Content note: this article contains descriptions of baby loss and miscarriage that readers may find upsetting.

Jodie Nicholson, 33, was seven weeks pregnant when she started bleeding at work. “Right away, I knew I had miscarried,” she tells Stylist. “There was too much blood for it to be anything else.” When she rang the IVF clinic, which had helped her become pregnant after trying unsuccessfully for six years, Jodie was told to head to A&E. When she arrived, she was sent to the early pregnancy assessment unit and asked to sit in the waiting room until she could be seen.

“I was petrified,” she says. “By this point, my underwear and super-strength pad were soaked through. It just wasn’t right, and I was certain I had lost the baby I had tried so hard for.”

Taking her seat in the waiting room laden with posters of smiling babies and leaflets about parenting, Jodie became painfully aware of all the pregnant women around her. She recalls one couple discussing in hushed tones their unborn baby’s nursery and the colour scheme and furniture they’d choose. “I could feel my heart rate increasing,” she says. “But I kept sitting, hoping that the wait wouldn’t be long before I was seen.”

Sadly, Jodie’s suspicions about her miscarriage were right. “I felt like the wind had been taken out of me,” she says, remembering the moment the miscarriage was confirmed. A week later, Jodie went back to the early pregnancy assessment unit for a pre-booked appointment to confirm the miscarriage had finished. Once again, she was placed in the general waiting area. This time, there was no grabbing onto hope. Her baby wasn’t alive as all these babies twirled and kicked in their mothers’ stomachs.

“Even knowing I had miscarried, I had been placed in this room,” she says. “I was incredibly angry. Instead of being able to grieve the loss of my baby and a wasted IVF treatment, I was hit with visions of what I could have had, what I wanted so badly.”

Nicole Marie Gunter vividly remembers being told at her 21-week scan that there was no amniotic fluid around her baby. “We were told that the baby had a 30% chance of surviving pregnancy,” she says. “There was no guarantee he would be breathing because of the lethal damage to his lungs and his stomach had collapsed. If he was able to breathe for himself at birth, he would be straight into NICU and would have spent most of his early years in hospital on dialysis and needing a kidney transplant at two years old.”

Nicole made the difficult decision to be induced early as the doctor said he’d be able to do more for her baby out than in. Given the sensitive nature of the birth, she was told to go straight to the labour ward, where midwives would be waiting for her.

“When we arrived at the labour ward, they didn’t know about me and told me to go to the maternity ward,” she says. “I tried to explain that I couldn’t do that because there were newborn babies on the ward, knowing that I may not be leaving with my baby, but they were very dismissive. I had to go to the maternity ward, only to be told by an auxiliary that they didn’t know about me and to take a seat and wait.”

The experience of waiting near other mothers haunts Nicole even today. 

Louise Caldwell, 40, was given the devastating news that her baby didn’t have a heartbeat during her 12-week scan. She remembers sitting in the maternity unit waiting room before the scan next to a heavily pregnant woman who was also waiting. After the scan, Louise passed the same woman from the waiting room in a treatment room. “She was lying on the bed with the curtain open and her baby’s heartbeat was loud on the monitor,” she tells us. “My emotions went from uncomfortable, nervous and anxious to sadness, heartache, embarrassment and shame.”

The experience seared in her memory, Louise set out to advocate to MPs for separate spaces for mothers who had lost their babies. “I don’t want other women going through what I did because the trauma, pain and heartache is mental torture,” she says. “It would have benefited me to have a separate location because I would have felt relaxed, more comfortable and less tense. There would have been no anxiety about who I would see or what I would hear. I could completely focus on the heartache of losing my baby, not another woman’s bump.”

Louise’s campaign led to the opening of baby loss rooms in Lanarkshire and Shetland, but she’s not done yet. She is hoping for support from Westminster so that all other maternity hospitals in the UK will follow suit.

“Separate spaces are so important, not just waiting rooms but other areas too,” she added.

For Jodie, Nicole, Louise and other mothers experiencing pregnancy complications or baby loss, waiting in an early pregnancy assessment unit, maternity triage or labour ward with happily pregnant women or new mothers can feel like torture in the middle of their trauma.

“If someone is losing their baby through a miscarriage or having to make a decision around termination for medical reasons, they should absolutely have a separate, quiet space,” says Jen Coates of the charity Sands. “Privacy and dignity are so important.”

Coates also talked about the vital importance of having separate, soundproof spaces for parents to grieve after the death of their babies. “Being able to hear babies from the room you are in can be really distressing,” she said.

But what can be done about it? 

“As service providers, there is a moral injury in having these different groups of people sitting side by side,” Leah Hazard, a midwife and activist, tells Stylist. “No midwife would want to cause that distress for a mother.”

If a woman enters an early pregnancy assessment unit or maternity triage with a complication or loss, Hazard said most midwives would “try to bring that person into a single side room straight away” so she wouldn’t have to sit among other women. And on a labour ward, many hospitals will make every effort to keep a mother who has lost her baby away from the cries of newborn babies.

“But it comes down to infrastructure and physical resources,” says Hazard. “A lot of these units are relatively old and sensitivity towards pregnant people was not the foremost concern for the people who designed them. It may not always be possible to put that person into a separate waiting area. It just depends on the size, capacity and layout of the unit.”

Hazard says someone experiencing miscarriage or baby loss should always feel she can ask to be placed in a different space. If midwives can make it happen, they will. Unfortunately, though, you can’t ask for something that doesn’t exist.

“We can’t just magic up another room,” she said. “I would be in favour of more sensitive design and more capacity for people coming in with different circumstances. But that would require better and new hospitals, and a fresh approach to the environment.”

In recent years, hospital trusts have worked together with Sands to create bereavement suites to provide a peaceful and distanced space away from the maternity ward for parents after the death of a baby.

But collaborative work is still to be done by hospital trusts and the government to ensure there are separate spaces for grieving mothers and partners on early pregnancy assessment units and maternity triages. 

“We are determined about accommodating everyone in every circumstance,” Hazard says. “But the reason why women in distress are often having to wait among more comfortable women is not because we want them to, but because there is no other option.”

After Jodie’s experience, she started a petition, asking the government to require that the NHS offer separate rooms to parents going through pregnancy complications or loss, and she hopes that with enough signatures, the petition will be reviewed by politicians.

“We need to be given the option to process our emotions in a safe, comfortable space,” Jodie says. “If I had this space, I would have felt safe and able to grieve my loss. Losing a baby is traumatic enough – it shouldn’t be made more traumatic by having to wait with those who are celebrating life while we mourn death.”

To sign the petition, head here.

Images: Getty