Core Value Series: Encouraging Community

By: Maria Servold EPLA Editor

In the core value series, the editors of Hope Blooms seek to show the heart of the EPLA by describing our core values. We encourage you to remember the children we’ve lost and stand with families suffering from miscarriage.

Encouraging Community
One of the most common feelings you may experience after the loss of a child is loneliness. It can feel like no one understands your pain and emptiness and that there is no one to walk beside you through your grief. 
What we need most in these moments is community - people around us who can love, support, and guide us through the incredibly trying time after a miscarriage. These connections can be personal, which tap into another core value of ours: loving people. 

But support after a miscarriage should also come from the community at large. This is partially why the EPLA was created: to build online and real world communities for families suffering from miscarriage. Not that long ago, there were very few resources for women after miscarriages, particularly early ones. By creating a place to discuss miscarriage, we encourage the greater community to better understand what it is and how to help. 

Through things like this blog, attendance at loss conferences, participation in walks of remembrance, and distribution of resources, the EPLA seeks to engage and encourage people from around the world in this topic.

By bringing attention to early pregnancy loss, we hope we can destigmatize miscarriage, thereby helping women who suffer them feel accepted and loved. When miscarriage is no longer a taboo subject, those who have suffered from it can come out into the light and find others who have gone through the same thing. When women and families come together and support each other, a community is born. 

By bringing attention to early pregnancy loss, we hope we can destigmatize miscarriage, thereby helping women who suffer them feel accepted and loved. 

Maria Servold is an Editor at the EPLA, Assistant Director of the Herbert H. Dow II Program in American Journalism, and Lecturer in Journalism at Hillsdale College.