Just a short note..

To say I've finished my lit review (finally! I know I've been whinging about it for ages) and it has given me a push to start talking about something that is continuing to interest me the intersection between abortion and miscarriage. I have just finished combing through a number of critical texts devoted to women's health and do you think I could find much information about miscarriage? Pages (and sometimes chapters) devoted to the analysis of abortion politics/medicalisation of pregnancy/use of ultrasound to hide the mother in abortion politics etc, but nothing more than cursory mentions about "spontaneous abortions".

One position put forward by Linda Layne in an article she wrote in "Feminist studies" in 2006 was due to the difficulty of the fight to give women access to safe and legal abortions, a side effect has been;

[that]..it has been difficult to acknowledge that many women experience a pregnancy loss as the loss of a "baby" without apparently concurring with anti-abortion advoctates regarding the status of embryos and fetuses. This puts feminists in a bind, and as a consequence, feminists have been inclined to ignore the issues.

Reading that gave me my 'ah-ha' moment. I couldn't understand as I read through my pile of books just why, when contraception, assisted conception, childbirth and especially abortion had whole essays dedicated to them - why miscarriage remained still hidden. And this is indicative of the wider invisibility by society and how they process about what makes a baby, when a baby is alive. And I am not immune from that. I am a very avid supporter of Australia providing access to safe and legal abortions, so perhaps this is why it struck such a chord with me - I am being challenged, by this research to critically analyse my own position.

Whats clear from the research about miscarriage, is that ambiguity and inconsistency revolve around what it is, how to define and what even to call it. Medically it is described as 'abortions' when clearly that terminology for women could be offensive to say the least. One piece of medical writing suggested that the term 'miscarriage' be replaced by 'early pregnancy FAILURE', (Bourne & Condous, 2006 - Handbook of early pregnancy care) handbook of early pregnancy care, yeah nice sensitive suggestion there - how is that terminology more useful? So, now I'm ready. I'm ready to find out from the women themselves, this is going to be very interesting.

Anyway - off again - Jude invited one of his most favourite people over tonight - Em and she wants us to go out, just James and I, for a catch up. So I need to rest (I was up till 3.30AM this morning writing furiously) and I am actually also heartily SICK of looking at the computer.

I'll chat again soon. I hope my discussion of this topic has not caused any hurt or pain to any of the readers here. I know the subject matter can be distressing, so I try not to talk about it too much - but I really did want to share that as I think it is vital to the understanding of where my research wants to go.

Take care xx

p.s - Sue - no hard feelings, thanks for apologising (I had no idea you read this blog lol) - I'm sorry too.