Miscarriages colour art of mom-to-be
MILFORD, Mass. Artist Ashley MacLure’s world is filled with fairies, young girls riding giant moths — and anguished, bleeding women.
A grimacing young woman rendered in black and white is curled in a fetal position, splashes of crimson staining her bottom. Here she is again, leaning against a bloodied wall, her abdomen nothing but a large oval hole. There’s a self-portrait in charcoal pencil — a close-up of a face pinched by sorrow.
In her artist’s mind, this is what miscarriage looks like. And while MacLure’s story seems destined for a happy ending — she and her husband are expecting their first child this summer — the high school visual arts teacher hopes her provocative works will help take away the enduring stigma of pregnancy loss.
“It’s my way of shouting into the void,” she says.
As many as one in four pregnancies ends prematurely in miscarriage, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine says. With miscarriage so commonplace, women increasingly are pressing for society to stop treating it as taboo.
Among them is figure skater Nancy Kerrigan, who revealed last year during an episode of “Dancing with the Stars” that she had six miscarriages during an eight-year span. Now a mother of three, she told ABC’s “Good Morning America” the losses were rough on her marriage.
#IHadAMiscarriage
“We don’t talk about it as fluidly as we should,” says Dr. Jessica Zucker, a Los Angeles psychologist and mother of two who lost a baby and launched a social media campaign — #IHadAMiscarriage — to get people talking openly.
“The unfortunate consequences are that a majority of women are reporting shame, self-blame and guilt,” she says. “Loss is devastating, but the women who live these losses are strong. What they have to share is deeply important.”
MacLure, 30, who’s had two miscarriages, says other women’s stories can make her feel like an impostor. But her grief and pain — both physical and psychological — are no less real.
That’s captured in her art, which is honest and edgy — some might say brutally so.