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Miscarriages and Men
A public service announcement from a female researcher
Here’s a PSA about miscarriages that I wish somebody had given me because I knew nothing until it happened. Very much to my own surprise, I ended up having almost every kind of miscarriage there is.
By the way, my name is Katherine Pickering Antonova,I’m an Associate Professor of Russian history at Queens College, City University of New York. I earned my B.A. at the University of Chicago and Ph.D. at Columbia. Originally from Holland, Michigan, I was a Rotary Youth Exchange student to Norway, and have also lived in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Ivanovo, Russia. Apparently, I like cold places too.
Every man should read this. You REALLY need to know this.
There are many kinds of miscarriages — everyone is different medically and for the woman and how it affects her, but they also range from “missed miscarriage” (very early, medically minor) to catastrophic (in every sense) late miscarriages.
“Missed miscarriage” is one of several weird archaic terms for when pregnancy starts successfully but ends again before we would normally even know for sure it was there, but that can now be detected with OTC quick tests.
My grandma, mother of 8 + 1 late miscarriage said it was a blessing not to know about those and she was right in the emotional sense — knowing about them is a roller coaster of hell, but physically it’s possible not to notice.
However, medically, now that we know we’re discovering that lots of these take a big toll on the mother’s body and are also a signal that something is off that should be paid attention to. My male OBGYN, a very big name in Manhattan, blew off SEVEN of these before I had an accidental appt with a female junior doctor in his office who was horrified.
She put me on very simple and safe baby aspirin & progesterone and by the next month I was pregnant with my youngest & the whole string of miscarriages was over. So — not really so minor.
The next most common kind of miscarriage typically happens around 6–12 weeks from conception & is usually caused by the body rejecting a genetically imperfect embryo (I’m not a doctor!) — they’re more common as women are having babies later in…
