Background reading:

• Unspoken by Chari Pere
• “‘I Needed to Know I Was Not the Only One’: Talking Honestly About Pregnancy Loss and Reproductive Grief,” by Jessica Zucker and Chari Pere

Transcript:

00:00:04 Michele Goodwin:

Welcome to On the Issues with Michele Goodwin at Ms. Magazine. As you know, we’re a show that reports, rebels, and we tell it just like it is. On this show, we center your concerns about rebuilding our nation and advancing the promise of equality. So, join me as we tackle the most compelling issues of our times, and on our show, history matters. We examine the past as we think about the future, and in today’s episode, we discuss the complex emotions and feelings of grief that can accompany pregnancy loss, highlighting advocacy work to connect those most affected and offer support. 

We delve specifically into how creative expression and clinical care can offer support to those affected by pregnancy loss, and joining me now are two very special guests. Chari Pere, an award-winning cartoonist behind the viral Unspoken Cartoonmentary series, and Dr. Jessica Zucker, a Los-Angeles-based psychologist, specializing in reproductive health and the author of the award-winning books, Normalize It: Upending the Silence, Stigma, and Shame That Shape Women’s Lives and I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement. Jessica is the creator of the viral hashtag #IHadaMiscarriage campaign.

Listeners, sit back and take a very close listen. It’s such an honor and privilege to have you both with us, Chari and Dr. Zucker. Thank you so much. I want to start off this episode with a bit of level-setting. Can you let me know, and our audience of listeners, what’s meant by the myth of moving on after miscarriage and reproductive loss? For example, what comes to mind happens to be the dangers of perpetuating this myth and what brings with it. So, perhaps I’ll start with you, Dr. Zucker. What’s meant by the myth of moving on?

00:02:18 Dr. Jessica Zucker:

Oh, this is such a profound and important question. I think the myth is really sort of entrenched in our cultural fear of grief and about, you know, exploring it, expressing it, leaning into it, you know, and really allowing ourselves to feel the spectrum of feelings in the aftermath of pregnancy and infant loss and life after, and so, this sort of push to “move on” is a subtle way of saying not only do I just not want you to be in pain, so I’m trying to “fix it” for you, but I also can’t, necessarily, tolerate it myself. Why? Because, again, society hasn’t really sort of armed us with the skills and the understanding of how to be present with people in these very difficult seasons. I don’t know if I should keep going.

00:03:24 Michele Goodwin:

No, I appreciate that. I’m wondering, Chari, given your work, which is really so emotive, it’s quite moving, the cartoons, and I’m thinking about your website right now and this Unspoken, a Cartoonmentary series that really helps us to understand the challenges that are presented by pregnancy loss, and you narrate, in a visual way, what we get wrong by the sense that a person can just simply move on. What does this question mean for you, this myth of moving on?

00:04:12 Chari Pere:

Well, it’s an excellent question, and you know, I feel like everybody expects to just be strong right now and put on a front, and nobody takes the time to stop and realize how to be a little bit softer and kinder. Everybody’s dealing with their own traumas and issues, regardless of whether it’s miscarriage or anything like that, and we all really need to take the time to process it and share our stories with each other to help each other. So, I know I’m from a house full of very strong women, and some don’t like to share anything.

So, when I had my miscarriage and I opened up to my mom, my mom said, oh, yeah, I think I had one, too. So, you know, I don’t know if it was processed or discussed properly. The expectations are so hard. You know, we always talk about how, as women, you know, we have to do…you know, bring the money in, and take care of the kids, and everything has to be exactly perfect, and the truth is, we’re all perfectly imperfect in our own ways. So, you know, we all have to do what we can to…I mean, I try to share what I can to help break these myths that are out there, because it’s crazy that we’re all experiencing it and perpetuating it.

