The presence of absence

K Kuberska, S Turner

OAI: oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/291867 • DOI: 10.17863/CAM.39026

Pregnancy loss can be a particularly difficult life event, immediately defying the scripts people may have for their own autobiographies (particularly as these relate to their reproductive lives) and overturning their expectations of grief and bereavement. Although pregnancy loss is a topic not usually openly discussed in public, it has attracted a considerable degree of academic attention in the last five decades, which has overlapped with a change in the standards of bereavement care following pregnancy loss in healthcare in some high-income countries (e.g. Davidson 2007; Duchemin-Pelletier 2017). At the same time, the fact that there are few widely accepted culturally-sanctioned ways for dealing with pregnancy loss, such as memorialisation rituals (in particular in the western world), coupled with the often unexpected nature of miscarriage, termination for foetal anomaly, or stillbirth, means that bereaved people - and those around them - are forced to forge their bereavement paths as they go along, questioning many previously held assumptions about pregnancy, parenthood, and grief (see e.g. Brier 2008; Kersting & Wagner 2012; Walker & Walker 2015) .