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Hey, look on the bright side — just think how unfunny our offspring would've been!
In television, pregnancies are likelier to end in a recognized miscarriage than they do in real life. What's a female character to do when she discovers she is pregnant? It would not be too controversial for television writers to suggest an abortion, but it would be if she were actually to have one, since Good Girls Avoid Abortion. In the end, she'll make her mind up to have the baby, if it's not what she decided ought to happen in the first place.
But it won't happen, because the plot of an ongoing series would change too much if her character had to be rewritten to include raising an infant. So the writers employ the Reset Button by having her miscarry, often by falling down a flight of stairs. This trope is limited to serial works, where reverting to a status quo is more important than advancing a plot. Therefore, miscarriages are less common in non-serial works, and even when they do happen it's not a Reset Button. A common variation is for a character (usually a main character's girlfriend) to say that they've miscarried, only for The Reveal to come later that the baby was born, perfectly fine. Whether or not this gets picked up again depends on how tied the writers are to the status quo.
Keep in mind that this may be Truth In Television; somewhere between 40% and 75% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage, and by all accounts, sometimes the woman also wanted an abortion—but in most cases, the woman didn't even know she was pregnant; the fertilized egg simply fails to implant (or disintegrates upon implantation) and she either has a perfectly normal period or one that is slightly late and slightly heavier than normal. More severe critics cite the trope as a cheap source of drama for female characters, whose most important dilemmas always end up as highlighting their femininity.
However, if a woman wants to have a child, this trope probably doesn't exist to them. If they do have a miscarriage, it's usually a particularly brutal Double Subversion of the Law of Inverse Fertility.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- Used for the same purpose: Sekai in the School Days anime is Conveniently Not Pregnant After All in a last-episode retcon to establish Kotonoha's Villainy Discretion Shot. Yandere is one thing; baby-killing appears to be another, even if it's your love rival who says she's pregnant.
- Considering Kotonoha isn't in her right mind when she umm...checks, it's hard to tell whether Sekai was pregnant; perhaps it's better this way.
- Also, even if Sekai was pregnant, the early stage of her pregnancy at the moment of her murder would make it impossible for anyone who wasn't a trained medical specialist (forensic or not) to see a "baby".
- Kyrie reveals that she had one around the same time Battler was born, which is part of the reason she resents his mother. Had her son lived, Rudolf might have married her instead of Asumu. Of course, with the revelation that Asumu isn't Battler's biological mother, fans have theorized that her son might be closer than she thinks.
Comic Books
- The Batman comic Batman: Son of the Demon uses the variation. Batman joins up with his Well Intentioned Extremist enemy Ra's al Ghul, marries his daughter, Talia, and gets her pregnant. Talia decides that to defend her and the baby would hold Batman back from his mission, and fakes the miscarriage; the last we see is their son, in an orphanage, holding the necklace Bruce gave to Talia. This story was retroactively declared an Elseworld and then retconned right back to being canon years later, when Talia presented Bruce with his son Damian, now 10 years old.
- In a recent arc of Captain America, the title character's sometimes-girlfriend Agent Sharon Carter of SHIELD discovered that she was pregnant. She was then taken captive by Red Skull and, after a fight, was found stabbed in the abdomen. The next issue revealed that she had done it to herself to keep her baby away from the Skull. No one blames her. (It's hinted that Red Skull was going to use her baby as his new body.)
- Nocturne from Exiles who not only lost her child between issues but did any grieving there as well. One issue the father is put into a coma while punching out Galacticus and has to be left behind when the Exiles move on. The next issue someone asks her about why she's not showing yet and she informs them that she 'lost it 5 worlds ago and She's glad because what sort of crappy situation is this to bring a child into?'. The baby isn't mentioned again until the father comes out of his coma and the second the Nocturne says to him is 'I lost the baby' (the first is "You're Alive!")
- One of the oddest occurred in Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles. Mainly used to bridge plot points between the end of the TV series and the upcoming movie, several characters had rather sudden changes worked upon them, were killed off, etc. Perhaps the most Anvilicious was Admiral Lisa Hunter from the original Macross segment of Robotech. Due to a space battle in which she is commanding one of the ships involved (while pregnant!), she loses her baby and later steps down from military command. This is rather confusing because Admiral Rick Hunter, her husband, only shows up in one brief shot, and Lisa herself not at all. Even more confusing, there had been no canonical evidence that she was pregnant before that sequence.
