Shema Tariq talked about her experiences

This article appeared in our ‘Everybody’s Invited’ issue on December 5 – a special edition aimed at tackling loneliness and getting people out and about for Christmas

MISCARRIAGE is still a harmful “taboo” which makes parents feel more lonely and excluded, a doctor said this week.

Shema Tariq, a public health academic at UCL, said “it was an incredibly lonely time” after she had a stillbirth in 2017, leaving her feeling that she was not able to socialise with friends who had young children.

“I was very angry with the world. I was also clearly grieving. I couldn’t be around anybody who had children because it was just too painful,” she said.

She lost her eldest son, Altair, at 21 weeks after multiple rounds of IVF and describes the loss as “devastating”.

In 2020 she became a trustee of the charity Tommy’s which funds research into pregnancy loss and preterm delivery.

“The loneliness of infertility is very stigmatising,” Dr Tariq said. “Lots of people don’t want to talk about it because there’s a real sense of failure, that you have failed yourself because you can’t get pregnant.

“You are so immersed in the process of IVF it becomes completely all-consuming and you often have to put your work and social life on hold, and you’re so consumed with wanting to have a baby that it’s very difficult to be around other people who have families.”

She found the response from those around her after she had a stillbirth sometimes particularly isolating. “Everyone wants to brush it under the carpet, historically that’s been the case,” she said.

“Society finds the idea of the death of a child so horrifying that they can’t really engage with it, and then they kind of hold people at a distance. People don’t know what to say because they’re scared of saying the wrong thing. It is much better to acknowledge it and say something than it is to pretend like it never happened.”

As a result of some people not being there for her family during her grief, she lost some close friends but also gained new ones.

Dr Tariq started posting about her experience on Instagram and found a group online who she now sees regularly. She said partners are often forgotten about because the attention is focused on the person who had the baby.

“No one really said anything to my husband,” she said. “So don’t forget partners. I was lonely, and I reached out on Instagram and made new friends, and that’s quite a classic female thing to do but my husband wasn’t doing any of that, really.”

Dr Tariq has been able to have two children since Altair.

Although the grief of losing her son has become easier to cope with she said it is still there. Christmas was a particularly difficult time in the beginning.

“The first few Christmases when we didn’t have children, it was just so painful. Whenever you see images of Christmas, it’s people with families and children opening presents,” she said,

“And I felt so excluded from all of that. The first Christmas after losing our son was absolutely devastating for us. I think I spent the whole time in bed. Any big celebration is a time when you do reflect. It can be quite painful. Even now for us, when I’m wrapping presents for the kids I’m thinking I wonder what Altair would have wanted?

“We’ve got a star decoration with his name on the tree.”

If you need advice or support, visit https://www.tommys.org/