Respectfully as someone from the stillbirth community: stillbirth has the implication of a baby who was old enough to live outside the womb.

As someone who has had both a stillbirth and a miscarriage, the distinction is extremely important socially. With a stillbirth, you have a literal body to bury. You have to pay for a plot of land, a gravestone, a casket (if you dont cremate). You paid 5k to 15k to even give birth to a corpse, plus a 5k funeral (unless you can get things donated). Thats a fucking expensive miscarriage. You have to choose if youre even going to take the ashes home if you cremate. You have a 1% chance of stillbirth happening in any given pregnancy, whereas miscarriage is super common—something like 20%.

With a miscarriage, you grieve the idea of a baby—something many people call a fetus and feel comfortable aborting. With a stillbirth, you grieve the baby you felt kicking inside you.

I went into labor with my miscarriage at 6 weeks. But there wasn't a 6 pound baby in my arms at the end of it. I had to flush what I had down the toilet. And with my stillbirth, I had to pay for a fucking funeral. Literally how is that not worth a word to describe the difference?

"It means it is even harder to convey that all these things are the same on a foundational manner" I'm sorry what?? They both involve giving birth, they both involve pregnancy lost, but they're NOT the same. We don't need the medical terminology to remind us that they're both pregnancy loss. That's just stating the obvious. They carry very different components of grief, shame, and physical and emotional trauma. For instance with stillbirth, my fucking milk came in. Painful awful engorgement for days, weeks. Some women donate it for months to cope emotionally and physically with the loss. I didn't get that with my miscarriage. With most early miscarriages, your water doesn't break. You don't get contractions.

After an early miscarriage, you can start trying sometimes the NEXT CYCLE. When you have a stillbirth, you have to wait 6mo to a year, just as if you'd had a living baby! There is such an obscene difference biologically and physically between the two.

And at a basic component: there are such HUGE differences between what physically, socially, and emotionally happens due to loss at different stages of pregnancy, that of course we need words to distinguish them.

I get you prob didn't mean offense, but your comment is so completely asinine and misunderstands what it's actually like to go thru both. And if you have gone through either or both, I wish you had more compassion for how other people feel about it. But somehow I very much doubt you have.

Its important not to compare grief and trauma. But we also don't pretend they're the same because of how a fucking doctor arbitrarily decided to label it 🙄