High Heart podcasts, he More Kiss podcast playlist and listen live on the free iHeart app. Now, something we were talking about recently, and I think it's because my whole algorithm at the moment is pregnancies, babies. It's like the social media knows I'm pregnant and it's feeding me every single article or Instagram post that has to do with pregnancy.
But the way it works, it does, doesn't it.
Well, Look, this is something that we've spoken about on Life Uncut before, but I really do think that the conversation around this is changing, and that is that there is a bit of a silence that surrounds the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. Now for most women, and I won't speak for everyone. I'm certainly not the oracle of pregnancy, but for a lot of women, we are told to keep your pregnancy or your good news quite private for
the first twelve weeks. Now, the reasoning around that is because during that first twelve weeks is when most miscarriages happen. It's when the rate of which you can lose your baby is quite high. And for anyone who doesn't know the stats, one in four pregnancies does end in miscarriage. Usually it's early miscarriage. And I myself have had two miscarriages.
I had one before my first daughter, Maley, and I had one before my second daughter, Lola, and I always found it quite a I guess, quite an interesting thing that you're told to keep it to yourself for the first twelve weeks, because the problem is is if you haven't told anyone that you're pregnant, you also don't get to share with anyone or explain to anyone why you might be feeling really sad.
If something does go wrong.
And there's been quite a movement in a recent article that's come out around really starting to shift the perception around this secrecy of twelve weeks.
And the question is is who does it benefit?
Does it actually benefit new expectant mothers, or is it something that just adds more shame around the whole feeling of like, well, my body wasn't able to carry a pregnancy to full term. If you are someone who unfortunately joins that awful club of having a miscarriage, look it's.
A hard one. I've not been pregnant and I've not had a miscarriage, so I can't speak to it like that. But I do think it's interesting because I understand where it comes from.
Like I understand why it's always been like, hey.
Don't tell anyone until you're quote unquote safe or in the clear.
And I guess that is.
Because for a lot of people, if you tell a mass amount of people, it does mean you have to deal with it on a mass level as well. I don't believe in keeping it a secret for the twelve weeks, but I understand why. It's like, you know, maybe don't go crazy with who you tell, but you definitely need that support system. You need someone to be there with you if you're going through it.
Yeah, but you don't have to tell everyone. It's it on Instagram.
But I mean you can tell your people at work, you can tell your support systems. Actually, Samantha Payne, so she's the co founder and CEO of Pink Elephant, and she puts it so perfectly. She said this, the twelve week rule tells us to stay quiet just in case. But if the worst does happen, then you're suddenly grieving in silence. You haven't told anyone, so there's no support.
And I do think that this is very relevant for women, especially in a work environment, Like if you are suddenly grieving and going through, you know, struggling with a miscarriage, you've never spoken about the fact that you are or might be pregnant or any of these.
Sorts of things.
But the first conversation you're having to have in a workplace environment could potentially be, oh, I'm actually having a miscarriage. I just think it adds to the stigma around it. I definitely think it adds to the shame. And I do think that as a society we're moving beyond that
a little bit. But I think that it should be a case where if people want to talk about early pregnancy, we shouldn't have this like, oh, you don't speak about it, you might have a you know, it might not end well, and it should be like, Okay, well, that's great knowing that it is a possibility, but still holding so much space for like the excitement and the joy. And I say this because I remember when my sister told me
she was pregnant, and she told me really early. I think she was only like maybe four or five weeks, just found out like literally, you know, Pete on the stick double lines, which you're so excited, And she called me and my first reaction was a bit like, oh, you're not meant to tell me.
I was quite young, and I don't think I had realized.
I think I was so conditioned by this twelve week rule thing that I was like worried for her if she had to tell me that something went wrong.
Because it almost is a rule without it being a rule.
That's how we grow up.
You can grow up knowing that when you hit the twelve week mark, you're to talk about it. Even when I'm trying to think about right now, I'm like, why do we have that rule?
What are the repercussions of it? And it is shame. That's the default, right.
It shamed you from saying, hey, my body wasn't able to hold on to that, or maybe there's something wrong with me, and that's absolutely not the case.
Yeah, And I think for me, I didn't realize how common it was because it's so rarely spoken about, especially publicly, and so when it did happen to me, I thought that there was something wrong with me.
That's the only place.
That's the first place your brain goes to, especially when it's happened twice, You're like, Okay, there's something wrong with my body and how it works. And it wasn't until doing more research and having more conversations with family and friends that I was like, oh, my good, people who I'd never even suspected, family members I never even suspected who had gone through miss carriage all kind of stepped forward to was like, oh me too, like me too,
Like this happened to me. And I think it's only when you are someone who's been through it do you realize the volume of women who also experience the same thing, which is why I think if you're pregnant, well, firstly, congratulations, but if you are pregnant in that early twelve weeks and you want to tell the people who you love and who are in your surrounding networks, like, I don't think that that's something that you should feel as though
you have to keep to yourself. Because the more we talk about it, the more we normalize it, and it just means that something does go wrong. It makes talking about that okay as well. Absolutely