the future.

There is an increasing number of resources for both families and medical professionals. Organizations such as the Pink Elephant Support Network, SANDS, and the Perinatal Loss Centre have resources such as fact sheets, extra support, and training for medical professionals.

The Australasian Society for Ultrasound in Medicine is developing resources for supporting sonographers in communicating unexpected findings in an ultrasound. However, there is still an absence of miscarriage in Australian health guidelines.

Source-Medindia