Breaking the code of secrecy

Mark Zuckerberg is right to challenge the taboos surrounding pregnancy.

MOST people don’t discuss miscarriages because you worry your problems will distance you or reflect upon you – as if you’re defective or did something to cause this,” wrote Mark Zuckerberg, announcing his wife’s pregnancy, after three miscarriages. In the open letter, he continued: “In today’s open and connected world, discussing these issues doesn’t distance us; it brings us together. It creates understanding and tolerance, and it gives us hope.”

It is not strange at all that the inventor of Facebook would think social media had a new answer to a problem as old as humankind. What would be strange is if he were right: what if that’s true? What if this taboo were to be overturned by the Internet? What would the implications of that be, for all other taboos, for all other hopes?

The shame of miscarriage is an enraging thing, kept alive by everyone who goes anywhere near a pregnancy, whether it ends happily or not. We have this convention of not announcing a pregnancy until the high- risk first three months have passed; the only reason for it is to maintain a cult of silence around the possibility of miscarriage. But what we’re protecting is not the couple who suffers the miscarriage, but the world around them, which under cover of respecting private grief clings on to an infantile squeamishness around the particulars of reproduction.

Miscarriage culture is, from a feminist perspective, an amplification of the shame involved in being female in the first place. Like motherhood, it’s the territory on which you discover that the one thing more deficient and embarrassing than holding the female apparatus is to hold it wrongly. Naturally, though, a culture in which the loss of a pregnancy is unmentionable affects women and men, and heaps loneliness indiscriminately across the genders, so it is only a feminist issue in so far as it’s a human one.

What I found frustrating – hated in myself, actually – was that, even thinking all this, I found it impossible not to collude with the silence when I was pregnant. I understood the taboo and whence it stemmed; I rejected the terms of it, and rejected outright, knowing what I knew about myself, the idea that I’d want it shrouded in secrecy if I did have a miscarriage.

The modern narrative around pregnancy and childbirth makes it more difficult to be open

And yet I found it impossible to break that three- month omerta, for reasons both rational and irrational. On the rational side, you don’t know until it happens how open you’ll want to be; to allow for the possibility that you might not want anyone to know is the safer wager, even if it feeds into a culture of isolation. On the irrational side, you don’t use your own body to make a statement about gender politics ( even though, as second- wave and even first- wave feminists taught us, that’s exactly what you use); it’s tempting fate. Fate might not sign up to feminist principles; fate might read the Telegraph.

I would point – where Zuckerberg looks at modernity and sees openness and connectedness – to a modern narrative around pregnancy and childbirth that makes it more difficult to be open. A narrative that makes connectedness superficial and manicured.

There has, over the past decade, been a vast inflation of the way risks to pregnancies are presented. No trace of peril is considered too slight or random to be endlessly evaluated by the responsible would- be mother. The territory of “irresponsible mother” has spread from “pregnant woman who smokes” to “pregnant woman who drinks, eats tuna, fails to keep abreast of the latest guidelines on bagged salad or allows herself to become too stressed”.

It is extremely hard, in this pitiless environment, for anything to go wrong just because it went wrong. In the rush to build this new truth, in which there’s no tragedy without a culprit, and the donkey work of grief is to find out who that culprit was and blame them, an older, schmaltzier story has been buried. Obviously, the natural response – the one that needs no drumming up and pours out unbidden when a stranger has a miscarriage, or a baby, or a miscarriage then a baby, or a baby then a miscarriage – is empathy, bottomless kindness.

And here, perhaps, is where Zuckerberg’s hope – that we could create understanding and tolerance if we’d only discuss things – is warranted. Because while there is nothing in the DNA of social media that quashes spite or says people have to tell one another the truth on it, there is something about the response, when people do tell the truth about themselves, that insists upon fellowship as more than a feeling, as a force. – Guardian News and Service