Aren't you announcing your pregnancy a little early?

Please Note: This is a personal blog post about how Chris and I came to the decision of when to announce our pregnancy. Someone else could observe the same principles that we did and come to a different conclusion. This is a very personal decision, and each couple needs to decide what they are both comfortable with. While I would love to eradicate the fear and shame surrounding pregnancy loss, I understand that many people have strong reasons for not sharing their pregnancies or their losses.

"Aren’t you announcing your pregnancy a little early?" This is the silent (and sometimes not so silent) question that has surrounded me over the past several months. And I cannot tell you how many times this thought has popped into my head over the years. As soon as someone shared their due date, I’d automatically do a mental count to see how far along they were. If they were in the first 12 weeks, I’d think to myself, “Wow, that’s pretty early. What if something happens? Won’t they regret telling people? I mean, aaaawkward!” 

When I became pregnant for the first time, I was hit with a mix of emotions. Thrilled, excited, thankful…I wanted to shout the news from the rooftop as soon as I saw that little positive on the pregnancy test! Yet, I was also a bit nervous, knowing that miscarriages do happen. What if we told everyone, only to lose the baby a few days or weeks later? Would people think us presumptuous if we shared our joyful news, only to “take it back”?

When I told Chris that I wanted to wait awhile before announcing the pregnancy, his response rocked my world: “If you want to wait for the doctor to confirm that you are actually pregnant, that’s fine. But if we’re sure that you’re pregnant, I think we should tell people. Even if we end up losing the baby before we’ve had a chance to announce it, I don’t think we should keep that a secret.” What?!? The whole point of waiting was in case of a miscarriage. There was no point in waiting to announce the pregnancy if we were gonna share our loss either way. Thus began a discussion that forever changed the way I saw pregnancy.

Really, in my mind, a pregnancy announcement was somewhere along the lines of a dating announcement. When I was single, I never wanted to share that I was dating someone too soon; because if it didn’t work out, that would be awkward and embarrassing. I looked at a dating relationship as the possibility of a future marriage and therefore worthless if it didn’t end in marriage. And I was looking at pregnancy the same way – it was the possibility of a baby but worthless if it didn’t actually end in a baby. However, this reasoning had one fatal flaw. If life begins at conception, then a pregnancy is not the mere possibility of a baby – a pregnancy means that we already have a baby. Even if the Lord takes that baby home before we get to hold it in our arms, nothing can change the fact that our baby was alive for a time.

Then it hit me: If we had a 6 month-old who died, we wouldn’t try to pretend like our child never existed. We wouldn’t go through our facebook pages and remove any and all evidence of that baby’s life, nor would we regret that we had “told” people about our baby. Instead, we would grieve and share the loss with others. We would have a memorial service and honor the life that the Lord had created. True, in that scenario, the choice of keeping our baby a secret would have been removed from our hands. Yet why would we think any differently of our unborn child? Would we not grieve that child and honor the life that God had created and entrusted to us, even for so short a time? 

As Chris and I wrestled with this issue, I had to ask myself some questions: Do I want to hide my joy and pretend like everything’s normal? (Would that even be possible if I’m sitting in church, eating soda crackers and grinning like the Cheshire Cat?) Do I want to go through the first trimester of my pregnancy, worried and fearful, refusing to rejoice in case something goes wrong? Do I want to rob others of the chance to rejoice with us? Would I want to go through the grief of a miscarriage alone? Would I want to hide my tears and put on a happy face so no one suspects that we’ve suffered a loss? For me, the answer to these questions was a resounding “No!” (I understand that other women might have different answers to the same questions. Again, this is a very personal choice.)

So we went ahead and announced our pregnancy at 5 ½ weeks. We lost our sweet baby just a few weeks later, right at the close of the fateful “8 week window”. Yet we had those precious weeks of rejoicing with family and friends…of planning and hoping and praying. When we found out our baby was gone, my first thought was, “I’m so glad we told. I wish we’d found out sooner so we could’ve shared it sooner.” Looking back, I wish we had relished every day even more than we did. And we’ve had many weeks and months of weeping with others, surrounded by a community of believers who have prayed and cried with us and for us.  

We chose to name our unborn baby “Jesse” which means “gift.” We don’t know whether our baby was a boy or girl, but we do know that we were blessed with a gift from the Lord. Chris and I are convinced that God created our baby for a purpose, although we may never fully understand it this side of heaven. We know that God planned our baby before the foundation of the world and that Jesse lived all the days that God had intended for him (Psalm139).

The Lord has given us a ministry that no one ever asks for – we now have a unique understanding of grieving parents. While we prayed for a child and not for a ministry, we do not want to waste it. I have joined a secret club that I never wanted to join – that of mothers who have suffered miscarriages. It is a club shrouded in silence and oftentimes shame, with women left feeling that they cannot share their loss. This ought not to be so, especially for Christians. If we believe that life begins at conception, that should radically impact how we see pregnancy and the loss of our unborn children. We should not feel bound by the conventions of secular society, which views a miscarriage as a “minimal loss” or an awkward situation to be hidden away. Why should we hold to the principles of those who refer to our unborn babies as “fetuses” and “tissue”? These terms are disturbingly similar to those used by abortionists. Instead, we need to see our babies’ lives as God sees them – precious, made in His image, knitted together with a specific number of days allotted to them. When those days come to an end sooner than we expect, it is right and good to grieve. We should acknowledge that life and praise God for the gift of a child that we will one day meet in heaven.     

In the months since losing Jesse, our family and friends have steadfastly prayed that God would bless us with another child. On October 27^th, we discovered that those prayers had been answered. When I saw that positive on the pregnancy test for the second time in my life, I wept with joy. Again, I felt that fear and hesitation: what if something goes wrong? What if people think we’re foolish for sharing our joy, especially after what happened the first time? Yet, so many have prayed for us – would we deny them the privilege of rejoicing over God’s answer to our prayers? We are not sure what the future holds, but we do know that we have received an immeasurable blessing. So we announced our pregnancy “early” once more, knowing that the Lord has again blessed us with a child, even if we don’t know for how long.