October is Pregnancy & Infant Loss Awareness Month, and I invite you to enter into this conversation with me. I’ve shared some helpful resources for pregnancy center clients or churches ministering to those facing loss. Please be advised that this story contains elements of loss and medical trauma that could be difficult for those who have experienced their own losses to read.
The miracle of witnessing a new life through ultrasound images was what originally drew me into pregnancy center ministry. When I stumbled into a job at a center a year out of college, it was chaperoning ultrasounds that tugged on my heart. The privilege of witnessing a young mom – whether she was initially excited about the prospect of being pregnant or not – recognizing the undeniable truth of life growing inside her with a sweet little heartbeat on the ultrasound screen… every time, it was nothing short of miraculous.
So you can imagine my horror when it was finally my turn in that ultrasound room, and despite years of knowing what I was looking for, that sweet little heartbeat… wasn’t there.
I am 1 in 4 – the proportion of women who have had a miscarriage. I am also 1 in 100 – the number of women who have had recurrent miscarriages. I have two angel babies – one who we lost at 7 weeks, never getting the chance to see that heartbeat on the ultrasound screen. Our second we lost just six months later at 11 weeks – I will always treasure how we did get to see our sweet baby’s heartbeat twice, I just wish we had the gift of seeing it stick around for longer. I could tell you so much more about the rollercoaster of emotions from our journey through grief in the last year, but that’s a story for another time. Today, I want to candidly and gently take the time to suggest a few principles to keep in mind as you wrestle with the challenge of how to meet with and serve those in your community who face their own grief journeys – through your local pregnancy center or your church.
What Loss Means for Your Clients
Imagine the wave of feelings that result when pregnancy center clients face loss. In many cases, they may be wrestling with guilt or shame if their initial feelings about their pregnancy were complicated at best. Any way you slice it, loss is loss. And loss takes many different forms – early miscarriage, stillbirth, chemical pregnancy, ectopic pregnancy, and more. It can be hard to find ways to cope, and every person’s experience with grief is unique.
In the same way pregnancy centers must be prepared to meet with clients in varying circumstances amid their pregnancy decision, I encourage you to be similarly open to compassionately meeting your clients or church members facing loss wherever they are in their journey. Some may be reaching out for any shred of support they can get, desperate for connection in the isolation of their grief. Others may be closed off, not wanting to let any of the emotions in for fear it will crush them.
I encourage you to have grace and be patient, asking questions about how your friend or client may feel best supported in their season. Ask the same sort of empathetic questions you would ask a client struggling with their pregnancy decision – do you have anyone in your life who you could call on to help support you in this journey? Do you have a faith community that can come alongside you? What about this season is most scary or daunting to you? We have resources on [X, Y, Z], would any of those be helpful to you? Or simply… how are you really doing? (With full intention to sit with them, cry with them, and provide space for whatever comes after.)
In many cases, a pregnancy center might not be the best equipped to meet the needs of someone wrestling with loss on a long-term basis. The church should be the best equipped for these care and discipleship needs! But truthfully, the church was the hardest place for me to be after our losses. When I was trying to make sense of the death of my babies, singing worship songs about God’s faithfulness didn’t come easily. Let alone the fact that I was surrounded by babies most frequently in church services, forced to attempt to hold it together while I just cried and wished my own baby was there in my arms.
I’d encourage you to think creatively about how to bring the pregnancy center together with local church partners to provide opportunities for more specialized care to those facing loss in your community. If there’s a counseling or grief support ministry, perhaps that’s the perfect referral or connection point for a local church member who can walk alongside a loss mom or dad for the long haul.
So apart from simply empathetically asking questions and checking in, how do you meet those facing pregnancy and infant loss in their grief? I have a few ideas of where you can start, pulled from my own experience, that I hope can be helpful.
A Few Ideas on How to Meet Your Clients in Grief
1. Language matters. Ensure your Pro Abundant Life beliefs are truly reflected in the way you respond to loss. You’re not trying to make the person (or yourself) feel better – there’s truly nothing you can say to ease that grief. But you can empathetically meet them in it as Jesus did, and use language that honors the unique value of the life that was lost.
