Miscarriages for Black Girls is a community-centered book project inviting Black women and femmes to share writing about miscarriage, still birth, termination for medical reasons, and recurrent pregnancy loss. This book exists because silence has been treated as the appropriate posture for this kind of loss. Many of us have been offered quiet instead of care, distance instead of witness, and efficiency instead of tenderness. We have been told to grieve privately, return quickly, and keep it moving.

This project refuses that.

Miscarriage is often framed as common but private, medical but apolitical, unfortunate but uncomplicated. For Black women and femmes, pregnancy loss, still birth, and terminations for medical reasons ar rarely experienced in neutral conditions. It unfolds inside a country shaped by racialized medical neglect and disbelief, and inside a healthcare system shaped by bureaucracy, liability, and profit. It unfolds alongside unequal access to timely care, unequal exposure to chronic stress and environmental harm, and unequal protection under law. It unfolds within relationships, workplaces, families, and faith traditions that may not know how to hold the grief, or may demand that grief remain small.

This book makes room for what is too often minimized, managed, or processed.

We welcome submissions in many forms, including:

• Personal essays

• Poems

• Letters (to a baby, to your body, to God, to a partner, to yourself)

• Prayers, fragments, journal entries, lists, voice-note transcriptions

• Reflections that contradict themselves, because grief often does

Work may be tender, furious, numb, faithful, profane, unresolved, or still learning how to speak. There is no single correct tone. There is only honesty.

Work from Black fathers and grandparents is also welcome. 

This project is for Black women and femmes, including (but not limited to) Black Americans, African and Caribbean immigrants, Afro-Latinx women, and Black people of mixed heritage. You do not need to be a professional writer. You do not need to have the “right” vocabulary. Your experience is enough.

Submissions are welcome regardless of when the loss occurred. If it was recent, if it was years ago, if it still lives in your body as if it happened yesterday, you are invited.

Submissions may be published under your name, under a pen name, or anonymously. Contributors will have the opportunity to review and approve how their work appears before publication. 

This book is not a clinical manual and it is not medical advice. It is not a tidy narrative of overcoming. It is not a single story trying to stand in for everyone. It is a chorus. A record. An archive of what too often goes undocumented, not only in medical charts, but in family memory.

We are living in a moment where reproductive care is being redefined by law, surveillance, and fear. The same medications and procedures used for abortion are also used for miscarriage management, and delays, denials, and legal ambiguity are not experienced equally. For Black women, whose pain and urgency are already more likely to be dismissed, that shift intensifies existing vulnerability. This book is one response: community as care, witnessing as resistance, language as a form of holding.