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ABSTRACT
The ways in which celebrities speak about their experiences of pregnancy loss could provide a platform from which women in the audience can make sense of their own loss, and go some way towards helping, not the pain or grief per se, but the shame, silencing, guilt and loneliness that is often said to follow the experience. This article will examine the ways in which pregnancy loss is presented in popular celebrity listicles and, drawing on extant work from the fields of celebrity, gender and health studies, consider the ways in which they can be said to offer comfort and camaraderie to the 1 in 4 women who have experienced, or will go on to experience, a miscarriage. However, while the listicles might be applauded for drawing attention to an experience shared between female celebrities and their audience, these short-form articles routinely present miscarriage as a back story to a successful pregnancy outcome, with little health information or links to available support beyond these first-person accounts.
Disclosure statement
No financial interest or benefit has arisen from the direct applications of your research.
Notes
1. There is no single way to move on from pregnancy loss. How a woman feels will depend on her circumstances, her experience and what the pregnancy meant to her (Miscarriage Association Citation2020).
2. I am using the terms miscarriage and pregnancy loss interchangeably because of the fact that irrespective of the form of pregnancy loss; be it miscarriage, missed miscarriage, miscarriage due to ectopic, molar pregnancy or stillbirth, the experience can be similarly devastating for women, partners and families (Collins et al. Citation2014, 44–50).
3. Because the algorithms that create our Google results are personalised, this research cannot be fully replicated. That said, I am keen that this article be used as a springboard for further quantitative and qualitative research in order to gather a robust data set for the number of celebrity miscarriage listicles available online, and to discover how readers make sense of such media texts. Such research should consider the ways in which searches have been said to reproduce class and race-based norms and stereotypes (Safiya Umoja Noble Citation2018).
4. Respondents to a recent questionnaire relating to miscarriage care in the UK found that “only 23% of women who had miscarried spoke about their experiences with a friend” (Mumsnet Citation2016; Nsoesie et al. Citation2017).
5. On the back of hearing David Feinberg announce that Google is “organising the world’s health information and making it accessible to everyone”, Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard, Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners has been quoted as saying: “[i]t’s a good thing for patients to take an interest in their health, but we would recommend that they use reputable, unbiased UK websites, such as NHS.uk, as a source of safe reliable health advice” (Margi Murphy Citation2019).
6. Australian singer Kylie Minogue’s revelation about her battle with breast cancer raised awareness of the disease in popular print and electronic media and led to an increase in women seeking mammograms in the wake of the reporting. While appointments rose by 40% for those previously screened women, it soared by 101% for those previously unscreened (Kelaher et al. Citation2008, 1327).
7. By extension, there are no examples of a celebrity sharing details of a mid-pregnancy or anomaly scan that shows anything other than a healthy baby, developing as expected.
8. Black women are one and a half times more likely to experience infertility than their white counterparts (Chandra, Copen and Stephen Citation2013).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Rebecca Feasey
Rebecca Feasey is Senior Lecturer in Media Communications at Bath Spa University. She has written book length studies on masculinity and television (EUP 2008), motherhood and the small screen (Anthem 2012), maternal audiences (Peter Lang 2016) and infertility and pregnancy loss in the media (Palgrave Macmillan 2019). E-mail: [email protected]