Pregnancy loss can provoke a profound and complex form of grief, marked by sudden, unexpected loss and a lack of societal frameworks to help navigate the experience. As the bereaved often lack memories of the lost child, grieving is further complicated. Metaphors play a key role in expressing difficult emotions, as they help individuals make sense of their experiences. Studies have shown that people use more metaphors when describing personal emotional experiences, especially those not widely shared, such as pregnancy loss. The Death before Birth project (2016-2018) studied how women in England used metaphors to describe their experience of pregnancy loss. Metaphors involving journeys, containers, and division were prevalent, reflecting the isolating nature of the grief. The embodied aspect of the loss was significant, as the grief was often felt physically. Participants also experienced a shift in their relationship with their bodies, with some blaming them for the loss. Accepting the ongoing nature of grief while integrating it into their lives was a major step in recovery. Building on this work, the study is now being extended to France in the PERINAT project, which also includes fathers’ experiences. This paper is the first of several papers in which we compare and contrast the findings from the two projects, allowing us to better understand the experiences of English and French parents who have experienced pregnancy loss. In this first paper we focus on the strong parallels between the two sets of interviews. We discuss these parallels in depth and explore what they reveal about the experience of pregnancy loss in the two countries.
This study investigates how women discursively construct their childbirth experiences in online forums, particularly in relation to obstetric violence. By analyzing 2,618 comments from the Mumsnet platform, the research explores the linguistic strategies women use to narrate their experiences, including direct speech, sensory details, and rhetorical devices. Using Braun and Clarke’s six-phase thematic analysis framework within a Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) approach, the study identifies four key themes. The findings reveal that online narratives, often structured as micro-narratives, provide a space for sense-making, emotional validation, and solidarity-building. Additionally, the study highlights the role of social media in amplifying women’s voices, with the hashtag #MeToo emerging as a linguistic marker that connects childbirth experiences to broader discussions of gender-based violence. Ultimately, the research underscores the need for systemic reforms in maternity care, emphasizing respectful treatment, informed consent, and gender-sensitive practices.
Feminist linguists tend to confer great power to language, but what is this power exactly and can it be tested? The present study aims at providing a first exploration of the effect of English neologisms coined in contemporary feminism, such as manspreading or himpathy, on the perception of the denoted concept. Drawing from the literature on neology, cognitive linguistics, and philosophy of language, the study suggests the possible hypostatisation effect of feminist neologisms, which can be tested by assessing the utility of the concepts they represent. To observe whether the knowledge of feminist neologisms increases the perception of utility of the denoted concepts, a questionnaire was designed. In total, 112 English speakers completed the questionnaire. The results show that participants who knew a neologism prior to the questionnaire perceived the denoted concept as more useful than participants who did not know the neologism. Moreover, the results of the questionnaire revealed similarities to be explored with studies observing the effect of gender-fair language. While the study of the impact of neologisms on our representations is only in its early stages, that of gender-fair language is well advanced and should be used as an inspiration.
Perinatal bereavement is one of the most challenging yet unspoken types of grief. In many European languages the lack of a lexicalised item to refer to prematurely deceased babies and their parents witnesses to the stigmatization that still broadly surrounds perinatal death, making it difficult to identify, let alone acknowledge, those who have experienced it. In the context of perinatal death, identifying new terms to designate parents and their deceased babies affirms the reality of their bereaved condition, which can prove beneficial to tackle the invisibility of perinatal loss and help prevent cases of dysfunctional grief, as defended by hypostatization theory.This paper reflects on the issue of designation in the French language of deceased babies and their parents. We investigate this question by means of a survey based on questionnaires administered to a total of 181 bereaved parents (88 male, 91 female, 2 empty answers). The parents’ responses are analysed via three different methods: a descriptive analysis, an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), and an analysis using Item Response Theory (IRT). The descriptive analysis reveals a strong agreement among the bereaved parents as to which words they are more prone to use. The exploratory factor analysis uncovers three meaningful clusters in their responses, which represent three latent semantic traits: (i) metaphor-based terms, (ii) more conventional expressions of mourning, and (iii) terms referring to absence or loss. The IRT-analysis links these tendencies to socio-demographic variables (such as age, gender, involvement in help groups, religion, etc.) that influence the choice of one lexical formation over another.
