When the Loss Has No Name: Chinese Medicine and Pregnancy Loss

Your body went through a postpartum period, and no one told you. Here's what recovery actually requires — and what the UK just did about it.

MATERNAL HEALTH

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10/4/20266 min read

October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month, and October 15th is Remembrance Day. I want to write about this carefully, because it is a subject most of us have been taught to move past quickly — and because I think Chinese medicine has something genuinely useful to offer that almost nobody is saying out loud.

Here it is: your body went through a postpartum period, and no one told you that.

If you have experienced a miscarriage, a loss later in pregnancy, or an ending that came with no explanation at all — your body did not skip the recovery. It did the work. It shifted hormonally, physically, energetically. It expended Blood and Qi. And then, in most cases, it was expected to carry on within days, without the care, the meals, the visitors, or the permission to rest that a living baby would have brought.

That gap is where so much unnecessary suffering lives.

What does Chinese medicine understand about pregnancy loss?

First, a thing worth saying plainly: pregnancy loss is common. Somewhere between ten and twenty percent of known pregnancies end this way, and the true number is higher because many losses happen before anyone knows. The overwhelming majority are caused by chromosomal factors entirely outside anyone’s control.

I want to be direct about this because I have sat with women who have spent years auditing themselves — the coffee, the stress, the lifted box, the argument. Chinese medicine does not offer you a cause to blame yourself for. What it offers is a framework for recovery.

In Chinese medicine, any end to a pregnancy — at any stage — represents a significant loss of Blood and Qi, and draws on Kidney Jing, the body’s deepest constitutional reserve. This is true at six weeks and it is true at thirty. The scale differs; the category does not. Classical texts treat postpartum recovery after loss with the same seriousness as recovery after a live birth, and in some ways with more — because the emotional component compounds the physical one.

There is a phrase in Chinese medicine: the Heart and the Uterus are connected by a vessel. The Bao Mai. It is an anatomical claim and an emotional one at the same time, and I have never found a better description of what this particular grief feels like in the body.

What does recovery actually look like?

The same things that support any postpartum body, offered to a body that people forgot was postpartum.

Warmth

Cold is the enemy of recovery in Chinese medicine. Warm food, warm drinks, warm clothing, a covered lower back and abdomen. No cold drinks, no raw salads for a few weeks, no swimming in a cold river because you are trying to feel something. Warmth helps the body finish what it started.

Blood-building food

Bone broth, dark leafy greens, beets, red dates, black sesame, goji berries, liver if you can tolerate it. Blood loss is Blood loss, and the body rebuilds it from what you give it. This is the single most concrete thing you can do in the first weeks.

Rest that you do not have to justify

This is the hardest one, because there is no baby to point to. Nobody brings a casserole for a loss. I want to say clearly, as a practitioner: you are allowed to rest. You do not have to earn it by having something to show for it.

Acupuncture

Treatment after pregnancy loss works on several layers at once — rebuilding Qi and Blood, regulating the hormonal shift, supporting the uterus in returning to baseline, and tending the Heart and the Shen, which is where the grief lives. For women hoping to conceive again, it also supports the body’s readiness, though I always say the same thing: there is no rush that your body owes anyone.

Why does this surface in autumn?

We are in Metal season, and Metal governs grief and the act of letting go. If you read my September post on grief, you already know the argument: the losses that never get a ceremony do not disappear. They settle into the body, and autumn draws them closer to the surface.

Pregnancy loss may be the clearest example of a grief without a ceremony that exists. There is often no funeral, no obituary, no formal acknowledgment that something ended. Many women grieve a loss that other people in their lives never knew about at all.

In Chinese medicine, grief lives in the Lung — which is why this particular sorrow so often shows up as a chest that will not fully expand, a shallow breath, a tightness across the upper back, or a susceptibility to every illness moving through the house. The body is holding something it was never given room to release.

October 15th exists for exactly this reason. A day, named, for a loss that usually has no name.

Something is finally starting to change.

The United Kingdom recently announced new legal rights that take effect in April 2027. Among them: women who experience pregnancy loss before 24 weeks — including miscarriage, termination, and failed IVF transfers — and their partners will be entitled to up to two weeks of bereavement leave.

Before this, there was no statutory right to any time off at all. An estimated one in five women in the UK experience miscarriage in their lifetime, and until now the law offered them nothing.

What struck me most was a detail in how the policy was written. Employees need only notify their employer “as soon as is reasonably practicable,” and no evidence of the loss is required. Someone sat down and thought carefully about what it would mean to ask a grieving woman to document her miscarriage for HR. That is a small mercy, and it is the kind of small mercy that tells you a policy was written by people who were actually paying attention.

The minister who announced it said something I have not been able to stop thinking about: “No one should have to fight for time to grieve.”

The United States has no equivalent protection. There is no federal right to bereavement leave of any kind, for any loss. If you took a single day after a miscarriage, you likely used sick time, or vacation, or nothing at all.

But laws tend to follow culture, and culture follows what people are willing to say out loud. Which is part of why I am writing this.

If you are in this.

I am not going to tell you it happened for a reason, or that your body knew what it was doing, or any of the other things people say when they are uncomfortable and want to help.

What I will tell you is that the physical depletion is real, that it is treatable, and that you deserve the same care a mother with a baby in her arms would receive. Chinese medicine has been offering that care for a very long time, and I offer it here in St. Helens.

Whether it happened last month or fifteen years ago — a body that was never fully tended can still be tended now. It is not too late. It is genuinely never too late.

Support and Community

RESOURCES

Nourishment, Reading, and Gentle Support

Blood-Building Nourishment

Red date (jujube) tea — classical Blood tonic, gentle and easy to sip
Bone broth — the foundation of postpartum recovery in Chinese medicine
Black sesame seeds — nourish Kidney Jing and Blood
Iron supplement (if indicated) — Blood loss commonly causes deficiency

Warmth and Comfort

Heating pad for the low back and abdomen — warmth is medicine here
Weighted blanket — deep pressure calms a nervous system in grief

Books That Actually Help

It's OK That You're Not OK by Megan Devine — rejects the tidy stages of grief
Welcome to the Grief Club: Because You Don’t Have to Go Through It Alone by Janine Kwoh - One of my favorite books on processing grief
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken — a memoir of loss, written without platitudes
The First Forty Days by Heng Ou — postpartum nourishment through a Chinese medicine lens

This post contains affiliate links. I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend things I genuinely believe in.

You are allowed to be cared for.

I see patients at Well Within in St. Helens, OR. If you are recovering from a pregnancy loss — recent or long past — I would be honored to support you.

Book your first visit at sashadewsnup.com.

Helping you to heal. — Sasha

Postpartum Support International — free support groups specifically for pregnancy and infant loss, plus a helpline: postpartum.net · 1-800-944-4773

Share Pregnancy & Infant Loss Support — national network with local chapters: nationalshare.org

If you are struggling with thoughts of self-harm or in crisis, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by calling or texting 988 in the United States.