Dr. Jessica Zucker was home alone when she had her miscarriage at 16 weeks. What followed — the physical experience, the grief, the silence that surrounded it — became the origin of something she couldn't have planned. A New York Times piece. A campaign. A movement. Millions of women finally saying out loud: I had a miscarriage too.

Jessica is a Los Angeles-based psychologist specializing in women's reproductive and maternal mental health. She has spent her career studying why women's experiences — pregnancy loss, postpartum struggle, the full complexity of reproductive life — remain so systematically silenced. Her two books, I Had A Miscarriage and Normalize It, are a direct response to that silence.

This conversation is raw and necessary. It covers the trifecta of silence, stigma, and shame that keeps women isolated in their grief and what it actually takes, practically and emotionally, to break the cycle.

In this conversation, Jessica doesn't speak from a distance. She brings her own grief, her own ongoing medical reality, and her own hard-won understanding of what it means to hold space for the parts of life that don't get talked about. This episode is for anyone who has experienced pregnancy loss, loves someone who has, or wants to understand how to sit with grief that often goes unspoken.

Dr. Jessica Zucker — Los Angeles-based psychologist, author, and creator of the #IHadAMiscarriage movement.

She specializes in women's reproductive and maternal mental health, and has spent her career building language and community around experiences that culture pressures women to keep quiet. Her first book, I Had A Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement, grew directly from her own 16-week pregnancy loss. Her second, Normalize It: Upending the Silence, Stigma, and Shame That Shape Women's Lives, expands that lens to the full scope of women's silenced experiences. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue, and Harvard Business Review. She has been featured on NPR, CNN, The Today Show, and Good Morning America.

To follow her: Instagram: @ihadamiscarriage

✦ Silence is the first domino and it's the one we have the most power over. Jessica's trifecta model is a cycle: silence creates stigma, stigma creates shame, shame drives more silence. The entry point for breaking it is the same as where it starts. You don't have to share publicly, or loudly, or all at once. But finding even one space where the thing can be named — on paper, with one person, in a community of strangers online — begins to interrupt what has been running unexamined.

✦ The language we use around pregnancy loss is doing something. Jessica chose "I had a miscarriage" deliberately — direct, unambiguous, not softened into something more palatable. Language shapes experience. When we reach for euphemism or vagueness to protect other people's comfort, we often pay for it with our own isolation. Her campaign was built on the premise that saying the actual thing, plainly, is itself a form of healing.

✦ Hearing "you're not alone" and actually feeling it are two very different things. Jessica makes this distinction clearly. Being told you're not alone while holding an experience in silence is hollow. The felt sense of not being alone requires contact — with someone who has been there, or who can stay present in the discomfort without trying to move past it. That's what community offers that reassurance alone cannot.

✦ Women are pressured to be "boxable" and the cost of that pressure is invisibility. Jessica talks about the societal expectation that women exist within legible categories: mother, not-mother, grieving correctly, moving on appropriately. The reality of human experience doesn't fit those boxes. Pregnancy loss, in particular, sits in a space that culture hasn't built adequate containers for. Normalizing it means building those containers — not waiting for culture to do it first.

✦ The experts are navigating their own hard things too. In one of the most honest moments of this conversation, Jessica shared that she is currently weighing whether to stay on her cancer medication — dealing with its side effects while trying to show up fully for her work and her life. The person who has built a career helping others hold difficult experiences is also, right now, holding one of her own. One thing worth sitting with: expertise doesn't exempt anyone from the hard parts. It just sometimes gives you better tools for staying present with them.

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I loved the moment Jessica talked about her father — how his willingness to have open, honest conversations when she was growing up gave her the template for not keeping things inside. She connected that directly to how she responded to her own miscarriage: not with silence, but with language. It is a great reminder that our capacity to share difficult experiences is often shaped before we're even aware of it.

If this conversation opened something up for you, there's more where this came from.

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