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Hi Ece,
This is such an important topic!
When I’ve done this work I am generally a support (via herbs, acupuncture and emotional support) and the bulk of my role is in the weeks after the pregnancy has ended, but I’ve also worked a few times with individuals who were referred by their medical provider to help resolve a missed miscarriage with acupuncture and herbs.
Like you, it has also been my experience that we are sometimes the first to notice if there is trouble brewing in relation to heavy bleeding, retained tissue or infection.
I am increasingly being called as an abortion doula within my community and I’ve worked with a handful of people in this way so far – and I add in acupuncture and herbs to support recovery. I am sure the experiences vary, but I will say in general that the hormonal “crash” after a medical/surgical abortion seems to be more pronounced than with miscarriage. I’m seeing stronger yin xu signs and sometimes heavier bleeding, but its also just a few people I’ve worked with – so its hard to tell. I’m also finding that people respond incredibly well to a few well-placed acupuncture treatments and some supportive herbs to aid recovery after the medication/procedure. It’s likely I’m going to be doing alot more of this work and would be happy to keep data on all types of loss if you wanted to come up with a spreadsheet.
I do think in writing about this that it will be important to narrow your focus and decide what you’d really like to look at…I see 3-4 excellent ideas in your post. All worthy of time and effort. I also think that its rare that miscarriage and abortion are written about together because its just so complex to combine the two. I was just listening recently to a podcast episode that touched on this. If you’re interested it is the April 20th episode from the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics and is an interview with Jemma Rollo regarding her paper on Relational Ethics in pregnancy. It might be useful as a starting point. I haven’t read the paper yet (waiting to see if it will appear in Sci-Hub), but the conversation might be a helpful if you’re going to try and tackle such a sensitive topic.
I’m excited to see where this goes.