This content is excerpted from All the Love: Healing Your Heart and Finding Meaning After Pregnancy Loss.
Witnessing and honoring the loss of another is one way we can help grievers make sense of their pain. However, when it come to queer losses, there is much silence around the experience. In “Queering Reproductive Loss: Exploring Grief and Memorialization,” Elizabeth Peel and Christa Craven explore the extent of such silence: “Queer losses are often overlooked (or perhaps avoided) in most academic and popular books on LGBTQ+ reproduction, and queer experiences remain absent from most self-help books on recovering from reproductive loss.” Furthermore, lack of support before the pregnancy loss and subsequent lack of support after the pregnancy loss may compound and complicate grief and pain. In my practice, I use a concept called intersectionality to look at each person’s multiple identities and how they overlap. The overlap (for example, “I am a lesbian” and “I was raised Catholic” and “I lost a baby”) can create additional layers of grief and trauma.
A pregnancy loss is especially compounded when family and friends have not been supportive and when they even try to justify the loss with a religious slant: “This wasn’t natural. This isn’t what [insert God or other religious figure] intended.” A pregnancy loss often triggers shame in women, which may unleash any history of previous trauma and shame due to their sexual orientation and gender identity. They may have thoughts like, “Maybe I lost this baby because I’m in an ‘unnatural’ relationship.” While the most common grief responses cut across all gender identities and sexual orientations, it can be especially painful for a queer couple due to their “place” and “designation” in society.
For some couples, having a child was either consciously or subconsciously an entryway to be included and accepted as a “family unit” and to belong to the “parent club.” Some couples tell me that pregnancy loss alienates and isolates them even further.
Lesbian couples
For some lesbian couples that experience pregnancy loss, numerous other factors may complicate their grieving process. Some of my clients tell me they had to “jump through more hoops” to get pregnant, and so the pain is exponential. These can include physical, emotional, and financial hoops, which make the grief process harder since pregnancy requires much dialogue and planning (often much more than for heterosexual couples).
Lesbian couples will have to consider who will carry the child, where they will obtain sperm (whether from a friend, a sperm bank, a family member), the costs of IVF and other medical bills, the physical pain of injecting oneself with hormones and undergoing painful procedures, potentially dealing with ignorant medical providers who do not allow the same-sex partner into the room and make derogatory/hetero-normative comments (like “Where is your husband?”), and parental leave concerns (some companies do not offer maternal leave to the non-gestational partner).
Heather Love cautions in Feeling Backward that queer losses are frequently hard to identify or mourn since many aspects of historical gay culture are associated with the pain and shame of being in the closet and hidden away from the public eye. The subject of reproductive loss—the personal, and sometimes communal, experiences of miscarriage, infant death, and failed adoptions— has often been a silent burden for LGBTQ+ parents, one frequently intensified by fears of homophobia and heterosexism.
Furthermore, lesbian couples may encounter difficulty with the medical community who may not understand their loss or also have their own biases and judgments about a lesbian couple and pregnancy loss. The discrimination and lack of understanding may be less pervasive in big cities and more informed communities. However, in smaller rural towns, this is a big concern in that medical providers are not trained in working with the LGBTQ+ community and even small comments like “Where is your husband?” can be triggering for someone (especially during a tense period such as pregnancy loss). I have even heard stories of medical providers not allowing the non- gestational partner into the room to say goodbye to the fetus/baby.
Unfortunately, even for those who did not feel they experienced homophobia during their loss, their fear of homophobia frequently kept them from accessing resources such as local loss support groups, which other researchers have shown to be helpful to many heterosexual couples.
In 2007, Danuta Wojnar published the first empirical study on lesbian couples’ experiences of pregnancy loss. This small qualitative study drew on interviews with ten white lesbian couples in the United States, all of whom had planned their pregnancies. (She notes that about 50 percent of heterosexuals’ pregnancies are unplanned.) Wojnar found that, unlike some hetero- sexual mothers, lesbian mothers frequently bonded with their unborn child early in pregnancy.
Joanne Cacciatore and Zulma Raffo later published a study on “same-gender (homosexual) bereaved parents” in the journal Social Work in 2011. Through interviews with six white lesbian parents, they explore the intersection of what they term “stigmatized relationships” and “stigmatized deaths.” Bereaved lesbian mothers experience a double disenfranchisement; not only do they experience a dearth of support for their experiences with loss, but they may also avoid support services that require them to explain or justify their family. For all six participants, the authors noted that “ritual and remembrance—including things from hand molds to memorial services—appeared to play a key role in the integration of loss [into their lives as the ‘new normal’].”
Partner pain
In lesbian couples, it is common for the non-gestational partner to feel guilty that she did not carry the baby. There are also situations where each partner takes turns having a child, and therefore it is even more painful if one partner had a full-term pregnancy and the other experienced a pregnancy loss.
There is also the added misbelief that if one female partner experiences a pregnancy loss then the other female partner can “take over,” as if they are passing a baton between the two of them in a relay race. This may not be feasible for many reasons—medical or psychological reasons, or gender identity reasons (for example, the partner could be an assigned female at birth but identifies as trans masculine).
In terms of how the couple handles the pregnancy loss, Wojnar has found that the non-gestational partner has a similar response to a man in a heterosexual partnership following the miscarriage. “The response tends to be, ‘I lost her and I don’t know how to get her back,’” says Dr. Kristen Swanson, dean of the college of nursing at Seattle University.
I also see these reactions in my practice for the non-gestational partner. No matter how they identify on the gender identity spectrum, there is a sense that they are “pushed away” following a pregnancy loss due to the gestational partner believing that the non-gestational partner cannot share in the same level of grief because they were not carrying the baby. There is a sense in the non-gestational partner of hopelessness and frustration (“I don’t know what to say or do” and “Everything I seem to say or do is wrong”) and also potential underlying guilt that is hard to admit (“I didn’t carry the baby so the impact is less for me” or “I can’t feel as much as my partner because I wasn’t the one carrying the baby”).
Gay couples
For some gay couples who work with a surrogate to achieve their goal of a family, there may already be a sense of distance from their surrogate. Therefore, what is the experience of loss like for them? For some clients, they noted feeling isolated in their grief, especially as non-gestational parents. Also, they felt that their losses and grief were not acknowledged. Furthermore, some gay couples feel pressured to try surrogacy or reproductive technology again without having time to grieve.
According to the Australian Psychological Society’s Information Sheet on LGBT pregnancy loss, “The difficulties of conceiving (e.g., via donor sperm, surrogacy arrangement) mean that a significant amount of planning, hope, anticipation, negotiation, time, and money is likely to have gone into conceiving, which raises the stakes of the pregnancy, and can create multiple losses if the pregnancy is lost.”
For information on pregnancy (and loss) in the trans community, read this post.
This post was written by Huong Diep, co-author of All the Love: Healing Your Heart and Finding Meaning After Pregnancy Loss.
