Laeticia Hallyday confided in her miscarriage, a trauma that affects many women.
- Miscarriage is a natural termination of pregnancy.
- The majority of miscarriages (80% to 90%) occur early in pregnancy, during the first 12 weeks.
“I was pregnant, I carried a child until five months of pregnancy and I lost this child”. In the documentary “Johnny by Laeticia” which has just been broadcast on the M6 channel, Laeticia Hallyday recounts having had a miscarriage at five months of pregnancy, a tragedy from which she still suffers today.
Infertile, the singer’s wife also testifies to the long and hard fight she led to get pregnant. “I carried this weight of not being able to give Johnny the child he so dreamed of. It had become an obsession for him, so it was a great moment of deep pain for me”, she explains in the documentary. “For 10 years, we went back and forth to the hospital to do in vitro fertilization (IVF)”, she continues.
23 million miscarriages occur every year
If the losses of a child in utero are still a taboo subject for many French people, Laetitia Hallyday is far from being an isolated case. 23 million miscarriages occur each year worldwide, about 15% of all pregnancies, according to a report published in The Lancet. 10% of women will have two miscarriages in their lifetime, and 7% will experience three or more.
“For too long, having a miscarriage has been downplayed and, often, not taken seriously. Now is not the time to just tell women ‘Try again,'” plead The Lancet in the editorial that accompanies this report.
The silence around miscarriages persists
“Although a miscarriage most often only happens once, a significant portion of the population will need treatment and support. Despite this, the silence around miscarriage persists not only among women who experience them, but also among caregivers, policy makers and research funding organisations”, adds one of the authors of the report, Professor Siobhan Quenby (University of Warwick). “Many women complain about the lack of empathy with which they are taken care of after a miscarriage: some do not receive any explanation and the only advice they are given is to try again”, concludes by lamenting the deputy director of Tommy’s National Center for Miscarriage Research.
Several factors increase the risk of miscarriage in women, such as the advanced age of the mother, her premature birth, one or more complicated previous pregnancies, one or more miscarriages preceding the new gestation, pollution, stress or endometriosis.
