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But for all the women who want to share what they’ve been through – the grief, the physical and psychological stress, the pain and hopeful determination, the difficulty of fielding well-meaning questions that cut like a knife – many prefer to deal with their experiences in private. In reporting this story, the National Post heard from a dozen Canadian women who have experienced infertility or pregnancy loss. Most of them wanted to tell their stories – but without their names attached.

Danielle, a twentysomething professional in Alberta has miscarried twice, the second time because of a ruptured ectopic pregnancy that saw her lose a litre and a half of blood. The first time she didn’t even tell her parents. And some of her friends still don’t know what she’s gone through.

“Pregnancy is really romanticized,” she says. “It’s a miracle, it’s a gift. And so if you’re not capable of being pregnant or you can’t keep your pregnancy, what does this mean for you? That you’re cursed?

“It makes people who’ve been through it feel like they can’t talk about it because there’s this voodoo superstition around fertility: ‘If you just relax, it’ll happen for you’ or ‘This wasn’t the time,’ ‘It wasn’t meant to be.’ It’s said with the best of intentions but there’s a sincere lack of empathy behind it.”

“I’m a hypocrite for being angry because if people had talked about it, I maybe wouldn’t have felt that shame and that brokenness,” she says. “But at the same time I wasn’t willing to talk.” Not discussing it helped protect her from pain.