It's time we started talking about miscarriage

It's a lot right?

One in four pregnancies will end in a miscarriage before the 10 week mark.

And yet, it's something we don't seem to discuss.

Somewhere it's become ingrained in society that when you fall pregnant you shouldn't speak of it until the 12 week mark.

Just in case.

Just in case something goes wrong and you miscarry, is the implied implication.

And yet why is that?

Actress Anne Hathaway made headlines this week when she opened up about her miscarriage.

From everything that she said about acting, her career and her personal life, it was the comments about her miscarriage that other media outlets focused on and reproduced.

In 2015 she had a miscarriage while she was performing an off-Broadway production of Grounded.

The play tells the story of a female US Air Force pilot who is no longer able to fly when she becomes pregnant. During the six-week production, Ms Hathaway would have to pretend to give birth onstage every night.

All while dealing with her own loss.

She didn't speak of it publicly at the time, but Ms Hathaway shared the information with her close friends.

And as she started talking about it to her friends, Ms Hathaway found many of them had gone through similar experiences.

"I thought, Where is this information? Why are we feeling so unnecessarily isolated? That's where we take on damage. So I decided that I was going to talk about it," she told Vanity Fair.

According to SANDS, a not-for-profit organisation in Australia that offers support for miscarriage, stillbirth and newborn death, each year there are 103,688 pregnancies lost to miscarriage.

That's a lot of families going through grief.

And yet, it's a subject so rarely spoken about that when a celebrity mentions she had a miscarriage almost 10 years ago. It makes headlines.

In October, Chezzi Denyer spoke to ACM about her battle in trying to have a third baby.

After having three miscarriages in a row, Ms Denyer described how she "felt very lost and broken".

"I just could not understand how it was happening, or why it was happening. I could fall pregnant, but I just couldn't seem to remain pregnant," she said.

Unlike the two celebrities I've mentioned, I'm not advocating for everyone who has had a miscarriage to go to the media and make it publicly known (although if you want to share on your experience with miscarriage I'm here to listen).

But I do think each time we talk about it, that isolation barrier breaks down.

The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists says many women who have experienced a pregnancy loss "feel guilty and may blame themselves".

Let's be honest, unless you're smoking and drinking while pregnant, in the vast majority of cases, the mother did nothing to cause the miscarriage.

And for most people, the reason the pregnancy ended will never be known.

RANZCOG says when prospective parents learn that one in four confirmed pregnancies end in loss, it helps couples to understand they're not alone.

Okay, that's great.

But understanding comes so much easier if you're not just hearing that statistic but normalising it too.

Ms Hathaway said she decided to speak up because she no longer wanted to feel shame about "something that statistically seemed quite normal".

After only hinting at her the struggles she had gone through on her Instagram following the miscarriage, Ms Hathaway said "the thing that broke my heart, blew my mind and gave me hope" was all the women who would come up to her, almost daily and share their pain.

We need to do more of that.

There's about 284 miscarriages a day across the country.

Maybe there are reasons to keep it private, that's okay.

But let's make it part of the conversation.

Let's take away that isolation and break down those barriers.

If you want to shout about your pregnancy from the rooftops, go ahead. Don't wait until the 12 week mark because there's a chance it may not go as you had planned.

Because let's be honest, you're definitely not alone.