From Here to Maternity

My PhD uses Critical and Creative Writing methodology to address four questions:

1. What metaphors are used by doctors and patients when communicating about foetal death?
2. Is there a conflict between the way obstetricians imagine and describe foetal death and the way that women experience it?
3. How are parental-foetal relationships represented or denied through these metaphors?
4. How do these representations inform medical understanding of grief and maternal mental health?


The creative component will be a memoir about miscarriage, motherhood and madness. Entitled, From Here to Maternity, it will be about my experience of recurrent miscarriages. My experience as a patient enabled me to re-examine things I had taken for granted in my professional experience. While experiencing miscarriages, I worked in a small team commissioned by the Family Court, to provide expert witness assessments of children who the local authority was applying to remove from their birth parents. Almost all my professional conversations were about motherhood and madness, about what makes a good enough parent and what causes harm. Away from work, I was preoccupied with the smallest physical signs of life and those signs that might herald impending foetal death. These collisions, of private experiences as a woman miscarrying, and my professional experiences as expert witness and member of the judiciary made me curious about how stories are told by parents, by professionals and by the courts. I kept notes of those often incommensurate narratives and on how they seemed to be constructed. Being a patient myself, albeit an obstetric one, made me construct expert assessments and judge things differently.

My obstetrician used military metaphors to describe his treatment plans. My immune system, he postulated, was mounting an attack on embryos, identifying them as enemy invaders' He suggested I had high numbers of cells called natural killer cells and his proposed treatment was presented as a counterattack. Throughout that pregnancy, I lived with my husband, an army officer, on a large military headquarters, passing a sniper guard every morning when I took my toddler to nursery. The politics and poetics of war were part of my life during that pregnancy.

I shall describe cases, typical of real cases I saw for the Family Court, to explore real themes and dilemmas, but identities and geography will be fictionalised. I will include relevant memories from medical school and clinical material from earlier in my career. The personal and professional stories relate to one another by revealing frictions and troubling ethical interfaces when considering motherhood and maternity.

My critical component will investigate the language used in the recent British medical literature and in the writing of women to describe foetal death, with a particular focus on deaths in early pregnancy, medically known as miscarriages. I will pay close attention to the significance of class, education, culture, community, ethnicity, religion, disability and sexuality in mediating this discourse.