In light of this, be mindful of the words you use, and think through the true message it conveys to your clients. Step 1: throw out any statement that uses the phrase “at least”. “At least it was early.” “At least you know you can get pregnant.” I even had a medical professional tell me, “You’re young; it’ll happen for you.” In each of these statements, I’m sure the intention is to reassure the person in their grief or encourage them to think about a “silver lining” – but in actuality, all it tells the person hearing it is that you’re more interested in diminishing the value of the life they lost, dismissing their grief, and telling them to move on.
Consider alternative language that affirms the value of the life that was lost, validates their feelings of grief, and allows room for vulnerability in that. I once told a friend the best response to grief was just, “This really sucks.” Just the simple acknowledgment of how awful death and loss are, the affirmation that I’m not crazy, that I don’t have to act like everything’s fine… permits true vulnerability and care. Try out, “How can I honor your baby with you?” “Have you found any particular rhythms meaningful in this season as you grieve?” or “How is your heart today?” If you want further ideas on what to say (and what not to say), Miscarried Hope by Rachel Lohman, which I link below, has an appendix of helpful phrases in the back that I’d recommend anyone seeking to better support those facing loss to read.
One thing to note if fear of saying the wrong thing seems overwhelming – saying the wrong thing is always, always better than saying nothing. A simple “I’m so sorry you’re facing this loss; how can I be praying for you?” goes a long way to someone who feels like their grief is unseen by everyone around them. Empathy does not require you to fully understand what a person facing loss has gone through – it just asks that you see their need and respond with kindness and grace.
2. Sit with them in their grief – for the long haul. Don’t expect those who have faced loss to be “over it” immediately. Unfortunately, we have a tendency in our culture to give folks about a week to cry, tell them we’re sorry for their loss, bring them a casserole, and our duty is fulfilled.
This may sound crass (and dismissive of meal trains at every church ever, which frankly does very much help!), but truly, the times when I needed support the most came in the weeks and months following my losses… when my body had healed, but my heart was way, way behind. In many cases the person best equipped to provide this long-term support might be outside of the pregnancy center; it might be best to partner with your local church communities in this effort.
3. Seek ways to provide practical support and resources. No one prepares you for the medical follow-up required for miscarriage. Pregnancy centers can partner with their medical director or other local OB/GYNs who can provide practical referrals for medical care. Consider connecting your loss mamas and dads with online support groups, licensed clinical counselors, or others who can provide specialized care. I’ve listed a few of my recommended resources on this below but encourage you to think outside of the box, particularly when it comes to how you can provide practical follow-up care.
4. Continue to point your loss mamas and loss dads to the only true place where renewed hope can be found – in Jesus. But be patient when conflicting emotions make that difficult. Discipleship is hard but so important when you’re trying to make sense of a broken world that includes the loss of children. I had to go back to the basics of my faith in my grief journey, and I still wrestle with this. Returning to the simple Gospel is the best place to find renewed hope – that God didn’t intend for us to live in a world where babies die, but in our broken world where sin entered in and allowed for grief and loss, He still loved us so fiercely that He was willing to lose his own Son to a horrible death and separation so that we might experience eternal life with Him without grief and pain. You simply cannot make sense of a world where babies die if we divert our focus from this eternal hope.
5. Everyone’s grief journey looks different. Hold space for each person’s unique needs – not everyone copes in the same way. Some loss mamas and dads will name their angel babies – I’ve chosen to honor my angel babies in different ways, through the tattoo on my forearm of a bouquet of birth flowers, and through the necklace a dear friend bought me with each baby’s birth flower on a charm (which I wear alongside the necklace my husband got me of our wedding date… meaning I have reminders of my whole family close to my heart at all times.) At any rate, simply asking the person you’re walking with through grief how they best cope, or what is most meaningful to them in their healing journey, can go a long way.