00:05:35 Michele Goodwin:

But there’s the presumption, isn’t there, that, somehow, pregnancy is perfect? There’s the expectation that women, girls, people with the capacity for pregnancy, those who become pregnant, must behave in perfect ways, or that if there has been loss, pregnancy loss, or if there has been a concern that has emerged with the pregnancy, it must be because there was some conduct that was wrong, acting in an imperfect way, and it seems to me that there’s something troubling by this.

And so, I wanted to turn to you again, Dr. Jessica Zucker. You’re LA based. You’re a psychologist that’s specializing in reproductive health, and you’re the author of an award-winning book, Normalize It, along with others, and so, I wanted to ask you about another mythology, and that’s the mythology of perfection. That pregnancies, on their own, are always perfect, unless there’s something that’s been done wrong by the person carrying the pregnancy. What is it that society gets wrong about that?

00:06:48 Dr. Jessica Zucker:

Yeah. I mean, it feeds women this idea that they are supposed to be glowing and they are supposed to be enjoying the changes in their body and the feelings they are experiencing, and you know, this ends up being a setup for women feeling incredibly alone in the aftermath of pregnancy, even when the pregnancy goes well, and the concern is that perinatal and postpartum mood and anxiety disorders are rampant, and although, on screens, you know, they make it look like, oh, this is women who either want to harm their babies or can’t get out of bed, it’s so much more nuanced and complex than that, and so, this myth keeps women silent, and it continues all of the stigmas that surround women’s lives, and then it can bring a sense of shame, and this can happen all the more if you have experienced pregnancy loss, because all of the people around you, loved ones included, say, aren’t you just so happy to be pregnant? And you know, now they…

00:08:04 Michele Goodwin:

Sometimes women are not. Sometimes people who are carrying pregnancies are just not happy to be pregnant.

00:08:10 Dr. Jessica Zucker:

Exactly, and maybe they’re anxious, and maybe they’re depressed, even if this is all they wanted, especially…

00:08:17 Michele Goodwin:

And maybe they’re angry, too. Who knows under what conditions that they became pregnant?

00:08:22 Dr. Jessica Zucker:

Exactly, and so, I think we would do better as a society to talk about the very real, raw, candid, and complex experiences of women.

00:08:34 Michele Goodwin:

I think you’re absolutely right. To just help to further explain for our audience, how do you define pregnancy loss? What is that, especially in the wake of how the Supreme Court and state legislatures have intervened in medical and science conversations, right, including furthering these mythologies that pregnancy is always perfect? What people want…happen to be being in the state of pregnancy, that that’s a natural state for women, and that women should embrace that, and it seems that there is a policing and a surveilling with a mindset of perfection in pregnancy, but then there’s pregnancy loss. So, how does one who’s living, let’s say, in a state where the governor believes and the legislature believes that pregnancies are perfect, unless she’s done something wrong? And now here’s this terminology of pregnancy loss. Well, what does that mean?

00:09:40 Dr. Jessica Zucker:

Oh, wow. Yeah, this is a tough one. You know, the truth of the matter is, even prior to what’s happening governmentally, women were blaming themselves. The research shows, from years back, that women, in our country anyway, in this culture, tend to blame themselves, tend to feel guilty, tend to feel a sense of body hatred and shame. What’s that…

00:10:10 Michele Goodwin:

This is when they’re having a mis…in association with miscarriage and still…

00:10:14 Dr. Jessica Zucker:

Yes. Yes, and so, as you know, approximately 1 in 4 pregnancies result in miscarriage, and I think the number is about 1 in 160 in stillbirth, and then, of course, we don’t have accurate numbers for chemical pregnancies, and we probably don’t have accurate numbers for terminating for medical reasons. So, why is it that women are thinking that it’s a fault of their own? 

