JM on the Miscarriage in Paradise
October 23, 2005 As posted on the Simon & Schuster Bulletin Board

I'm sorry I didn't see this thread 5 years ago; if I had, I would have replied this way:

I can readily understand why the heartbroken mother who posted the original message in this topic would bitterly object to having people refer to her still-born baby (at 7 months into her pregnancy) as a "miscarriage." And I feel very badly for inadvertently adding to her misery by referring to Meredith having a "miscarriage" at 6 months into her pregnancy in PARADISE.

However, my use of the word "miscarriage" in PARADISE wasn't an inadvertent mistake or an error. Because PARADISE was a novel that was going to be read by millions of women all over the world with varying degrees of medical knowledge, and also translated into 80 different languages, I decided not to choose a term from a Medical Dictionary to describe what happened to Meredith. Instead, I chose the appropriate term as defined by the General Dictionaries we all use because this term was less daunting, less distracting, and less likely to be misunderstood and mistranslated. The term was "Miscarriage."

Had I used a somewhat more technical term from a Medical Dictionary, it would actually have been "Spontaneous Abortion."

I don't have to tell you how badly misinterpreted, misunderstood and mistranslated that term would have been.

There were other terms available in the Medical Dictionary, but I felt all of them would be needlessly disconcerting, and even distressingly gruesome, to a lot of readers.

For much the same reason, I used the term "baby" in PARADISE, rather than "fetus," though either term would have been technically correct.

At the end of this message, I'll include the general-usage North American Dictionary definitions of some of these terms so that you can consider them for yourself.

I suppose at this point, I ought to tell you that when I wrote about what happened to Meredith and why her baby didn't survive, I didn't need to look it up in any reference book. I have very vivid, chillingly gruesome memories of what my sister's OB/GYN referred to as a "Spontaneous Abortion." My sister had two of them, one during the sixth month of her pregnancy, and another during the fifth month of her next pregnancy. The second one occurred one night when we were both visiting our parents, and the baby didn't survive.

The first "SA" occurred around the middle of my sister's sixth month of pregnancy. She made it to the hospital that time, and a tiny baby boy was born, then rushed by ambulance (while being baptized on the way at my sister's heartbroken request and given the name "Christopher") to the neo-natal ward at Cardinal Glennon Hospital for Children.

My sister's obstetrician warned us that the baby "was too little" to survive which translated in medical terms to the fact that at 6 months plus some days, his little lungs couldn't function properly. At Cardinal Glennon, we were told that no baby born that prematurely had ever survived, but they fought for him anyway and for days we hung around the window of the neo-natal ward, watching him struggle to breath with life support systems doing most of the work. He was the most beautiful baby I'd ever seen, tiny and perfect, even with his head shaved and IV's running into his scalp. We stood at the window, each of us unknowingly breathing in whatever tempo he was.

I've told you all that because it relates to another issue our BB member brought up in her long ago post that started this topic:

quote:
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Meredith lost Elizabeth in her 6th month, that's not a miscarriage that's a still birth. In fact it might not have even been a still birth - Meredith mentions that Elizabeth was too little to be saved, which makes me think Elizabeth survived labor and died after birth. And as such it really bothers me that Meredith et al refer to the loss of Elizabeth as a 'miscarriage'.
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Obviously, my own personal experience says otherwise. However, my experience was more than 30 years ago, PARADISE was written 15 years ago, and medical science has made advances in neo-natal care by leaps and bounds. For example, not long after baby Christopher was born huge advances were made in dealing with tiny premature lungs. Today, babies who were born much earlier than he was, are able to survive.

The thing to remember is that things change, experiences vary and color our opinions, but the experiences are equally authentic and the conflicting opinions are equally valid. It's good to keep all of that in mind when we ponder something we've read.

PS--

Last month, Chris took me to dinner while he was in Houston on business. He insisted on paying the bill, too. I think he put me on his expense account.

Oh, and by the way, he is still gorgeous!

Did I mention that for several months after he was born, he was the youngest baby on record to survive? Very soon afterward, however, those medical advances I referred to began taking place, and before he was a year old, he'd lost that particular distinction.

[ October 23, 2005, 03:34 AM: Message edited by: Judith McNaught ]

I forgot to post the dictionary definitions I referred to in my last message. Here they are:

Miscarriage

1. premature expulsion of fetus. An involuntary ending of a pregnancy through the discharge of the fetus from the womb at too early a stage in its development for it to survive.

Technical name "Abortion"

Also called "Spontaneous Abortion."

Fetus

1. Unborn offspring. An unborn vertebrate at a stage when all the structural features of the adult are recognizable, especially an unborn human offspring after eight weeks of development

Baby--

Unborn child. A child that is still in the womb.

As to whether Meredith and Matt ever went together to visit Elizabeth's grave--of course they would have. You know the kind of people they were--how could anyone doubt they would have done that?

As to why I didn't show them visiting Elizabeth's grave in PARADISE--I didn't do that because enough is enough. There's a line of distinction between writing a scene that is painful and wrenching, but cathartic versus writing a scene that is just plain maudlin. Maybe it's just me, but I have limits on how much fictional sorrow I'm willing to endure. Or inflict on readers

~~ Judith McNaught on Simon & Schuster's SimonSays Discussion Board