Domestic Church
Faith
Formation
Liturgical
year
Resources
respect life
Series
subscribe
subscribe

Two Griefs, One Mercy | Miscarriage vs Abortion and What Women (and Men) Need

by Martina Kreitzer

Faith  ·  Grief  ·  Healing

Tenderness  ·  Truth  ·  Mercy

I have sat with both kinds of women.

I have been one of them.

Three times, I have carried a child I would not bring home. Three times, I have known the particular silence of a loss the world does not quite know how to hold – and I have watched other women carry a grief that looked like mine from the outside and felt entirely different from the inside. Whether your grief comes from miscarriage and abortion loss, from a body that feels like it failed you or a decision you can never undo, this post is for you. Both of you. The Church’s mercy is wide enough – and specific enough – to meet each of you where you actually are.

This is not a doctrinal statement dressed up in pastoral language. It is not here to rank suffering or assign blame. It is an honest look at two real griefs – and a conviction that mercy is not sameness. Treating it as such does not help either woman. It leaves one feeling invisible and the other feeling flattened.

So let’s name them both – honestly, tenderly, and without flinching.

Mercy is not sameness. And treating it as such does not help either woman. It leaves one feeling invisible and the other feeling flattened.

For the Miscarrying Mother: What Your Grief May Look Like

What your grief may look like – and what you need

You did not choose this.

That is the first thing anyone should say to you, and often the last thing anyone does. Your body may have failed you, or the pregnancy was not viable, or something happened that no one can fully explain – and now you are here, holding a grief the culture around you does not have good language for. Even the Church, which has the theology to hold you, does not always have the infrastructure. Your priest may not have known what to say. Your parish may not have offered a blessing. You may have gone home from the hospital and back to your life within days, carrying something enormous in complete silence.

Your grief is real. Your child was real. The bond you felt – even at six weeks, even before a heartbeat was confirmed on a screen – was written into you. It does not require a certain number of weeks to be legitimate. It does not require a visible loss to count.

“The death of babies through miscarriage is a time to honor their lives and to support their grieving families.” – USCCB

What grief may look like

You may feel a sorrow so large it surprises you. Then, almost immediately, you feel guilty for how large it is – as if you are being dramatic about something the world considers minor. You are not being dramatic. You lost a child.

Invisibility is another layer. The world moves on in a week, and yet you are still standing in the same hallway, holding the same weight, wondering if you are the only one who still remembers. You are not the only one. Your child is remembered by God, entrusted to His great mercy, held in the communion of saints before you even had time to name him or her.

Anger often follows – at your body, at God, at the woman in your circle who announced her pregnancy the same week you lost yours and has no idea. Anger is not a failure of faith. It is grief with nowhere to go. Additionally, many women describe a longing that is harder to name: the need for someone to simply say the name. To acknowledge that a person existed. To not change the subject.

What you need

You need witness. You need someone to sit in the loss with you rather than rush you through it. Furthermore, you need permission – to name your child, memorialize your child, grieve your child as the person he or she was. That permission is exactly what the Church gives you.

The Blessing of Parents After a Miscarriage or Stillbirth exists. Mass intentions exist. The Order for the Naming of an Infant Who Died Before Birth exists. These are not small things. They are the Church saying: this child was here. This mother is grieving. We see them both.

Resources like A Catholic Guide to Miscarriage, Stillbirth, and Infant Loss by Abigail Jorgensen – a Catholic bereavement doula who has walked this road herself – exist because the need is real and the gap has been large. Red Bird Ministries offers retreats, spiritual direction, and community for both mothers and fathers. Catholic Miscarriage Support offers immediate, practical guidance rooted in Church teaching.

What you do not need

You do not need to be told it was God’s plan, that at least it was early, that you can try again, or that you should be grateful for the children you have. None of these things are comforting. Most of them are not even true in the way they are meant. God’s sovereignty does not eliminate your grief. Trying again does not replace this child.

You are allowed to take as long as you need, and you are allowed to still be grieving at a year, at five years, at every October 15th for the rest of your life. Grief is not a problem to be solved. It is love with nowhere to go – and the Church walks with you in it.

For the Post-Abortive Mother: What Your Grief May Look Like

What your grief may look like – and what you need

You may not have thought of yourself as grieving.

That is often the first complication – the grief itself is buried under the question of whether you are allowed to feel it. The culture that told you it was a choice may not have prepared you for the weight of that choice. The healing ministries within the Church may feel like the last place you can bring your pain. And so you carry it alone, in a silence that is different from the miscarrying mother’s silence – because yours has a layer of shame underneath it.

That shame is not the end of your story. However, it is real, and it deserves to be named.

What grief may look like

Moreover, post-abortive grief often comes in waves – sometimes years later, triggered by a due date you still remember, a child the same age yours would have been, a pregnancy announcement that cracks something open in you that you thought was sealed shut.

There is also the question of permission. Many women feel they forfeited the right to grieve – that a choice was made and grief is not something you get to claim alongside it. This is not true. Grief and culpability are not mutually exclusive. You can have been wrong and still be heartbroken. The Church holds both of those things at once – and does not require you to perform one before it will acknowledge the other.

Many women also describe a profound disconnection – a numbness, a dissociation, a sense that they never quite let themselves feel it at the time and now do not know how to reach it. This experience is far more common than anyone acknowledges. Moreover, it is not permanent. As a result, healing often begins not with confession but with finally allowing the grief to surface at all.

Many post-abortive women also carry a quiet misunderstanding about confession – that absolution is both the beginning and the end, and that if peace does not follow immediately, something is spiritually wrong with them. Confession is not the end of the healing. It is the beginning of it. Reconciliation restores the relationship with God. The grief still needs somewhere to go.