00:10:48 Chari Pere:

Yeah, no, I 100% agree with that, and the thing that struck me the most when I was going through my miscarriage was that I thought I had done something wrong, 100% sure. Nobody had talked about it. I had no idea how common it was. Jessica and I, we both…we had a miscarriage around the same time that led us to both do our respective projects and movements, and it was just flabbergasting to me to see how many people came out of the woodwork after I started saying, oh, I had this miscarriage, and I shared my comic about my experience, and everybody had just talked about it. You can’t take away the physical actions, you know, of the loss of the pregnancy, but the entire emotional torture of what did I do? Why did I cause this? I don’t know anybody else who had gone through this. Why me? All that, and would be like, oh, it’s common. Okay, so, hopefully I can move on soon or try to figure out next steps, but all of that could’ve been gone instead of days of berating myself and just feeling so alone.

00:11:52 Michele Goodwin:

So, Chari, thank you so much for sharing that with our audience and providing an opportunity for us to think about it even more deeply, and your artistry has also helped us in this regard. I want to pick up on something that you said, which is that you felt alone, and you felt as if it was your fault when you had your miscarriage. Why did you feel that way?

00:12:19 Chari Pere:

So, I was actually physically alone, because my husband was out of town for five days, the entire time I got the bad news, and by the time he came back later on from his business trip, the baby was gone, but I guess, from a cultural perspective, people don’t talk about their pregnancies until after the first trimester, and why? Why is that? You know, some people do it because they don’t want to poo-poo. They want to make sure that nothing happens with the baby. Some people want to keep it private.

But if everybody stops and thinks, wait, one second. What works for me, it would’ve been a lot easier for me to have told a few select people, hey, I’m expecting a pregnancy, and just letting you know very early on, and this way, I would’ve gone…stepped aside from the whole problem of, by the way, I had a miscarriage and hearing, oh, I didn’t know you were pregnant. Oh, I didn’t know about this. It just, the whole stigma of not sharing really, really put a dent, and it’s important for us to try to remove that aspect, because it’s something we can control. There’s a lot of stuff in life we can’t control, but this is something we can do to figure out what’s best for me in my situation.

00:13:27 Michele Goodwin:

So, in part, what you’re also sharing is that you were alone, both in terms of real physically, your husband was away on a trip, and so, you were alone in that sense, but you’re also mentioning that there is a cultural barrier, too, that people don’t, necessarily, talk about their pregnancies when it’s not clearly visible that they might be pregnant, and who knows the reasons for that. I imagine that, Jessica, in your work, that you could probably give us some insights about why it is that people choose not to share when they become pregnant, and maybe that is because that they are also concerned about, well, will this be a pregnancy that makes it to term?

00:14:13 Dr. Jessica Zucker:

That’s right. You know, the 12-week rule I think needs to be gotten rid of once and for all. I think it actually kind of cultivates this sense of silence and stigma and the resulting shame, as well. I understand, from a medical perspective, why doctors, midwives, you know, might be suggesting to people to wait to share their news. Why is that? Because a majority of miscarriages do take place within the first trimester. Those of us, though, who have had second trimester losses, and then some, you know, understand that this doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. So, essentially, it’s a setup for women to feel alone. Don’t share your good news, because in case it becomes bad news, then you’ll have to share the bad news. So, basically, if you don’t share at all, that means you don’t then have to share about the negative outcome or the unwanted outcome, and again, we’re back to this kind of, you know, point of culture not being able to really sink their teeth into grief or various feelings. Like you said, maybe anger, maybe relief.

00:15:41 Michele Goodwin:

Well, and picking up on that, Chari, I see that you wanted to add to that. Then I have a question for you, as you talk about second trimester loss, and amongst our listeners there, there are those who have shared that experience, and so, I want…and then others who’ve not, those who probably, you know, never have been pregnant at all, and if you might be willing to just give us some sense of what that personal journey was like for you when you experienced that? And I’ll turn to that right after Chari. So, Chari, you were about to say?

00:16:18 Chari Pere:

Yeah. So, what people don’t realize, also, that I realized, was I carried the burden of my miscarriage silently inside of me until I started opening up, and there’s just a freedom to opening up as early as you can, a weight that gets lifted off of you. So, I felt fully healed when I created my comic, because it really gave my story out and did good to others. So, I love how eloquently you put it, Jessica. How, you know, you don’t want to share the good news because it might lead to the bad news, but the bad news can also lead to good. It can help someone else in your situation. So, I felt that was a very important lesson for me that I just keep trying to pass on, that just because society has deemed this one way doesn’t make it still relevant, and also, it might help…the opposite might be true for you, in that case.

