If a pregnancy doesn’t go as planned the toll can be both traumatic and isolating—but sympathy, hope, and modern medicine can create positive outcomes
From the time that a woman decides to try to conceive a baby to the moment that baby is placed in her arms, pregnancy is portrayed in society as being one of the most joyful, exciting, and glorious times of her life. But what if it’s not?
Putting aside the fact that not all pregnancies are considered, planned, or even wanted, there three stark realities that are not often discussed: 1) Some women who desperately want to conceive a child aren’t able to; 2) Some women who become pregnant spend weeks and months in misery or fear; and 3) Some women don’t have a happy ending to their pregnancy.
“Fertility issues are becoming more of an open conversation, but there is such a stigma around miscarriages and other fertility problems that people keep most of it a secret,” says Annapolis resident Lauren Heier, who has struggled with infertility and miscarriages through much of her adult life. In doing so, the emotional turmoil surrounding fertility, pregnancy, and babies can take a significant toll on a person’s mental health.
Although the idea of complications in conceiving, carrying a pregnancy, or delivering a baby is scary, an open discussion about fertility and childbirth challenges isn’t meant to frighten would-be or soon-to-be parents. After all, most pregnancies progress without incident, with just eight percent involving complications that could, if left untreated, harm the mother or baby, says Johns Hopkins Medicine. However, women (and, in many cases, men) who experience the heartbreak of infertility, the physical pain of pregnancy-related medical conditions, or a gut-wrenching loss should know that they’re not alone and it’s not their fault. Here, three local women share their stories.
The Heartbreak of Infertility
Heier experienced her first miscarriage in 2008 at age 24 when she was seven weeks pregnant. “They called it a spontaneous miscarriage,” she recalls, naming the term for loss of a pregnancy before the 20th week. It’s much more common than many realize—early loss occurs in 10 percent of all pregnancies, according to the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG). However, the true number of miscarriages may be much higher, as they can happen so early that a woman may not even know that she’s pregnant.
In so many cases, there’s nothing a woman can do to cause or prevent a miscarriage. Around half occur simply because of fetal chromosomal abnormalities, which is a genetic condition that happens by chance, though it is more common in older women. A woman’s age is significant when it comes to fertility and pregnancy complications, says Mary Johnson, MD, the director of Anne Arundel Medical Group’s Center for Maternal and Fetal Medicine. “[The risks] increase every year; it’s not something that magically gets terrible at age 35,” she says, though she is quick to note that some women up into their 50s can safely carry a pregnancy to term.
Age wasn’t a factor for Heier, who since 2008 has had a total of 13 miscarriages. After marrying her husband, John, in 2011, she sought medical help and eventually ended up as a patient at a local fertility center. While Heier had proof that she could get pregnant without assistance, it was clear that it wasn’t something that happened easily. Strangely, though, all her tests came back normal, as did her husband’s. She didn’t have answers for her fertility problems—yet.
There are treatments for infertility, which is clinically defined as the inability to get pregnant after one year or longer of unprotected intercourse (or six months for women over age 35) and affects approximately 12 percent of women in the United States. Heier started with a common medication, clomiphene citrate, or Clomid, that’s used to stimulate egg production. When that didn’t work, they moved on to intrauterine insemination (IUI), a procedure in which sperm are inserted into the woman’s uterus. Again, no baby.
The next step would be some form of assisted reproductive technology (ART), the most common of which is in vitro fertilization (IVF). It’s an expensive process; nationally, the average cost of one IVF cycle falls between $10,000 and $15,000, according to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART). “We would have had to take out a loan,” Heier says. In Maryland, an insurance mandate requires policies to cover IVF costs to some extent, but there are criteria that the patient must meet.
Then, the unexpected occurred. In 2014, the Heiers won a raffle for a $10,000 grant for infertility treatment through 501(c)3 nonprofit Tinina Q. Cade Foundation after they registered—and encouraged their friends to register—for the organization’s annual Race for the Family 5K, with each registration coming with one raffle entry. Despite their incredible luck in winning, Heier wasn’t optimistic. “I didn’t think it was going to work,” she recalls. Because they had the money available, they decided to try IVF once. If it didn’t work, they probably wouldn’t try again.
In March 2015, the Heiers conceived. Against all odds, she stayed pregnant. “By 12 weeks, I was excited. At 24 weeks, I was like, this is happening,” she says. In November 2015, their daughter, Chelsea, was born.
Ironically, it was only after Chelsea’s birth that Heier finally discovered what was causing her struggle to conceive and stay pregnant. She had a unicornuate uterus, a genetic condition that causes only half of the uterus to form and only one fallopian tube to develop. Somehow, the doctors had missed it previously. Additionally, “come to find out, I don’t have the highest-quality of eggs, either, which really doesn’t help,” Heier notes.
