What the Word “Miscarriage” Gets Wrong
How the single word "miscarriage" shapes grief and why it often is not enough.
Posted May 12, 2026 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Miscarriage . The word carries an etymological history of failure, misconduct, and mismanagement. Even before it was recorded in the early 1600s as meaning the “spontaneous expulsion of a fetus from the womb before it is viable,” it meant “[a]n instance of misconduct or misbehaviour; a lapse of conduct; a misdemeanour or misdeed”; a “failure; [and] a blunder”; in time it also denoted the “failure of a letter…to reach its destination” ( OED ). In the reproductive context, these circulating definitions risk implying that the body has blundered, faultily mis-carrying what it was meant to deliver. Coupled with the ambiguous way we define “miscarriage” itself and larger narratives about healing and recovery, this grammar of failure has psychological and emotional implications. Research highlights how people experiencing loss turn to metaphor and metonymy to constitute embodied knowledge when they find their experience being biomedically and narratively foreclosed.
Philosopher Jessalyn Bohn identifies a problem built inherently into the term “miscarriage” itself. She argues that the word is structurally ambiguous, referring to the fetus’s intrauterine death and/or to the physical process of its preterm delivery. She pulls definitions from Planned Parenthood , Miscarriage Association, Merriam Webster, and other sources to show how some definitions refer to only one part (the death or preterm delivery) while others contain both parts (Bohn). Other definitions are simply vague. Highlighting one aspect but not another makes the language deficient in nuance or “granular[ity],” she argues. The linguistic ambiguity of miscarriage can create a gap between language and experience, negatively affecting a person’s ability to tell their story.
Psychological and emotional ramifications can follow. Definitions focusing only on preterm delivery and the use of phrases like “She lost the pregnancy ” or “She lost the baby” can imply that the gestational mother is at fault, and this can increase guilt . Moreover, when the definitions focus only on preterm delivery and the loss of the pregnancy itself as a state, it can promote disenfranchised grief —“grief that persons experience when they incur a loss that is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported (Doka, 1989)" (Bohn). Focusing on preterm delivery alone also emphasizes the gestational mother’s physical experience in a way that can deemphasize other family members’ ensuing grief. On the other hand, solely focusing on intrauterine death (and not preterm delivery) can deemphasize the physical experience and side effects the gestational mother will face during said delivery.
How language shapes care
In clinical settings, this ambiguity in language can show up in how people are counseled on what to do next. In their 2024 systematic review of qualitative research, Wallis, Heath, and Spong report that healthcare providers often focus on procedural management at the expense of emotional and narrative support (Wallis et al.). Patients are given discharge instructions, follow-up appointments, and sometimes reading materials. They note that they are rarely given a framework for what to do with the experience that extends beyond the biological event.
In general, we tend to assume grief and healing progress along a linear narrative. The dominant therapeutic model asks: How do you make meaning from what happened? How do you build a story that allows you to move forward? These questions can be productive, but they also carry within them a set of assumptions about the arc grief is supposed to follow and the resolution it is supposed to reach. The dominant narratives available after loss focus on either private recovery and the return to normal life or more public mourning and acknowledgment. Both scripts can impose a narrative shape that might feel tidier than the lived emotional and physical experience. Wallis et al. found that the narrative sense-making (or, narrative construction) processes following miscarriage remain “significantly under-researched,” and that the stories people need to tell are precisely the ones clinical or cultural institutions are not well-equipped to receive (Wallis et al.).
Fuller, Littlemore, and McGuiness’s “Death Before Birth” project interviews reveal how “metaphor and metonymy fill a void in everyday experiential language.” Bereaved parents used metaphors like carrying a child in their heart, and the symbolic language of ashes metonymically standing in for the lost child itself. They note that parents also turned to metaphor “when they wanted to express more complex or emotionally intense dimensions to their experiences” (Fuller et al.). The “flexible nature of metaphor allowed speakers to express contradictions within their experience because metaphorical language can hold contradictions in a way that non-metaphorical language cannot” (Fuller et al.). They turned to metaphor to make space for these contradictions, “rather than seeking to resolve aspects of their experience or emotions that might appear to be ‘illogical’” (Fuller et al.).
The term miscarriage is haunted by the broader lexical history of failure, even as it ironically fails to adequately capture the experience itself. Bohn suggests we move to the language of “intrauterine death” and “preterm delivery” rather than “miscarriage.” This more precise clinical language can help to make space for what has happened. But the repeated turn toward symbolic and metaphorical language also suggests that, rather than pressing the experience into a narrative of resolution, it may be more honest to let it remain unsettled, and to see healing not in naming the event correctly, but in finding words that can hold something of what was experienced.
Bohn, Jessalyn A. “When Words Fail: ‘Miscarriage,’ Referential Ambiguity, and Psychological Harm,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 48, no. 3 (2023): 265–282.
Fuller D, Littlemore J, McGuinness S. "What Remains? Rethinking Feminist Theories of Pregnant Embodiment through the Symbolic Language and Lived Experience of Pregnancy Loss." Hypatia 40, no. 4 ( 2025): 781–801.
Wallis, Emma L G et al. “How do people story their experience of miscarriage? A systematic review of qualitative literature.” Sexual & Reproductive Healthcare. vol. 41 (2024): 100997.
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Melissa Rampelli, Ph.D. , is an Assistant Professor of English at Holy Family University in Philadelphia, PA. She specializes in the history of psychology and gender studies among other areas.
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