Mark Zuckerberg spoke about miscarriage on Facebook: Here's why we should applaud him

Who are you on Facebook? The person who loves Modi? The person who hates Modi? And broccoli, potholes, Britney Spears, Calcutta and Delhi’s autos? Are you the person who shares poetry? Cuddly animal videos? Every smidgen of professional success?

Chances are on most days, you are not your fears, your pain or your anxieties on Facebook - a platform meant to communicate. You are either eating out and ‘feeling fantastic’ or wishing people ‘happy friendship day’ or ‘feeling wonderful’. Those few times you ‘feel upset’, it’s because you are craving Maggi, or you have lost your umbrella or your phone has stopped working. You have obviously known greater joys, deeper pain, but your Facebook persona is a carefully scripted character, someone who is perhaps more ’like’-able than the real you.

Mark Zuckerberg, the man who created this virtual world for us to perform in, however, did something most of us do not do. Rarely in real life, almost never on social media. While announcing that he is expecting a baby girl with his wife Priscilla which is common enough on Facebook, he also recounted the several miscarriages they had to face over the years. Even more remarkably Zuckerberg spoke about the experience of miscarriage as something they underwent together.

Most conversations around miscarriages attribute the experience exclusively to women. That’s not biologically incorrect since the woman is the one bearing the physical consequences of the miscarriage. Saying ‘my wife/partner suffered a miscarriage’ doesn’t necessarily stem from insensitivity. However, there is great reassurance, even if it’s symbolic, when her partner chooses to share the experience of the event, more so publicly. Not just sympathise but also empathise. Zuckerberg did just that.

He says in his Facebook post , “We want to share one experience to start. We’ve been trying to have a child for a couple of years and have had three miscarriages along the way."  

Yes, he says, ‘we have suffered three miscarriages’.

The experience of a miscarriage is always physically exhausting and in most cases emotionally draining too. Many women have partners or a family who choose to place the blame for the event on the woman, when it could have occurred despite her taking great precautions. Understandably therefore, women across the world have hailed Zuckerberg for his statement.

“You feel so hopeful when you learn you’re going to have a child. You start imagining who they’ll become and dreaming of hopes for their future. You start making plans, and then they’re gone. It’s a lonely experience. Most people don’t discuss miscarriages because you worry your problems will distance you or reflect upon you – as if you’re defective or did something to cause this. So you struggle on your own,” he says in the post.

He doesn’t sugarcoat the disappointment of a miscarriage. But he goes on to explain how a miscarriage need not be a terrifying experience, straining your relationship, draining your courage. How conversing about it with some degree of candour can actually help you heal faster.

“In today’s open and connected world, discussing these issues doesn’t distance us; it brings us together. It creates understanding and tolerance, and it gives us hope… We hope that sharing our experience will give more people the same hope we felt and will help more people feel comfortable sharing their stories as well,” he adds.

Women and men across the world have congratulated Zuckerberg on his impending fatherhood. Besides that, they have also thanked him for taking a necessary step in busting myths and the silence around miscarriages and the common practice of blaming women for it. Thanks to his statement many more on social media and mainstream media have started talking about miscarriages, their own experiences, that of people close to them.

Today quotes 41-year-old Lisa Sims recounting her experience of a miscarriage. “It was really devastating. I felt so alone and isolated because nobody really talks about miscarriage. I really felt like I wasn’t the woman that God designed me to be,” she says, adding, “I felt like I was just defective.”

Zuckerberg’s post, says Sims, is a crucial step towards encouraging women to talk about miscarriages and find both solace, strength and regaining their confidence.

In a world where most cultures tie a woman’s worth to her ability to bear a child, and it’s usual to construct narratives of femininity around procreation and most social discourses glorify a woman’s womb, inability to bear a child can be an alienating, depressing experience. Losing a child while it’s in the mother’s womb can drive some women to question their own worth, and send them into a downward spiral of depression.

The Telegraph promptly followed Zuckerberg’s post up with an article on miscarriage myths.  Anna Almendrala, a writer with Huffington Post , wrote a moving piece on miscarriage myths and discussing miscarriage in a public space. Almendrala recollects in her piece how friends, siblings, colleagues, family members spoke about the event as if it were a secret ritual she had carried out herself without either the knowledge or the participation of her husband. If there was a victim in the story, it was her husband. Her husband, however, was completely supportive and had dealt with it rather efficiently.

“And so it went throughout the days that followed; I’d be sitting in a daze on the couch and suddenly remember that more people needed telling. “You told John! Now you have to tell him about the miscarriage,” or “Justin knew!”

Almendrala’s story is the story of many women across the world. That’s why Zuckerberg saying ‘we suffered a miscarriage’ is a not something that should be taken lightly. And Facebook, as its creator just showed, can be much more than a place where you flaunt your dinners. There’s great potential for empathy in social media. We need to seize it.