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Good morning. There’s something unavoidably public about the later stages of pregnancy, when a woman’s whole body becomes a visible sign of what’s to come. But there’s something deeply private about a miscarriage, particularly one in the early weeks after conception. A report yesterday said one in seven pregnancies worldwide ends in miscarriage, and eleven percent of women endure such an experience at least once in their lifetime. Incidence isn’t evenly spread: it seems being black increases the risk by 43%. For most, miscarriage is a silent trauma. For those who go through the tragedy of losing a child, the grief is overwhelming. But there’s the modest consolation that everyone recognises the immensity of your catastrophe. By contrast if, a few weeks after discovering you’re expecting, you go through the pain and sadness of miscarriage, your grief is seldom acknowledged. People invariably say, ‘Try again.’ Though meant to be helpful, such words can be heard as saying, ‘I’m not willing to enter with you into your grief and the particularity of your loss. I can’t stay with the sadness of this. Come back in a few months when you’ve got a happy story to tell me.’ We seldom hold funeral services after a miscarriage; we don’t keep graves; we don’t mark anniversaries of loss or birthdays of the conceived but unborn. Instead, we deal privately with physical effects like blood clots and heart disease, or mental legacies like depression and post-traumatic stress. As the Lancet puts it, ‘The lack of medical progress should be shocking. Instead, there’s a pervasive acceptance.’ We grow up to be independent, active individuals, furious about politics, passionate about football, anxious about Covid. But each one of us was once a tiny zygote, that became an embryo, and eventually a baby. We are the lucky ones. A significant percentage didn’t make it. None of us chose to be conceived. Few of us seriously contemplate how extraordinarily minuscule are the odds of our existing at all. We are each, as the psalm puts it, ‘fearfully and wonderfully made.’ By the time we’re born we’ve been through enough changes and chances of this fleeting world to last a lifetime. There’s important work to do on reducing the incidence of miscarriage, and addressing disparities for different social groups. But tenderly to be with those who bear a silent grief requires us to contemplate the fragility of life, and cherish the moments and days miraculously given to each one of us. For conception and birth are a profound mystery: second only to the wonder of life itself.