Some Resource Ideas for Your Consideration
I’m encouraged to see more and more exhibitors at Care Net’s Annual Conference and ministry leaders stepping into the space of serving those who have experienced pregnancy and infant loss. It’s the worst club to be a part of, and I know many step into ministry after their own grief was unmet or unseen, so the next woman facing the same grief could have better. For that, I say thank you. No one can fully prepare you for the experience of pregnancy loss, but I felt marginally more equipped to cope because I knew where to go, in large part because of several of these partners, as well as friends who walked this road before me. The more we share our stories, the less isolating the grief feels, and the next friend who faces this loss will know who to turn to.
If you already have a partner who you work with to provide care to those in your community facing their own loss, or if you have an in-house ministry, please reach out and let me know if you have anything to add to this list! As always, please consider this list of resources as suggestions (not necessarily wholehearted endorsements for any miscarriage or infant loss outreach), and please do your own research and consideration as to what might best fit your ministry’s model or your loss mom/dad’s unique pain points.
Classes and Support Groups
- Foreknown Ministries – these lovely ladies exhibited at our Conference and they offer courses for women and men facing loss, as well as text support, online support groups and coaching, and resource guides.
- Juniper Glory – Aubrie, a fellow Care Net affiliate leader, graciously told her story last October for Pregnancy & Infant Loss Awareness Month. Her own journey through loss led her to create her own curriculum, built out of her ministry to other loss parents through their pregnancy center in Ohio. You can learn more about this curriculum and how to train your team to walk through it alongside your clients here.
- The Miscarriage Doula – this organization is not faith-based, but they offer robust and extremely helpful resources online for loss moms. I myself participated in a 6-week online Recurrent Loss Support Group, and this could be a great referral for your clients who aren’t quite in the space for a faith-based resource.
Studies and Books:
- Held – a devotional for loss mamas
- Ours – a devotional for loss dads
- Loved Baby – a devotional for loss moms from another exhibitor from Care Net Conference, Sarah Philpott
- Miscarried Hope by Rachel Lohman – a memoir and truly helpful resource on reclaiming hope in Christ following pregnancy & infant loss
- A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis – for my husband, this was the most helpful and comforting book he read following our first loss, and I quickly joined him. It’s a lot to chew on (like all C.S. Lewis books), but truly humbling and comforting to know C.S. Lewis had rage-filled grief at times and struggled to make sense of everything when he lost his wife too.
Other Resources:
- Hope Again Collective – founded by Rachel Lohman, the author of Miscarried Hope linked above, these beautiful jewelry pieces are named after women who have walked through loss and serve as great gifts for loss moms, and a portion of the proceeds go back to benefit miscarriage support.
- Wave of Light – every year on October 15th, loss moms and dads around the world will light candles in windows to honor and remember their babies lost to miscarriage, stillbirth, or infant loss. I encourage you to research Wave of Light events in your areaa, or consider holding your own for your clients.
- My favorite Instagram accounts to follow for miscarriage & infant loss awareness:
- @wishiwasntinthisclub
- @themiscarriagedoula
- @miscarriagehopedesk
- @the_worstgirlgang_ever
- @courageouslyexpecting (for pregnancy after loss)
- Social Media Graphics – if you’re looking for an easy way to share with your community that they’re not alone in grief this month and beyond, we’ve created some free customizable social media graphic templates for Pregnancy & Infant Loss Awareness month on Canva that you can access here.
I’ll be the first to admit that I am still very much in the middle of my own healing journey. Day by day, I ask God to help me reclaim hope that was lost in the midst of grief. It’s taken a lot of tiny steps toward that end – and there are still days I’m incapacitated by grief, missing my babies and wishing they were here. And though I’ve often questioned if God is really beside me through all of this, little by little He’s changing my heart to remind me that more than anyone, He knows what the loss of a child feels like. And He was willing to go through it for me.
Psalm 27 has always been a favorite of mine – it was read at my wedding and the themes of continually choosing to trust in the Lord’s goodness have come up time and time again in my life. If you’ve faced your own grief and loss, are walking alongside someone who has, or just need a reminder, may this bless you today:
I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord. -Psalm 27:14