“The day joy was over:” representation of pregnancy loss in the news

Abstract

ABSTRACT There has been a recent explosion of news coverage about pregnancy loss, fueled primarily by celebrities openly discussing their personal experiences on social media. At first glance, this coverage appears to be a feminist success for women. The miscarriage experience has historically been shrouded in secrecy and largely invisible in the news. To assess these discursive constructions of pregnancy loss, motherhood, and womanhood in news and lifestyle journalism, a corpus of 212 articles about pregnancy loss from the New York Times, the Washington Post, People Magazine, and Us Weekly are analyzed and compared using critical discourse analysis. This study aims to understand whether discourse about pregnancy loss differs between hard news sources and soft news sources; how the news media discursively construct the miscarriage experience; and what ideology about women is perpetuated in these articles. Findings reveal that pregnancy loss coverage reproduces essential and racialized notions of women as domestic, submissive, pious, and pure; reinforces problematic postfeminist rhetoric; and sensationalizes women’s grief in the service of profits. The main contribution of this study is the finding that journalists are perpetuating heteropatriarchal and post-racial ideology in service of the narrative of U.S. exceptionalism by framing miscarriage as an exclusively devastating experience.