South Yorkshire MP says miscarriage is still a 'taboo'
Olivia Blake wants to see better recording of baby loss as well as an overhaul to the way the issue is treated
A South Yorkshire MP says we need a complete overhaul of the way miscarriage is treated and spoken about to break down the taboo that still surrounds it.
Sheffield Hallam MP Olivia Blake is speaking to us after the government agreed to a range of improvements to miscarriage care - including scrapping a rule which meant women had to suffer three consecutive miscarriages before getting medical tests to try and work out why.
The Labour politician has been campaigning on the issue for years, speaking about her own experiences of miscarriage in Parliament.
She says we need to challenge the idea that miscarriage is 'just something that happens':
“There’s an expectation that you wouldn’t tell anyone that you were pregnant until 12 weeks, when you’ve had the scan and it’s all okay. But anything up to 24 weeks is a miscarriage.
“Having an early miscarriage is just as important to have support around you and be able to talk about it as any other kind of loss. And I think it is just minimised and you feel an immense pressure to keep it to yourself.”
Over the weekend, the government published its long-awaited Independent Pregnancy Loss Review, including recommendations to deliver 24/7 access to care for all women experiencing a miscarriage.
It is conservatively estimated that there are 250,000 miscarriages in the UK every year, with one in five women experiencing at least one miscarriage in their lifetime.
But Olivia says we need better recording of the issue so that we can improve research into what causes it.
Currently national miscarriage figures are not recorded, meaning targets cannot be set for bringing the number of losses down.
“We know there are certain risk factors and it would be great to have a better dataset to understand the reasoning behind that.
“It’s also really important that we can understand the scale of the problem because depending on who you talk to, we’re saying one in three pregnancies ends in baby loss, or one in five or one in four.”
She also says it’s important to include miscarriage on women’s medical records so people are not being ‘re-traumatised’:
“The number of people that I’ve spoken to who have had their red baby book delivered to them after they’ve lost a baby or been called for a scan or had calls for appointments or questions asked about how their children are doing, when they don’t actually have children because they lost their baby.”
Currently support for women experiencing miscarriage is patchy, and they must experience three consecutive miscarriages before they can access support and tests to find out what is causing the loss.
This means women with undiagnosed underlying health issues like a thyroid problem go through multiple losses which are, in many cases, preventable.
In response to the Independent Review, the Government has committed to 20 short-term actions to improve miscarriage care, covering training, education, and public information. They have also committed to reviewing the clinical and financial requirements of implementing a graded model of care nationally.