Miscarriage: must doctors make our grief worse?

Insensitive health workers compound the suffering caused by miscarriage, but a Mumsnet campaign aims to change matters

Belinda Benton's second pregnancy was going swimmingly - or so she thought - until she went to hospital, at 12 weeks, for a routine ultrasound scan. “On my way to the appointment I realised that I was bleeding,” she says. “When I got there they said they would go ahead with the scan and see what was happening.”

When the ultrasound equipment was switched on, says Benton, “there was just silence. No one said anything until I said, ‘There's nothing there, is there?' And the doctor burbled and eventually said, ‘No, there's no baby'.”

For Benton and her partner, the loss of their longed-for second baby was a tragedy - the scan picture showed that the foetus had stopped growing at six weeks - but there was scant sympathy from the hospital staff.

“No one offered any condolences or said they were sorry for our loss,” she remembers. “We were terribly upset, and we had to leave the same way we'd arrived, walking through a waiting room full of women waiting for scans. I felt awful, and the last thing these people needed was to see our devastated faces.”

Benton was told that she could have her uterus emptied surgically - “evacuation of the retained products of conception” or ERPC, in hospital parlance - or she could go home and miscarry naturally. “I asked how bad that would be and they said that it would be like a heavy period, so I thought I'd go home and wait for that,” she says.

In fact, the next few days were agony. “It was horrendous,” she says of her miscarriage three months ago. “It was like a birth. I had painful contractions; it was labour. I almost went into A&E.”

“I was given misleading information on what the experience of miscarriage was like. If I'd known how awful it was going to be, I'd have opted for surgery,” she says. “There is no help for women who are miscarrying at home - there should be someone you can phone or get advice from. I also object to the terminology - ‘evacuation of the retained products of conception' sounds horrible; they should call it something like surgical assistance around miscarriage. And there needs to be a lot more understanding on the part of health professionals that miscarriage is an emotional experience as much as a physical one. It's a huge shock, a terrible loss, and it helps to have those feelings at least acknowledged by the hospital staff with whom you come into contact.”

In recent weeks and months Benson, and hundreds of others like her, have been logging on to the parents' website Mumsnet to chart their experiences of what can seem like the uncaring, insensitive face of the NHS - doctors, nurses, midwives and protocols that appear to take no account of the pain, physical or emotional, involved in miscarriage.

To judge from the Mumsnet comments, health professionals often don't take account of the extent to which losing a baby is a personal tragedy More