Robison: ‘I couldn’t take time off after baby loss’
FORMER health secretary Shona Robison has told of her despair after she suffered a miscarriage in her constituency office but did not feel she could take time off.
Miss Robison, Nationalist MSP for Dundee City East, became pregnant for the second time aged 40, months after the party won a historic election victory in 2007.
She had been promoted to Alex Salmond’s first cabinet team as minister for public health, while then-husband Stewart Hosie, MP for Dundee East, spent most of the week in Westminster.
The couple had a four-year-old daughter, Morag, who was desperate for a little sister, so Miss Robison was delighted when she became pregnant and, after three months of secrecy, began to share the news. They began looking for a new house
– but tragedy struck just before Miss Robison’s 41st birthday, when she bent down and felt pain followed by bleeding.
A scan at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee revealed there was no longer a heartbeat, but the miscarriage happened while she was at work.
Miss Robison told the Sunday Post: ‘Despite the timing, I was really pleased to be pregnant.
‘Although things were really busy, I was just delighted that things seemed to have happened pretty quickly and all seemed well.’
But she described the experience of being at hospital as ‘a bit of a blur’. She said: ‘I think it was afterwards I got more upset because at the hospital you are trying to take in the news you are no longer pregnant.
‘Emotionally, your hormones are still all over the place thinking you are pregnant while your body is telling you something else.
‘I was in the constituency office working when it happened and it was a shock how much blood and pain there was.
‘I had just got this really huge job as minister for public health and was thinking about how we’d manage everything with a house move and a new baby.
‘And, I guess, as a woman in politics and thinking back to attitudes 13 years ago, there was also a bit of me that couldn’t give myself time to deal with something like a miscarriage. I just thought I needed to get on with it, I remember thinking I couldn’t take time off.’
Miss Robison added: ‘I wasn’t ill as such, but I was in pain and bleeding. I had a great relationship with my new private secretary who I told what had happened and, in the end, I had to take a couple of days off.
‘He was very sympathetic and made sure meetings were cancelled and I remember Nicola Sturgeon being very supportive.
‘But it’s that whole spinning plates thing, and feeling as a woman this was just something you should put up with.’ Miss Robison said that despite spending four years as health secretary, she still had not processed the loss. She added: ‘Actually, one of the hardest things was telling people I was no longer pregnant.’
One of her staffers, Nadia El-Nakla, wife of Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf, shared her experiences of multiple miscarriages, prompting Miss Robison to speak out. The women are launching a campaign this week, Changing Miscarriage Care, to call for best practice in care and treatment to be adopted across NHS Scotland and to raise awareness.
‘There was no longer a heartbeat’