Why don't we talk more about premature birth?

One in ten births happens early. But here's why we often don't expect it.

Welcome to Not a Doctor, the only newsletter about health and science that is about to get a little earnest.

I’m Melody Schreiber, a journalist and the editor of What We Didn’t Expect: Personal Stories About Premature Birth. I’m not a doctor, or a scientist, or really an expert of any kind. I just like to ask questions and try to find the answers to them.

And today, I’m asking questions about something deeply personal for me: premature birth.

🌡 🌡 🌡

It’s finally here! What We Didn’t Expect is out in the world, available wherever books are sold — indie bookstores, Bookshop, Amazon, Target, Walmart, you name it.

I had a lovely time at the book’s virtual launch at Loyalty Bookstores last week, and I’m over the moon excited for this book to be out in the world. You can get a sneak preview of the collection over at Romper in this lovely excerpt by Kelsey Osgood.

Next, I’ll host a virtual discussion with my literary agent, Eric Smith, at One More Page Books & More tomorrow night at 7 pm ET. The event is free, but please RSVP in advance for the link!

The event tomorrow is particularly exciting because we will also celebrate World Prematurity Day. In fact, all of November is Prematurity Awareness Month. So, let’s talk about premature birth: how common it is and what it’s like to go through it.

In a way, premature birth has always been with me. My twin sisters arrived early when I was four years old. Some of my earliest memories center around my mom going on hospital bed rest, and eventually seeing my tiny little sisters. They only graced the world for a day, but their impact reverberates among our family even now.

When my sister went into early labor a few years ago with her twins, we all held our breath. But they made it through labor and a long stay in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), and my niece and nephew are now cheerful little firecrackers.

Even though I visited them in NICU, I didn’t fully process what that time was like for my sister and her partner, or, years earlier, for my parents.

It wasn’t until my water broke 27 weeks into my own pregnancy that I even realized how common prematurity is.

As I began reading up on preemies, I learned that 10 percent of babies are born early in the United States. That’s the highest rate in the developed world. It means 400,000 families go through this every year, or more than 1,000 a day.

Yet we rarely talk about this common event. The reasons are complicated, but chief among them is our unwillingness to acknowledge that when it comes to our health, things can (and will) go wrong.

We don’t like thinking about the ways our lives are vulnerable, but there is no time like a pandemic to talk about it. Sometimes, our plans go sideways. Sometimes, the unthinkable happens — and then you realize how common this experience really is. Turns out, it’s pretty thinkable after all.

I wanted to create this anthology so that we could start talking about experiences like these. Because I believe that when we talk about it, we remove some of the sting.

Often when I talk to other preemie families, we realize how much guilt we carry. We believe, consciously or not, that we have failed our children. We went into labor too early, or we struggled to feed and care for our tiny little babies, or we didn’t recognize the signs of complications from their preterm birth.

I have often wondered: how could I struggle so much with something that billions of people throughout the course of history have done so easily? I sometimes forget that if my baby were born at any other time in history, he almost certainly wouldn’t have made it. Medical advances saved his life, and I’m immensely grateful for the sheer luck of our circumstances.

But I think the reason for this guilt is the sense that we have failed at something that should have been so easy. We think that we are the only ones who are ashamed of our bodies or our abilities as parents. We think we’re the only ones who have felt the strain on our relationships of the stress of caring for a preemie. We look on social media and we see announcements of blissful chubby-cheeked babies born full-term and we wonder: what did I do wrong?

But when we do that, we’re not just forgetting the long history of preterm babies who didn’t have a chance at survival. We also forget how common this experience is, when in fact everyone has some experience with premature birth. And we forget that everyone has their own struggles, even when they’re not immediately visible to us.

That’s why I talk about it. Because when we talk about it, we shine a light on some of the darkest corners. We realize how much we have in common — and we realize that we are all doing the best we can for our families.

I love writing about health and science because it is so deeply personal. I hope the stories in What We Didn’t Expect provide comfort and inspiration to those going through challenges and crises... which is basically all of us, at some point or another. Let’s keep talking about it.

🌡 🌡 🌡

As always, please leave a comment or email me (melodyaschreiber@gmail.com) if you have any questions. You can also follow me on Twitter and Instagram, if you’re so inclined.

If you liked this post, don’t forget to hit the little heart at the top. And if you know someone who might appreciate this newsletter, please forward it to them!