You may feel like there is no safe place for this. And in many dioceses, you are not entirely wrong – which is a failure the Church needs to reckon with, not something you should internalize as evidence of your own unworthiness.

You are allowed to name your child

So let us say it plainly: you are allowed to name your child. You are allowed to speak that name, to memorialize that child, to ask God where your child is – and to trust, as Pope St. John Paul II wrote in Evangelium Vitae, that you can entrust your child to the Father and his mercy. The Church does not withhold that consolation from you. Furthermore, it never did. That applies to you. Fully. Without condition.

Naming is not permission to rewrite the past. Rather, it is an act of love for a person who existed – and an act of honesty about the grief you have been carrying alone.

What you need

You need mercy that does not make you earn it first. You need someone who will let the grief be grief before they make it a lesson. Specifically, you need peer support from women who have walked this path – not a general grief group, but a room full of women who know exactly what you are carrying because they carried it too.

Project Rachel exists for this. Rachel’s Vineyard retreats exist for this. The sacrament of Reconciliation – received not in fear but in the knowledge that God’s mercy is wider than your worst moment – exists for this.

Theresa Burke, who founded Rachel’s Vineyard and wrote Forbidden Grief, spent decades documenting what happens when post-abortive grief is suppressed rather than witnessed. It resurfaces. It always resurfaces – in relationships, in anxiety, in a complicated response to subsequent pregnancies, in a grief that never had permission to be grief and so became something harder to name.

You are allowed to grieve. You are allowed to name your child. His mercy is not a reward for the deserving. It is a gift for the broken – and it belongs to you.

Why Miscarriage and Abortion Grief Require Different Support

These two griefs look similar from the outside. A woman quiet in her pew. A woman who flinches at baby showers. Or a woman who goes still when someone announces a pregnancy. If you love her, you want to help – and you may not know which grief you are standing next to.

Here is what serves both women: presence over explanation. Silence over solutions. The willingness to say “I’m so sorry” and mean it without adding anything after the comma.

However, what wounds each woman is specific.

The miscarrying mother does not need her loss minimized, her timeline rushed, or the suggestion that another pregnancy will fix it. She does not need a silver lining. She needs a witness.

The post-abortive mother does not need moral instruction before mercy, confession framed as a transaction that should produce instant peace, or – on the other end – a false reassurance that skips over the reality of what happened. She needs mercy that is honest enough to hold both the grief and the truth at once.

“The Church has the theology. What she continues to build is the infrastructure.”

The National Catholic Register has noted that miscarriage ministry in the Catholic Church is largely decentralized – with priests and laity alike often uncertain what to do, and many couples never discovering the resources that exist for them. Abigail Jorgensen’s A Catholic Guide to Miscarriage, Stillbirth, and Infant Loss was described as first-of-its-kind when published in 2024. Project Rachel has been present in most dioceses since 1975 – yet awareness remains low, access is inconsistent, and many women never find it.

The Church has the theology. What she continues to build is the infrastructure. That gap is not a criticism – it is an invitation. An invitation to parishes, to ministers, to lay Catholics who love someone carrying one of these griefs: build the pathway. Light the way. Be the infrastructure when the institution has not yet caught up.

A Word to the Men

You are in this too.

The man who held his wife while she miscarried and the man who drove someone to a clinic are not carrying the same thing – and yet, both of them are carrying something real. These two griefs in men deserve their own full treatment, and we will go there in a dedicated post. For now: you are not forgotten, and your grief is not invisible.

Closing

Two women. Two griefs. One mercy.

The Church does not hand them the same pamphlet – or should not. Real mercy is specific. It meets each woman in the actual shape of her loss, not a generalized version of it. Furthermore, the Church does not require either woman to become the other before she opens her arms to hold her.

Who Needs to Hear This

If you are the miscarrying mother, hear this: you are seen. Your child is known – by name, by God, by the communion of saints who hold him or her even now. Furthermore, your grief has a home in the heart of the Church, even when the parish down the street has not yet figured out how to show you that. The infrastructure may be incomplete. However, the theology is not. The mercy is not. And consequently, neither is the welcome.

If you are the post-abortive mother, know this: you are not beyond mercy. In fact, you were never beyond mercy – not for a single moment, not even in your darkest silence. The grief you have been carrying alone has a name. Furthermore, it has a path, and a community of women who have walked it before you, waiting to walk it with you now. You do not have to find your way in the dark. Someone is ready to light the way – if only you will let them.

That is what we are trying to do here.

From the Vault

Related reading from the Catholic Sistas archives:

Reflection Questions For the

Miscarrying Mother

  • Have you given yourself permission to name your grief fully – not minimize it for the comfort of others?
  • Is there someone in your life who will speak your child’s name with you?
  • Have you asked your parish about a blessing, a Mass intention, or a memorial? If not, what has stopped you?

Post-Abortive Mother

  • Is there a grief underneath the shame that you have not yet allowed yourself to feel?
  • Have you received the sacrament of Reconciliation – not as a transaction, but as the beginning of healing?
  • Do you know that you are allowed to name your child – and that naming is an act of love, not denial?
  • Do you know that Project Rachel exists, and that it is confidential, non-judgmental, and available in most dioceses?

People Who Love Them

  • Do you know which grief you are standing next to – and does it change what you offer?
  • Are you willing to sit in the loss without fixing it?
  • What would it mean for your parish to have a real, visible, consistent response to both of these griefs?

Resources

miscarriage and abortion grief Catholic healing mercy Church support
by Martina KreitzerPosted in Abortion, Ink Slingers, Martina, Motherhood, Respect Life, VocationsTags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0 comments
Add a comment...

Your email is never published or shared. Required fields are marked *

    More Details, please!

    Find us on the Gram, Pinterest, & Facebook!