00:17:17 Michele Goodwin:

And I just want to remind our listeners that I’m joined by the dynamic and talented Chari Pere, whose award-winning cartoon, the Unspoken…a cartoonist. There’s a whole website which you can go to to see her Cartoonmentary series that addresses many of the issues that we’re speaking to right now. As I look at the website, you have a short. You have the comics, and it all centers within this space that’s incredibly unique, because it unpacks areas that people don’t talk about and looks that are not supposed to…that we’re not supposed to see on people who are pregnant or who were pregnant.

I’m looking at the image right now of a woman who looks very afraid, and she looks scared, and underneath, is Miscarried, an animated short, and then, right underneath that, Michael’s Miscarriage animated short, which also looks complicated and complex, and what I see by looking at your website, which has been featured on CNN, Newsweek, the Daily Blast Live, and the Jewish Journal, and so many more, is this  complication of emotions, which is well beyond just happiness, right? So, I think that so much of what is associated with pregnancy and now deeply commercialized, right, are, you know, what’s the cake, the cupcakes, and inside, what’s the ultrasound images, the big parties.

I mean, these reveal parties, people are spending the kind of money on reveal parties of what they would’ve spent before on weddings. So, there is all of that, that people are seeing in social media…is contained with all of this, and then, by contrast, we have your website and the artwork that you’ve been doing and the narrative where you say, and in 2014, that you suffered a traumatic miscarriage, and you said your husband was out of town, which you mentioned, and that you were all alone, and nothing that you found online was comforting or helpful, and so, you decided to use your cartooning skills and create the emotional resource that you wish that you had, and it’s really…it’s so incredibly powerful.

And I’m also joined by Dr. Jessica Zucker, who’s an LA-based psychologist, specializing in reproductive health and the author of award-winning books. I mentioned Normalize It: Upending the Silence, Stigma, and Shame That Shape Women’s Lives, but also, there’s the book I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement, and so, Jessica, you also speak about your miscarriage, and you note that it didn’t fit the typical paradigm of the first trimester. Instead, it was in the second trimester, and could you share a bit about that, that you unpack in your memoir?

00:20:24 Dr. Jessica Zucker:

Of course. Yeah, so, going back a little bit, I am a psychologist, as you mention, and I specialize in this very thing. So, I had been sitting across from women and families for years, hearing about the pain and the anguish in infant loss and life after, and I understood it theoretically as much as I could. I had gone to all the conferences. I had read all the books. You know, I pursued my PhD and knew that I wanted to marry my background in public health with my clinical work and wanted to focus on all things women, and then, 16 weeks into my second pregnancy, I had a miscarriage while I was home by myself.

Sort of like you, Chari, I was alone. My husband was at work. He wasn’t out of town, but he had dropped our son at preschool, and I had started spotting the day before. I went to see my doctor. Everything looked okay, but I was up all night reeling in pain, and I just knew there was no coming back from this, even though my doctor thought, you know, everything could end up okay, and I started to sort of ready myself to head out to get a second opinion, even though it was probably futile, but I just, I wanted information. I wanted answers, if I could have them, and I suddenly felt like I was spinning. Like, I felt almost like I was in the midst of a panic attack, which I now understood…you know, not understand that I was actually in labor.

And so, I went to the bathroom to just kind of sit down and put a cold compress on my forehead, and the fetus came out, and so, I reached out to my OB/GYN, and she walked me through what to do. I had to cut the umbilical cord myself, and then I promptly began to hemorrhage. So, I put the fetus next to me on the bathtub, and my husband was darting through LA traffic to get home to me, and she recommended that I bring the fetus in for testing, and I went directly to her office, and then, to make matters all the more traumatic and dramatic, I was then faced with the choice of undergoing an unmedicated D&C or waiting for anesthesiology and having a blood transfusion.

