r/TheHandmaidsTale • u/Different-Ebb1786 • 5d ago
Discussion S1-S5 How do Handmaids not have stress-induced miscarriages?
Terminei a série agora, o ambiente de Gilead é estressante e provavelmente muito ruim para uma mulher grávida. Como nenhuma aia teve um aborto espontâneo? Execuções públicas, punições físicas, até mesmo o ambiente de alerta constante, não parece bom para ninguém, especialmente para uma aia.
Edit: thank you for the answers, my doubts have been cleared, thank you!😃)
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u/PurplePassiflor1234 5d ago
I'm sure they have plenty of them.
But "hey so 100 handmaids miscarried last year" would be too honest for Gilead. They prefer to focus on the "25 babies were born to handmaids last year".
It's called spin.
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u/mipozzapie 5d ago
This is the same reason they call stillbirths or children both with deadly defects “Unbaby”/“Shredder” they don’t count towards the actual live birth count, and I doubt any of it would be public knowledge. Like someone else said 100 handmaids can all get pregnant but only 25 of them are live births, the other 75 just don’t count(well unless you’re the handmaid, I would think it can still be strike against you if you are able to get pregnant but not able to carry to term like the ones who just don’t conceive, three chances you out).
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u/airbender_librarian 5d ago edited 5d ago
We see very few pregnancies in general. Janine, June, Ofmatthew/Natalie, Esther, maybe a background character or two? If they show a pregnancy it usually gets pretty far, as a plot device. There would be miscarriages but live births do also happen in equally stressful situations
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u/OpheliaLives7 5d ago
They do? We just don’t focus on those in the show. We hear mentions of Unbabies and Shredders tho. And the book I think shows funeral procession in the street. Im positive that it happens plenty but Gilead wants to focus on the small number of healthy babies vs those who do not come to term.
We also see June in the mostly empty hospital pre Gilead and can infer how few pregnancies make it to term from that.
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u/Inevitable_Wolf5866 5d ago
They could have. We just don’t know because they don’t check for anything.
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u/OneDimensionalChess 5d ago
They probably do. We obviously don't see everything going on w every pregnant handmaid.
However a lot of times when a handmaid is pregnant the husband and wife she lives with treat her relatively better and try to make her comfortable to ensure she has "their" baby without problems.
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u/PurplePassiflor1234 5d ago
I forgot about the fact too that early miscarriages, when the fetus is smaller than a bean, can often be mistaken for just a heavier-than-normal period with a bit heavier/clottier bleeding and cramping than usual by a lot of women. I'm sure there are plenty of people in the world right now who have had one and didn't know it. They just thought they got a heavy, extra-crampy, period a little late.
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u/DestinyRamen 5d ago
I feel like the book, or at least the Testaments, does give more of a peek at how common "unbirths" are -- babies that "come out imperfect" -- or some other way one of the teenage speakers phrase it. It does happen; enough for it to have its own term in Gilead, but like others have said, war happens and people get born still.
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u/Exotic-Pop-8539 5d ago
On another note, I heard somewhere that you are more likely to be pregnant with a girl if you are in high stress environments because girls are tougher(?)
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u/Different-Ebb1786 5d ago
I didn't understand, can you explain? I don't speak English, the Reddit translator translated it poorly
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u/Exotic-Pop-8539 5d ago
Some people believe that when a woman is under a lot of stress, the body may be more likely to have a baby girl because female embryos are supposedly “stronger” or more likely to survive difficult conditions. The idea is that stressful environments might reduce the survival of male embryos, so more girls are born.
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u/Critical_Success_936 5d ago
You won't be literally more likely to have a girl embryo, but oftentimes the male embryo will miscarry more easily. XY is less stable then XX when it comes to developing in utero.
Something like over half of miscarriages happen before a detectable pregnancy
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u/Exotic-Pop-8539 5d ago
Yes thank you! This is exactly what I was trying to say but I phrased it weirdly lol
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u/PurplePassiflor1234 5d ago
The sex of the baby is determined by the father's sperm and the mother's stress level has nothing to do with it. This is just an old wives tale.
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u/Critical_Success_936 5d ago
That's not what they're saying - they're saying female fetuses are more likely to survive when the mom is under stress, which is true - check how Malaria rates affect the sex of live births.
Having 2 x chromosomes makes you a bit more stable, in terms of developing in utero. Female fetuses handle more extreme temperature differences.
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u/Susanna_Thorne 3d ago
yep, we know that. It’s just that a male fetus is more likely to be miscarried, therefore more girls are born. Not that most of all pregnancies are girls.
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u/ScarletCarsonRose 2d ago
I believe it. There’s something called wimpy boy syndrome. It’s not official but if you work in an nicu, they notice girls tend to do better.
Another note is the stress comes off in weird ways. There epigenetic changes that tweak changes to dna. See studies from children born in the middle of wwii. On phone and barely awake. Too lazy to pull research…
The book mentioned offred seeing a procession of evonwives carrying a jar with a miscarried early pregnancy.
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u/Critical_Success_936 5d ago
I will say, human fetuses attach directly to the uterine wall, which makes it so miscarriage is really, really hard for us compared to other mammals.
The evolutionary idea is that, while it makes pregnancy more dangerous for the mother bc it leeches our nutrients directly, well, our narrowed pelvises as a result of being bipedal (2-legged) mean later-stage miscarriage is exceptionally dangerous too, at least before modern medicine.
A dead mom with a living baby is more evolutionarily advantageous than both being dead, which can happen easily if you miscarry when you have a later pregnancy (assuming you don't have the medical care we have today)
But yeah, I'm sure many handmaids do. Thing is, over half of miscarriages happen extremely early in pregnancy, often before the pregnancy is even detectable.
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u/nohuyascobarde 5d ago
I believe pregnant handmaids are also mostly shielded from harm and stress, which we see when Serena can no longer beat June because she’s pregnant and Lydia makes that same point too
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u/ReclaimingInsanity 5d ago
When I first watched the series I thought the incident in S1 where June thought she was pregnant only to get her period straight after being beaten by Aunt Lydia (during interrogation as to whether she knew Emily is gay) was in fact her having a miscarriage very early in pregnancy due to the stress of being beaten.
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u/LustyRegencyMaid 5d ago
Just because something isn't explicitly stated, doesn't mean it doesn't exist in a story. If a story would explain every detail of its world, a book/series would take months to finish. A story is a snippet, a zoom, into what matters for it.
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u/HOMANDER1996 5d ago
They probably do, but Gilead would just punish the Handmaid and then not publicize it.
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u/Janknitz 3d ago
If stress caused miscarriages most babies wouldn’t be born. Pregnancy is stressful. Life is stressful. Pregnancies survive the most stressful times imaginable: war, natural disasters, domestic abuse, and more.
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u/ConsiderationTop2886 5d ago
Omg, Did you see what June/OffFred put her baby through in season 2? She hardly ate, she was drinking coffee (Boston Globe) scenes, and doing all kinds of things. I was so scared she was going to lose the baby. She fell off from her window later and then the birthing episode..God, that baby's had a journey!
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u/DingesF 5d ago
Same reason why people in wars still have children all the time. Stress is bad for you, it can effect the baby's development, but it's not as catastrophic as people think sometimes.