This story is part of The Wall of Wombs, our 2024 exhibition sharing honest, deeply personal journeys of motherhood.
What you’re reading is a direct transcription of a spoken story — shared bravely, in the speaker’s own words.
Listen to this story and explore others at wallofwombs.com.
When I was about 16 weeks during that pregnancy, I went to an appointment at the hospital. They did a bedside ultrasound, and I thought, “The baby’s not moving, something’s wrong.” Like my motherhood instincts were telling me, something’s not right here.
The obstetrician was very rude and basically said to me, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s nothing wrong with the baby; the baby’s fine.” And I just put it down to a bad experience at this hospital. I thought, “You know what? I’m sure the baby’s fine.” I hadn’t had any other symptoms. No bleeding, no cramping, nothing.
And then at my 20-week scan, I found out that the baby wasn’t alive, and the baby had passed probably straight after the scan where it was “okay”. So in that appointment in the hospital, the baby was not alive, and she still let that baby be inside me for four or five weeks more than it needed to be.
It was horrible. I remember calling my mum and just losing it, but we had no support because it was COVID. So we had to break the rules and dropped the kids off at my in-laws to be looked after while I had the procedure to get the baby out because my body wasn’t doing it on its own. At that point, I was 19 weeks and 4 days. It was technically a miscarriage, and I was happy to let it go because I knew the baby was only 14 or 15 weeks.
The hospital got us in on Friday night. They said, “We’re going to give you the Mifepristone tablet on Saturday. You gotta come in for that, get the process started, and then we’ll induce you on Monday so you’ll have the baby.”
As I said, I don’t want it to be called a stillbirth; I just had it in my head that I didn’t see it that way. I didn’t want to connect with this. I’d never felt the baby move, so I wasn’t bonded with the baby.
On Saturday, I was grocery shopping, and the hospital called me and told me, “We can’t get the tablet for you. We need an obstetrician to sign off, and not all OBs can sign off on this particular medication. So you’re going to have to wait until Monday.” And I said, “I don’t care what the issue is. You need to get this baby out because I’m here, doing my grocery shopping with a foetus that’s been dead for six weeks in my system. You have to get it out.” And they told me, “We just can’t do it. The OB has scanned a script, but the pharmacy won’t accept it. There has to be something in person.” I answered, “That sounds like a you problem. Your job is to look after me.” And in hindsight, I would’ve just picked up my bags and gone to a different hospital. In the throes of grief, I was not thinking about that. I’m like, “Just get it out.”
I went in on Monday, and I had an amazing midwife whose name escapes me right now. But if she ever hears this, thank God she was there. She was just like, “I’m appalled that I’m seeing you today. You should be ready for an induction. You should not be here.” And then the baby, the baby wasn’t born until Thursday after. So I spent a whole week in this state. And then by that point, I was clocked over 20 weeks, and I was classified as a stillbirth.
Then we had to name the baby. The hospital wouldn’t take care of the remains, so we had to negotiate with funeral homes. Had they got the baby out earlier, it would have just been, as harsh as it is to say, medical waste, or maybe we should have just taken it home in a box, or I don’t know, but it was just the most appalling thing to be put through.
We still don’t know definitively what was wrong with that particular baby.
After I lost the baby and I started doing more studies as a yoga teacher and a doula, trying to come to terms with what had happened and how my mind could accept the grief and accept the loss.
I read that in a lot of cultures, across a lot of cultures, the soul enters the body around 17 weeks gestation. That’s about the time that most people feel those first flutters and stuff. So there’s obviously a physiological reason for that. But that made me feel a lot more comfortable in that I hadn’t connected with that baby yet.
You have to be really, really wary of your options. If you don’t know your options, you don’t have a choice. They will make those decisions for you. I think I have a healthy appreciation for medicine and where medicine can step in and be a real comfort and a real help.
But in most cases, it’s a real distraction in the birth space. Part of our job as a doula is to intervene in the intervention. And that’s what we do. And that’s where a lot of the magic happens because their mums are like, “I’ve got this, I can do it.”
And then pushes bubs out, not even a tear. There’s no trust from the system that women’s bodies can do this. It’s really important that we learn to trust mums and their bodies. Obstetricians come through a line, and I have obviously a great respect for what they do and their expertise in the field, but they’re there when things go wrong. And that’s their job. They have to specialise when things don’t go to plan.
They are seeing birth from a lens, and it’s not their fault; it’s a product of their training. They see it through a lens of what’s wrong, how we can manage risks. But, for a woman who has a low-risk pregnancy, it’s riskier to give birth in the hospital than at home. And that’s what’s really wrong with the system.