And so, after asking, you know, as quickly as possible, all the questions that I could about sort of pain level and intensity or what I would be experiencing during the unmedicated D&C, I did land on that option. I figured, how could there be worse psychological pain and more intense physical pain than what I had already experienced? And so, I lay there, as I felt the tugging out of the remainder of the pregnancy, and forever seared in my cells and in my psyche are the sounds of that machine and the feeling of letting go of the placenta.

00:23:44 Michele Goodwin:

And what you both have shared is that there is very little, save for the work that you’ve been doing and some others, that really has spoken to these moments, the trauma of these moments, the fear of these moments, the uncertainty, and now, added to that, you all have told the story of hard compassion in your lives and what it means to be engaged in the lives of others of just simply opening the space for discourse and for understanding and for caring, for love, and it really concerns so many of us, concerns me, that now we’re in a space that, based on what it is that you experience, could be criminal investigation now. You experienced, both of you, that which is normal. It happens. It’s tragic and is painful, physically and otherwise, mentally, when it happens, but that now, because of all this void, that now, exactly what happened to you, that if you had been in the wrong state, Jessica, it could very well have meant questions about had you done something criminally wrong, rather than just what happens in the body?

00:24:59 Dr. Jessica Zucker:

It’s truly unfathomable to me, and I’ve worked with patients, heard many stories of women traveling out of state to be able to undergo termination for medical reasons, for example, but yeah, I mean, if I was not able to get the help I needed in that moment, I definitely could have died that day. I mean, it was very clear. The amount of blood loss was significant and noteworthy and emergent.

00:25:31 Michele Goodwin:

You both have turned what has been that pain into something that is moving, that is engaging, that is loving for communities, and part of that has been narrative. It’s been storytelling, and so, whether through cartoon or through memoir, you’ve done that. If we could then just turn to the importance of being able to narrate in the ways that you have, to be able to story-tell, what have you seen as the benefit to that? And I’ll turn to you, Chari, for that, to start.

00:26:07 Chari Pere:

It’s been so rewarding to do what we’ve done. I just want to, first of all, say that Jessica’s book should be completely mandatory reading for every adult. If that had been out when I had my miscarriage, it would have saved me so much, and I think that our projects launched around the same…we had the miscarriage around the same time. They launched around the same time. The way she normalizes and writes these conversations for us to understand and to digest is so important, and so, I always try to be accessible with my work in a way that can reach others.

I try to make my art style something that’s universally pleasing. I try to be too artistic for art’s sake. Really, everything is trying to help make everybody feel like they’re in my position, and whether or not they’ve had a miscarriage, to at least relate to the people who’ve gone through the miscarriage or have a Down syndrome diagnosis or consider what their husband is going through in a miscarriage, and it’s been so important to see the impact. I have friends, years later, saying thank you for creating what you did, because I didn’t have my miscarriage then, but I had it now, and I knew exactly where to go.

And I think the story that really made the most impact for me was I released my comic, and Mayim Bialik, the actress, shared it, and it went viral, and I was reached out to, to come speak at a conference in England, and I was giving my workshop. A woman came in and came straight to me. She said, I’ve been waiting to speak to you, because you should know I had my miscarriage the week that your comic came out, and I’d seen it right afterwards, and it helped me so much. I have people writing to me that they’ve never shared about this. They had a miscarriage 30 years ago, and they didn’t have an outlet, and it’s back to what we were saying before about how, if you keep it inside, it lives and grows inside of you.

When you get it out, whether you’re talking to someone or using it in your art or using it in your writing or just being a therapist or a doctor and helping patients, it kind of puts back the broken pieces that were then taken from you that you don’t even realize are broken. You think you’re going to be strong and tough and put on a front and go on. You don’t even know how it impacts you, and then, when it’s out, you feel better, and so, we’re trying to do what we can to make everybody better in a world that doesn’t make sense all the time anymore, and do what we can to really make a difference, even if it’s just in one person’s existence.

