Yes, I’m sure this is all true. I have read that many miscarriages happen because the fetus isn’t developing properly because of a genetic defect. I’m sure that it also happens because of various chemicals that we ingest. But when a woman has a miscarriage in 2013, is it standard practice to do any tests at all to determine why she miscarried? There are so many genetic tests available these days that I think it would be a very easy to run a test on a miscarried fetus to see if it had extra chromosomes or even a fatal genetic disease.
Why is this important? Well, if a woman was told that she lost the baby because of a genetic defect, she would realize that the baby wasn’t meant to live and that it would have been impossible for that baby to survive.
If a woman doesn’t have that sort of information, then she will probably spend the rest of her life wondering if she exercised too hard or if she didn’t spend enough time resting in bed. She might even think that she caused the miscarriage by being too anxious and upset during the pregnancy, especially if the pregnancy was unplanned.
I agree, it is heart-wrenching for a mother to be blaming herself. Same for birth defects. I’ve been doing a project, involving my students, to collect stories about people harmed by contamination – in their neighborhoods or at work.
One issue came up – in a small area of the Brownsville,TX/Matamoras,Mexico towns around 1990 there were an unusually large number of children being born without brains (anencephaly), and no telling how many were miscarried. The condition is linked to lack of folic acid in the diets, so there was all sorts of hoopla about the mothers eating the wrong types of tortillas, etc. The good that came out of that is that the US now requires food to be fortified with folic acid.
But it also seems there are chemicals that block the absorption of folic acid and there was high pollution of that chemical in the small area with the cases. I believe it was benzene or ??, which was being heavily used in the factories on the Mexican side of the river, without any safeguards. (It is sort of ridiculous to blame mothers eating the wrong foods, when obviously they had the basically same diet of other mothers in the RGV.)
Then one of my students told me her child was born with anencephaly – but it was bec of some genetic defect she had and didn’t know about, one which blocked her from absorbing folic acid. (I also told her some chemical might also be involved.)
There are many other pollution issues in the Rio Grande Valley, as well, that have led to birth defects, still births (one year all births in that town were still births), and who knows how many miscarriages (I imagine there are miscarriages that even the mother may not know about): PCBs in a reservoir and canal system from which poor people get their fish, the factory that produced Agent Orange and several other highly toxic chemicals for decades that leached into the soil & surrounding low-income neighborhood and elementary school, run-off water (where children played in the effluents, etc), and some other pollution issues the EPA doesn’t even know about…yet.
Many pollutants linked to cancer also cause birth defects, and presumably miscarriages.
I think there needs to be a lot of research in this area, if it has not already been done. At least people can avoid some of the exposures.
