Christa Craven

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities have a long history of memorializing loss—The NAMES Project or AIDS memorial quilt, the Transgender Day of Remembrance, and art and fiction memorializing the Stonewall riots. Yet as Heather Love cautions in Feeling Backward, queer losses are frequently hard to identify or mourn since many aspects of historical gay culture are associated with the pain and shame of the closet (2). The subject of reproductive loss—the personal, and sometimes communal, experiences of miscarriage, infant death, and failed adoptions—has often been a silent burden for LGBTQ parents, one frequently intensified by fears of homophobia and heterosexism. Queer losses are also overlooked (or perhaps avoided) in most academic and popular books on LGBTQ reproduction, and queer experiences remain absent from most self-help books on recovering from reproductive loss (Peel and Cain). J. Halberstam has argued that " failure " to meet conventional standards of success (in this case bringing children into a family, albeit a queer one) can offer creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of challenging heteronormative understandings of love and life (2). Furthermore, Juana María Rodríguez advocates a reconceptualization of a queer sexual politics informed by both utopian longings and everyday failures (7). This chapter takes up the everyday experiences of queer reproductive losses and the memorialization of these experiences through physical memorials, religious and/or spiritual services, and commemorative tattoos.

When parents and researchers talk of queer perspectives on pregnancy, birth and parenting, an issue that we often avoid is queer experiences of loss during pregnancy, birth or adoption. This chapter centers on the personal narratives collected by two researchers—an American anthropologist and a British psychologist —who met online after their own experiences with pregnancy loss as queer women. We present the stories of queer people—primarily lesbian and bisexual women, but also several gay men and transpeople—as they have experienced reproductive loss. These stories are drawn from Peel’s online survey of 60 non-heterosexual women from the UK, USA, Canada and Australia and Craven’s 40 interviews with LGBTQ people who had experienced loss in the USA and Canada. We argue that for LGBTQ people, challenges in achieving conception and adoption amplify stories of loss, and that both grief and hope suffuse stories of reproductive loss. We identify several factors, such as the severely under-researched experiences of non-gestational or “social” parents, financial concerns about loss following assisted reproduction or adoption expenses, and fears of further marginalization as non-normative parents. These issues are particular, if not unique to queer experiences of reproductive loss. As most research and existing resources for support have focused heavily on the experiences of married, heterosexual (primarily white, middle-class) women, we conclude by suggesting ways for medical professionals and support groups to better serve LGBTQ people following reproductive loss.