What Not to Say when Someone Has a Miscarriage

Miscarrying a child is an extremely traumatic event in a woman's life. There are myriad feelings of loss, fear, trepidation and anger. According to Discovery Health, the rate of miscarriage is 15-20% of all pregnancies, so it is likely that you know someone who has had or will have a miscarriage. It's difficult to know what to say when someone has miscarried if you have never experienced it yourself. The most important thing to keep in mind is that the woman is grieving a death, just as if her child had been born and died later. It is the loss of a life and, like any other death, it's hard for those around her to know what to say. Say something if the woman who has miscarried is close to you. Not acknowledging such a traumatic event will make it more difficult. Here are five things that may come naturally for you to say but that you should avoid at all costs.

It must have been meant to be

Whether medically true or not, this gives the person absolutely no comfort. She may already be feeling a sense of helplessness and inability to control her body after the miscarriage. Telling her that it was God's plan or a body's natural mechanism to dispose of defects (yes, I was told this by a well-meaning friend) diminishes the sense of loss.

You can always have another one

Being able to have another baby in no way helps to grieve the loss of this one. To an expectant mother who has miscarried, this particular child was already real, may already have had a name, and already had a place in his or her mother's heart.

You shouldn't work so hard

When I miscarried, one of my in-laws told me that I shouldn't work so hard and be so stressed out. The implication of this is that I had so little regard for my unborn child that I killed her by working hard. What was most likely meant to be concern for my health and welfare turned into an accusation. No one ever knows the cause of any particular miscarriage and shouldn't presume that the mother had any way of preventing it.

Try eating (fill in the blank)