Although the Heiers were thrilled with finally having a child, they didn’t feel like their family was complete. They moved forward in the attempt to have another baby but consistently had their hearts broken. They did a second round of IVF that didn’t result in pregnancy. An embryo adoption, in which a donated embryo from another couple’s IVF procedures was inserted into Heier, didn’t succeed either. They turned to adoption and, in 2018, were matched with a birth mother in Florida. However, after the baby was born and the Heiers had traveled south to meet their potential daughter, the birth mother chose not to sign the adoption papers. “In a sense, it was worse than a miscarriage—we saw her, we touched her, we talked to her,” Heier remembers. “It was a lot of heavy emotions—not that a miscarriage isn’t, but this was more taxing.”
Throughout all of this, Heier continued to experience miscarriages, one of which didn’t occur until the 11th week of pregnancy. “It’s heartbreaking,” she says. “You think you’re having a kid. You’re like what’s wrong with me? Why does this keep happening?”
In February 2019, the Heiers got another call from the adoption agency. They had been matched with a birth mother, this time in Louisiana. The paperwork went through, and the couple brought home a little girl, Kyleigh. When she was three months old, Heier’s husband had a vasectomy—a difficult but necessary choice for Heier’s health. Their family was complete.
The Pain of Pregnancy and Childbirth
Even if conceiving isn’t difficult, sometimes actually being pregnant isn’t always all sunshine and roses. Even women who deliver a healthy, full-term baby can point to times during gestation that were distressing.
Take, for example, the common experience of nausea and vomiting during early pregnancy. Colloquially called “morning sickness,” most pregnant women know that it most certainly doesn’t occur just in the morning. In most cases, though, the nausea and vomiting go away by the 14th week of pregnancy. Up to three percent of pregnancies, however, experience hyperemesis gravidarum, a rare disorder caused by rapidly rising hormone levels that cause severe nausea and vomiting, which can last throughout the entire pregnancy. You may have heard about it in the global media when Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton was pregnant, as she suffered from a debilitating condition during all three of her pregnancies.
Beyond these pregnancy complications that affect the health of a mother, some parents also face potential abnormalities with the developing fetus. Even if there’s no physical pain for the mother, there can be extreme emotional trauma in learning that your growing baby is at risk.
Other medical complications can pop up during pregnancy, too, with some of the most common issues including:
• Iron-deficiency anemia • High blood pressure (hypertension) and related disorders, including pre-eclampsia and eclampsia • Gestational diabetes • Infections, included sexually transmitted infections (STIs) • Preterm labor, which begins before 37 weeks and increases the risk for health problems in the infant
Sometimes, pregnancy complications arise out of nowhere, Johnson says, and like with miscarriages, there’s nothing that could have been done to prevent it. There are known risk factors, though, which a woman can take steps to mitigate prior to conceiving. “If she has medical problems, get everything in good order before she gets pregnant,” Johnson says, though, of course, not all pregnancies are planned. “For example, a patient with diabetes is going to have a much better outcome if her diabetes is controlled.”
Other measures that can be taken including losing weight if a woman is overweight or obese, quitting smoking, alcohol, and drugs, and supplementing with folic acid, a B vitamin that reduces the risk of birth defects. If you are planning a pregnancy, the Center for Maternal and Fetal Medicine offers preconception visits in which the physician and the woman, or couple, go over medical history to identify “red flags” and make a plan.
For Annapolis resident Tiffany Schall, her first pregnancy in 2014 didn’t seem to be at risk for any abnormalities and the first six months of the pregnancy were smooth sailing. Then, through a blood test, Schall was diagnosed with thrombocytopenia, a condition when the platelets, or thrombocytes, that form clots to stop or prevent bleeding drop below a certain level. It occurs in about eight percent of pregnancies, but it’s typically benign and, thankfully, doesn’t normally have any consequences for the mother or fetus. However, it did mean that Schall wouldn’t be able to have an epidural for pain management during birth or a subarachnoid block, or spinal block, if a caesarean section was necessary.
Around her due date in March 2015, Schall experienced another complication when she went to the hospital with a persistent headache. Her blood pressure was far too high. Schall was immediately diagnosed with pre-eclampsia and admitted to labor and delivery. At first, she was given the option to induce labor but knew she wouldn’t have an epidural to minimize the pain. Eventually, fearing the safety of her baby, she says she felt pressured to have a c-section under general anesthesia, and her husband, Jim, wasn’t allowed to be in the room to hold her hand. The recovery process, including a magnesium drip to treat pre-eclampsia, hindered bonding with her healthy baby boy, Ethan, which she believes factored into her later struggle with postpartum depression.