00:28:29 Michele Goodwin:

Well, I’m looking at this article, The Intersection of Art and Mental Health, as we begin to close, how creativity influences therapy, and it seems to me that both of you at these intersections, working together, you nail it right here. Why creativity matters, both in therapy, and then what that means in the journeys that you both have had. So, we always ask this question on our podcast before we close, and I could spend so much time with you. It seems that it’s just gone by way too quickly, and it has, but I want to ask you both about silver linings. What, out of this work that you’ve been doing, this work both in engaging with patients and helping patients through their journeys and then also the storytelling of your own memoir, Jessica, and Chari, through your memoir, which is the cartoons that you do and those series, what’s the silver lining of this work? And to answer that, I’m going to first start with you, Dr. Jessica Zucker.

00:29:44 Dr. Jessica Zucker:

You know, it’s interesting. I have, I guess, trouble, is the right word, with the phrase silver linings. You know, I think that we don’t necessarily have to find “good out of bad,” because it’s too binary, and it’s kind of a setup, you know, for us to rush somewhere else that we aren’t currently. Now, that’s not to say that I don’t think these things can coexist. Grief and pleasure can coexist. Grief and gratitude can coexist, right? But when we feel forced by those around us, by society, to find a silver lining, to find something positive out of this darkness, I don’t know, it kind of maybe disrupts the importance of navigating the trajectory that hard things allow us to kind of dip into, even though we’d rather not be there.

00:30:54 Michele Goodwin:

No, I appreciate that very much. Thank you so much. Chari, what’s your response to that?

00:31:03 Chari Pere:

I think it’s so important to have that perspective and insight, too. I 100% agree about that importance, and I want to call back to what I was saying before. That everybody handles things differently. So, I’m someone who needs a silver lining, because I need that hope to cling onto, which is why, you know, when we talked about me feeling alone, I was by myself online, 2 or 3 in the morning, unable to sleep, in excruciating pain, dying to find one person sharing their story about what they had gone through, and I couldn’t find any.

But now, thanks to Jessica and thanks to so many organizations that are out there and artists sharing, there are so many more resources than there had been, and while there’s a long way to go medically and in support of, you know, society as a whole to have empathy and understanding, there’s more than there was, and there’s a long way to go, but someone who’s going through the same experience that we had gone through today have places that you can point to, and remembering the feeling of how alone and how harsh I was on myself, as someone who’s a recovering perfectionist and not understanding why I had one perfect pregnancy, why isn’t the second one going well? What did I do? Did I eat the wrong food? Did I eat too much junk food this time?

I was so healthy the first time. You know, all these things. Did I not exercise enough? You know, all these things that you’re going through there, when you hear other people share, you see the similarities. You see the strength, and you can pull from that for yourself, and that is my silver lining, but I acknowledge that I’m not the same as someone else, and everybody needs to have their space to mourn. I think that’s what we can work on, just figuring out…just making it normal for whatever that means to you.

00:32:55 Michele Goodwin:

I want to thank you both for joining us for our On the Issues podcast at Ms. Magazine, and thank you so very much for your very important work in this space of pregnancy loss and what it means to wake up the next day and to move on forward with one’s life. Thank you so much.

00:33:20 Dr. Jessica Zucker:

Thank you so much for having us.

00:33:20 Chari Pere:

Thank you. Thank you so much.

00:33:24 Michele Goodwin:

This has been your host Michele Goodwin, reporting, rebelling, and telling it just like it is. On the Issues with Michele Goodwin and Fifteen Minutes of Feminism, our Ms. Magazine and Ms. Studios joint productions, I’m Michele Goodwin and the executive producer of Ms. Studios. Our producers for this episode are Roxy Szal, Oliver Haug, Allison Whelan, and our Ms. Studios intern Emerson Panigrahi. The creative vision behind our work includes art and design by Brandi Phipps, editing by Natalie Holland and Emerson Panigrahi, and music by Chris J. Lee.