Ignorance is Bliss?

Someone help me here please. Is it just me, or does it seems like there are more women having miscarriages now days than ever before?

In the past few years, I have known of so many women miscarrying, and I am trying to figure out why this seems to be.

Most of them seem to be miscarrying within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, so that part doesn’t seem out of the ordinary, as that has always been the critical phase of pregnancy, but it just seems like there are so many of them occurring now.

The really odd thing that I have noticed with these miscarriages is that the women don’t seem to be actually losing the babies when they do miscarry, so they are left to carry them in their bodies and wait for the fetus to come out on its own. That sounds so cruel to me that these women have to go on with their lives and wait, knowing that their baby is no longer alive, and then if it doesn’t come out on its own, the woman has to have a procedure called a D and C (Dilation and Curettage) to remove the fetus.

 The emotional pain that they go through just seems so horrible to me. I have seen this with not only my daughter in law and friends, but also my nieces, including my one niece who openly writes about her experience in her blog, www.lyndsayslastbite.blogspot.com. It’s so sad to hear and read about her and all of these women on what they have gone through.

As I wondered what was going on with this, I remembered seeing a commercial for an early pregnancy test, where you could find out if you were pregnant in as early as 6 days after conceiving!  6 days!!

That seems amazing, considering that years ago, you usually didn’t find out that you were pregnant until you had missed your first, and sometimes your second period, meaning that by the time you thought that you might be pregnant and went to buy the over the counter pregnancy test, you were probably already about 6-8 weeks along, certainly not 6 days!

The pregnancy tests back then were like an actual science project as well. You didn’t pee on a stick and within minutes looked for a line or plus sign. Nope, our test were an actual test tube that you put urine in, shook it up, kept it in a dark place, OVERNIGHT, and then the next morning, looked for a circle at the bottom of the test tube. If you saw that, then you could call your doctor (if you had one, which sometimes you didn’t if you hadn’t planned on getting pregnant, so add another week to that timeframe to find a doctor to call) to have your blood drawn and confirm or deny the pregnancy. All of that process took you to about the 9-10 week mark, so you were then left with only a couple of weeks in that critical first 12 week phase of the pregnancy.

In talking with my sisters about this, we concluded that we may have also miscarried when we were having babies, but since technology was not as “advanced” as it is now, we may just not have known that we were pregnant and just thought that we were having a really bad period when in fact, we may have been miscarrying. I think that I would rather have not known that I was pregnant and miscarried, than to have to go through what the women today are going through by knowing so early on.

 I do understand, to a point, the need for finding out early if you are pregnant, so that you can start making healthy choices for you and the baby. But, I think that you have to determine if learning so early and possibly having to go through what these women have gone through outweighs the benefits of knowing early so that you can start make healthy choices. I can’t answer that, but I think that in many cases, the body is still going to miscarry if a fetus is not healthy enough to make it full term, regardless of when you find out that you are pregnant.

So, if the above is true, and there aren’t really any more miscarriages now than in the past, just the knowledge earlier on, then I would say, in my opinion, that just perhaps, knowledge may not be power in this instance, but rather ignorance was bliss for those of us that didn’t have to go through all that today’s women may go through by having this knowledge so early on.