Three years later, Schall gave birth to another healthy baby boy, Noah, but that process of labor and delivery was traumatic, too—and, in fact, could have been much worse. Though she was considered high-risk due to her history of thrombocytopenia and pre-eclampsia, Schall was determined to have a VBAC, or vaginal birth after caesarean. “I did a lot of research and was able to increase my platelets to healthy levels with a healthy diet,” she says. “I was deemed a perfect candidate for a VBAC.”
During labor, Schall experienced a uterine rupture, a rare and life-threatening complication. Affecting less than one percent of pregnancies and almost always in women with uterine scar from previous c-sections, ruptures cause a mother’s uterus to tear, so her baby slips into her abdomen and can potentially suffocate from profuse bleeding.
Thankfully, both Schall and Noah survived with no lasting physical health concerns. Shortly thereafter, Schall and her husband made the decision that they wouldn’t have any more children.
The Devastation of Late-Term Loss
When a woman takes a pregnancy test, there’s almost no doubt in her mind that in 40ish weeks, she’ll be coming home with a baby. Tragically, that’s not always the case.
Stillbirth, or fetal death, is deemed as such when the loss occurs after the 20th week of pregnancy. Astonishingly, this occurs far more frequently than anyone could possibly imagine—1 in 160 deliveries in the United States. There are risk factors, including advanced maternal age, obesity, pre-existing diabetes, chronic hypertension, smoking, and alcohol use, as well as known causes such as infections in the mother or baby, problems with the placenta or umbilical cord, and birth defects or genetic conditions. However, a significant proportion of stillbirths remain unexplained.
Crofton resident Leigh, who prefers not to share her last name, and her husband, who serves in the Navy, conceived a baby in 2014 while they were stationed in San Diego, California. Her pregnancy was fairly uneventful, though she developed gestational hypertension around 24 weeks that was successfully controlled. With that diagnosis, though, Leigh was considered high-risk, so she had an ultrasound at 37 weeks. It was then that they discovered that her levels of amniotic fluid, which surrounds the baby in the uterus, were dangerously low. The doctor told her to go home but to call if she had any problems. “The next night, I experienced horrible cramping and vomiting,” Leigh recalls. “The nurse said it’s just labor pains and to wait until my contractions were closer together to come in. This was my first pregnancy, so I believed the nurse and we waited.”
The cramping worsened, so they decided to head back to the hospital—but Leigh didn’t feel like the doctors were listening to what she was saying. “My son, Jaxon Von, was born still,” she says. “He was beautiful. He was also small for being 37 weeks along, which means the doctors didn’t catch earlier warning signs of something going on. He should have been delivered sooner.”
Leigh suffered a placental abruption, which occurs when the placenta detaches from the uterus too early. The March of Dimes estimates that 1 in 100 women experience a placental abruption, which causes the baby to not get enough oxygen or nutrients. Later, Leigh found out that the baby had stopped growing at 28 weeks, even though she had biweekly growth scans.
Leigh and her husband ended up pursuing legal action against the hospital, and they won their lawsuit. However, “The only time I ever heard some sort of admittance was when a doctor came in the day after and said, ‘I’m sorry we failed you,’” Leigh notes.
The couple has gone on to have three healthy sons, but the stillbirth took a significant toll on their lives. “I honestly wanted to die,” Leigh says. “I couldn’t eat, sleep, or really function for weeks.” Recently, her husband was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. “I have not been diagnosed by a therapist, but I know I have it, too. For months afterwards, I had horrible nightmares. I could hear babies crying in the middle of the night.”
Johnson says there’s a movement to have all mothers deliver by 39 weeks, and ACOG says it can reduce the risk of certain health problems in some cases. (Babies delivered before 39 weeks are more likely to have health problems both at birth and later in life.) However, there are logistical problems. “It’s a much longer process and more expensive,” Johnson says. “We just don’t have the capacity in our delivery rooms.”
Silence No More
Living with infertility or experiencing pregnancy or childbirth complications is not only traumatic, but it can be incredibly isolating. “You become numb, if that makes sense, because it is so emotionally taxing,” Heier comments. “You can’t go to baby showers without crying before or after. When your friends have babies, you want to be happy for them, but you’re jealous. You have no control over it. There’s no good fix.”
Not everyone will want to talk about their experiences, but others find it therapeutic to talk about what happened, even in the worst-case scenarios. Those coping with infertility may seek solace in finding others with the same struggle. Parents who have lost a pregnancy—at any stage—may want people to acknowledge that their child existed and mattered. They need support, not for their reality to be swept under the rug.
“If it’s your friend, just talk to them. Ask them questions. Just be there for support,” Heier advises. “The most important thing is to feel like you’re supported throughout the entire process.”
