Viewers of last night's episode of 19 Kids and Counting couldn't help tearing up after watching Michelle Duggar find out that the baby growing inside of her no longer had a heartbeat. That's the absolute last thing that any parent wants to hear at a routine doctor's visit, whether they are expecting their first child or their twentieth. Grief does not discriminate, and the Duggars were just as devastated as any mom and dad would be.
Going through a miscarriage is very emotional and also incredibly private for a lot of parents, but Jim Bob and Michelle decided to share their experience on reality TV because they hoped to help other parents. They were brave to publicize their awful moment, and they should be applauded for it.
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It's estimated that one in every four diagnosed pregnancies end in miscarriage. The reasons for miscarriage vary wildly, however most miscarriages do not ever have a diagnosed cause. Whatever the cause -- known or unknown -- miscarriages can be devastating. Even worse, miscarriage is a taboo subject, the type of loss that is rarely discussed.
It sounds unimaginable at first. After being told in her fifth month of pregnancy that she was at risk of miscarrying her daughter, Donna Kelly of the U.K. was given an unusual prescription. She could try checking into the hospital for the reminder of her pregnancy, which is a difficult enough sentence for anyone, but while there, she would have to lie upside down the entire time.
When
By now, the whole word knows that Michelle Duggar -- mama to 19 kids -- has had a miscarriage of what would have been baby 20. And now you have a choice, folks. You can decide whether you're going to join the group of people bashing the Duggar family, or you're going to care about those 19 kids. Because the reactions to this devastating new have certainly shined a light on a rarely talked about victim in pregnancy loss.
Or her uterus. Either/or. But some people are saying that this miscarriage is indeed
Sad news today for the Duggar family: Michelle Duggar has suffered a miscarriage. Already in the second trimester of her pregnancy with the Duggars' 20th child, she was at a prenatal check-up where Michelle and husband Jim Bob were hoping to learn the baby's sex. Instead, the doctor couldn't find a heartbeat.
I was at lunch with a few women that I didn't know that well and we started talking about my twin boys and how lucky I was that they were healthy, full-term babies. Then, I just blurted out, "Well, it took us a long time to get pregnant and I had a painful miscarriage, so maybe this was just the scales tipping back in the other direction." Wait, what did I just say? I had just dropped into casual conversation an experience that had been so difficult and personal to me. A beat later, I got flustered and felt the need to downplay it: "It's not a big deal ... I have my babies now ... it's in the past ... I mean, it was a big deal, but now it's not a big deal."
Getting news that the baby you are carrying -- the one you start loving the minute you see two lines on a pregnancy test -- has stopped growing and that you have miscarried is one of the most heartbreaking things a woman faces. But finding out that the doctor made a mistake and terminated what would have been a healthy pregnancy is unimaginable. Yet new research suggests that's what's happening to hundreds of women each year.