After Publicly Miscarrying Her Baby in Supermarket, Actress Comes to Realization About Her 'Failure'

Eight weeks into her second pregnancy, actress Ashley Williams felt some discomfort, but she chalked it up to "miraculous evidence of new life."

In her piece for the Human Development Project, "I Need to Talk About My Miscarriage," she explains that she tried to smile through the pain while she carted her son Gus to the grocery store underneath their apartment building.

As they were headed for the pizza aisle, she felt something on her leg. She writes:

"A heavy, dark, and slow stream of blood made its way down my left inner thigh. Without thinking, I swiped it. My fingertips came up wet."

When her son asked her about her blood-soaked shorts, she simply replied, "That's an emergency," before texting her husband that he needed to come home.

She was experiencing a miscarriage.

Williams quickly learned that her emergency wasn't so uncommon. In fact, her midwife told her that at her age, one in four women miscarry. This piece of information left her wondering:

"If 25 percent of my peers are currently experiencing miscarriages right alongside me, why wasn’t I prepared? Why don’t we talk about it? Why was I feeling embarrassed, broken, like a walking wound?"

Her questions were not answered when she spoke with her friends, most of whom had experienced a miscarriage themselves.

Williams pondered whether women were silent about losing an unborn child because they, in a sense, felt like they had failed.

"My (still bloated) gut feeling is that something even more painful silences us — the fear that we, as women, are failures. Procreation, the driving purpose in our constructed notion of womanhood, is broken by this sudden trauma."

She admits that her miscarriage deeply hurt her confidence and caused her to question her strength. But as she thought about it some more, she realized just how strong she really is.

Now, Williams is talking about her miscarriage in an attempt to "normalize her miscarriage."

"I stand here in front of you, chalk in hand, needing to normalize my miscarriage. And I’d love to hear about yours. I believe this it will allow me — and us — to gather hope and strength."

She ends by imparting encouragement for other moms who, like her, have suffered a miscarriage:

"You are not broken. You did nothing wrong. You are strong, you are brave, and there is hope."

Williams knows that if talking about it can help her heal, it can help others heal as well.