Guilt and emptiness: women's experiences of miscarriage.

Women who lose an early pregnancy are shocked when they are first given the information that they have miscarried. Later they feel guilt and emptiness. Heideggerian interpretive phenomenology has been used with 13 women from southwest Sweden to uncover their lived experience of miscarriage. Women plan their future with a child during early pregnancy. When miscarriage occurs it is not a gore, an embryo, or a fetus they lose, it is their child. They feel that they are the cause of the miscarriage through something they have done, eaten, or thought. They feel abandonment and they grieve for their profound loss; they are actually in bereavement.