Chemical Pregnancy
If you have begun to miscarry, and hadn’t yet been able to hear your baby’s heartbeat with a doppler, your doctor might have said that you are having a chemical pregnancy.
This means that it’s a very early miscarriage.
This very early miscarriage–or the name of it–doesn’t make your baby any less real. At 5 weeks gestation, just about the time you may have found out that you were pregnant, your baby was about the size of a sesame seed. And, at 5 weeks gestation, your tiny baby’s heart has already begun to beat. It’s just too small to be heard on a Doppler.
While identifying your baby at this stage is probably just not going to happen, because of everything that is delivered during the miscarriage, including uterine lining and lots of blood, your baby is real. Your feelings about your baby are real.
Ectopic Pregnancy
An ectopic pregnancy means that your baby has attached itself to an area outside of the uterus rather than inside your actual uterus. This situation can be fatal to the mother unless the pregnancy ends as quickly as possible.
This can be a very heartwrenching situation for a mother, who may mistakenly believe that she needs to have an “elective abortion”. In an elective abortion, a mother electively chooses to terminate her pregnancy-despite the knowledge that the baby most probably would go on to develop through a full term pregnancy, and have a live birth. In an ectopic pregnancy, the very high probability of the both the baby dying and the mother dying, make delivering the baby as quickly as possible a necessity.
