When You're Having A Miscarriage, But Have To Go To Work Anyway

The singer Halsey recently revealed that she performed on tour a few short hours after realizing she was having a miscarriage. Here, a look at what happens when women have to—or choose to—work through losing a pregnancy.
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2016 Gregg DeGuire

Halsey, a singer who has previously discussed her battle with endometriosis, recently revealed that she suffered a miscarriage while on tour in 2015. What's more, just a few hours after realizing she was miscarrying a pregnancy, she got on stage to perform because she knew it was important for her career. She ended up wearing an adult diaper and taking two Percocet, a very strong opioid made to relieve pain, then "went to the venue to do her job," reports Rolling Stone.

Miscarriage is common—about 10 to 25 percent of recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage, making it the most common form of pregnancy loss, according to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. It usually takes place during the first 13 weeks, according to the American Pregnancy Association. Although the cause is often hard to pinpoint, miscarriages can happen because there's something wrong with either the fetus or maternal health.

If these numbers surprise you, that's likely because it's still a cultural taboo to discuss miscarriage publicly. And because of that secrecy, there's another common detail about miscarriage that many people might not know: How long they actually last. The physical process of miscarrying can last anywhere from a couple hours to several weeks. And the longer it takes, the more likely it is to interfere with your day-to-day life. Or, as is the case for a lot of women: The more likely it is to happen in the background, as work, family, and other obligations carry on.

The experience of having a miscarriage can vary in length and intensity, depending on the person and the particulars of the pregnancy.

"What tends to happen is a woman will start to have some bleeding that increases in amount," eventually evolving into something like "the heaviest period you’ve ever experienced," Sherry Ross, M.D., an ob/gyn and women's health expert at Providence Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California, tells SELF. There's also intense cramping, hence Halsey's Percocet.

"Usually it’s [a few] hours of what I call hell—this really heavy bleeding, really heavy cramping, and generally feeling really beaten up," Jacques Moritz, M.D., an ob/gyn at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, tells SELF. But the cramping and bleeding can last for days or even weeks, says Moritz.

Depending on how far along a woman is when she miscarries, she may also have to have a surgical procedure called a dilation and curettage to make sure the miscarriage is complete or address issues like severe bleeding, according to Mayo Clinic. It's an outpatient procedure, and although the cramping usually abates in around 24 hours, light bleeding can persist for about a week. The psychological effects can last much longer, say Moritz and Ross.

Halsey isn't the only woman who's gone public about working while having a miscarriage.

In 2009, Penelope Trunk, a serial entrepreneur who blogs about her work and life at PenelopeTrunk.com,tweeted about miscarrying at her job.

"I was relieved that I wouldn't have to figure out how to get an abortion," Trunk, who thinks the pregnancy was around eight weeks along, tells SELF in an email. Trunk was in her 40s, already had two children with special needs, and knew she didn't want to add to her family. She lives in Wisconsin, which has a history of implementing laws that make legal abortion harder to access, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a leading nonprofit organization that researches sexual and reproductive issues.

"It didn't seem like a big deal to have a miscarriage at work—statistically it happens to women all the time," says Trunk. But as she explained ina piece for The Guardian, amid all the backlash about her abortion comment, some people also criticized her for another reason, saying "a miscarriage is too private to discuss at work."

"But why? It's an important part of a woman's experience," Trunk said in the piece. "It is not dirty or evil or shameful. A large number of women will have miscarriages in their lifetime.... And most men at the office have lived through the miscarriage of a significant other. It's an experience that happens over weeks, not hours. And it happens at work."

Trunk, who tells SELF that she miscarried over the course of a few days at her job, says she could have actually stayed home but decided not to because she likes work. There are basically no wrong choices here—however a woman emotionally responds to a miscarriage is right for her. "Some people may find solace going back to work—it may take [the miscarriage] off their minds for a while," says Moritz. "Everyone's different. It depends on the person."

But one thing's clear: For women who would rather take some time to process the physical and mental effects of a miscarriage, it's not always that easy.

Whether it's Halsey's pressure to perform for adoring fans or worry about how suddenly taking time off will impact your job security or paycheck, it may feel impossible to press pause on your work life to deal with a miscarriage.

Although the Family and Medical Leave Act protects paid leave for pregnant women suffering “serious health conditions related to pregnancy, such as a miscarriage,” it doesn't apply to everyone; in general, to be covered, your employer needs to have at least 50 employees and you must have worked at the job for at least 12 months and 1,250 hours in the past year.Plus, even if you wanted to use this leave, you might not feel up to explaining why you qualify.

"It’s so private that you might not even share it with anyone—certainly not anyone at work—so it feels like you have to go back to business as usual," says Ross, who says this can just compound the emotional effect.

And it's not wrong to worry about potential backlash of taking time off to deal with a miscarriage. In February 2014, Winnie Mou, a woman in Ontario, Canada, brought a wrongful termination suit against her employer, who allegedly fired her partially because she took time off due to a miscarriage.

This past March, the Canadian tribunal judging the case ruled that miscarriage can count as a disability, so Mou shouldn't have been allegedly punished because she took time off for one. “[The ruling] should make it easier for the next woman who comes along who feels like an employer has relied on her miscarriage to penalize her in some way,” Morgan Rowe, Mou’s lawyer, told CBC News.

Although it will take some time for cultural attitudes about miscarriage to shift, when women like Halsey, Trunk, and Mou speak up, it gives others a window into what miscarriage is really like—and hopefully helps women going through similar experiences feel less alone.


Watch: Why I Don't Want My Miscarriage To Stay Secret