Understanding Reproductive Loss

The study of human reproduction has focused on reproductive ’success’ and on the struggle to achieve this, rather than on the much more common experience of ’failure’, or reproductive loss. Drawing on the latest research from The UK and Europe, The United States, Australia and Africa, this volume examines the experience of reproductive loss in its widest sense to include termination of pregnancy, miscarriage, stillbirth, perinatal and infant death, as well as - more broadly - the loss of desired normative experiences such as that associated with infertility, assisted reproduction and the medicalisation of 'high risk' pregnancy and birth.