Containing Pregnancies Research Project
Containing Pregnancies Research Project
Posted by am933
15 August 2025Me and [husband] to each other, would say that we are Mummy and Daddy. But I wouldn’t expect other people to see that. Because there’s this whole like, ‘miscarriage’ thing. I feel like because I did have this labour and experience, and we met him, and we named him, that’s why I feel I’m a mum. But I don’t expect other people to understand that, because before I wouldn’t have. Because I wouldn’t have understood what they’d been through.
‘Bethany’
Aimee’s previous research about the politics of second trimester pregnancy loss in England has been published Open Access (free e-book) and is available here. This feminist academic book carefully and sensitively analyses women’s experiences of different forms of miscarriage and termination for foetal anomaly from 13 weeks of pregnancy up to the UK legal foetal viability threshold of 24 weeks.
The book shows how the experience of second trimester pregnancy loss for women is structured by biomedical and legal positions on the status of the foetal being or baby which are enacted by NHS care, civil registration laws, and associated State regulations and entitlements. These positions interact with women’s embodied experiences of pregnancy, labour, birth and the body of the foetal being which resonate with ideas of English personhood and kinship.
Recognition of diversity and nuance in responses to loss is a key theme of the research, as is breaking down divides between abortion and spontaneous forms of pregnancy loss, and expanding conceptualisations of prenatal and posthumous personhoods in the English context.
In the book, Aimee shows how ideas about the normal and acceptable outcome of a pregnancy structures the experience of those who will not produce a healthy living baby. She calls for an approach to all pregnancy which moves away from seeing it as the ‘means to an end’ and which instead recognises it as a meaningful and important experience for women whatever the context, and whatever the outcome.
This is an excellent book … As someone working in the field of reproduction/family studies (though not specifically on pregnancy loss), this book has expanded my thinking regarding how legal, medical, kinship systems and cultures come together in defining our understandings of life/death, personhood and relatedness
Dr Leah Gilman, University of Manchester