- That said, the PTTSC miniseries did tend to incorporate elements of the now dubiously canon Robotech novels (as a nod to older fans), which had Rick and Lisa have a son later on. Max and Miria's psychic Messianic Archetype daughter Aurora was retconned into their hotshot ace pilot daughter Maia, so the details are not always important...
- Mary-Jane in the Spider-Man comics, as part of Marvel's constant effort to keep Spidey young. It was revealed that the baby had actually been born healthy and spirited away, but we never saw any more of this plot, except in the MC2 Alternate Continuity, where said baby eventually became Spider Girl.
Film
- In Fools Rush In, Salma Hayek's character tells her lover that she's miscarried their child who is later born on the Hoover Dam.
- Subverted in The Godfather, Kay, the wife of Michael Corleone, apparently suffers this trope, only to be revealed later that she aborted the child, out of hate towards her criminal husband. However, some argue that her "confession" is a lie meant to hurt Michael.
- Citizen Ruth is about a drug addict who gets pregnant and is fought over by Pro-Life and Pro-Choice groups who both want to use her as a pawn to farther their respective causes. Thanks to this trope, neither wins.
Literature
- Used in the Sword Of Truth series. Despite Shota's warnings that a child born of Richard and Kahlan would bring about a cataclysmic disaster, they go ahead and get pregnant. (They had an artifact to prevent conception which failed to work as advertised). Soon afterward, Kahlan is struggling over drinking a miscarriage potion and finally decides against it, pouring it away. However, she is then beaten by a gang of thugs to an inch of her life, losing the baby anyway.
- This is Older Than Steam, having been used in Fanny Hill in 1748.
- Fanny is strongly suspected to be an Unreliable Narrator. She's just been dumped by her lover (whose father has sent him on a world tour to detach him from her), she's pregnant, and she owes an astronomical sum to her landlady. Her only possible source of income is prostitution, but that would have been impossible in 1748 while pregnant. Moreover, her landlady is a "wise woman" - that is, an abortionist.
- Pam has one in one of Phyllis Reynold's Naylor's Alice books.
Live Action TV
- Martha Kent in Smallville.
- Gabrielle in season 2 of Desperate Housewives. Particularly annoying as there had been a great deal of tension built up over whether Carlos or John was the father.
- Teresa in The OC uses the variation; she doesn't miscarry, but claims she did so that Ryan will go back to the O.C.
- Subverted in Scrubs. JD goes from Sacramento to Tacoma to see Kim's ultrasound, only to leave when she tells him she's miscarried; the episode closes on her gynecologist telling her she has a healthy baby boy. This ends up becoming very important later on in the season's main plot.
- Carrie in The King Of Queens was pregnant for exactly one episode.
- Greys Anatomy's Cristina Yang unequivocally wanted an abortion in the first season, but of course, never got to go through with it due to falling ill from her ectopic pregnancy (which, also-of-course, was when the father found out about it).
- Happens to Anthony LaPaglia's character's girlfriend after she's taken hostage in Without A Trace - although there were signs the pregnancy was already in trouble, as was the relationship since she leaves soon after.
- Maddie, in Moonlighting. Cybill Shepherd was pregnant with twins in real life, and the pregnancy was written into the show — but the babies weren't. In the "Womb With a View" episode, narrated largely by Maddie's unborn baby (as played by Bruce Willis), Maddie miscarries during the baby shower.
- In the recent short-lived The Bionic Woman remake, the same car accident that leads to Jamie becoming bionic also causes her to miscarry.
- Julia got pregnant on Party of Five and was going to have an abortion, but miscarried before she got to the clinic.
- On Webster, Catherine discovered she was pregnant and lost the baby... in the same episode. Doubly-jarring, given how lighthearted Webster usually was.
- An episode of All In The Family before Gloria and Mike successfully had a baby featured Gloria finding out she was pregnant and then losing the baby almost immediately afterward. Interestingly, in the spinoff Maude, the title character did have an abortion. The episode ended with her simply making the decision with no abortion scene, but the episode was still incredibly controversial.
- Kitty in Brothers And Sisters, although she never considered an abortion, miscarried her pregnancy very early, resulting in her then-fiancé not having to deal with being a Republican presidential candidate expecting out of wedlock.
- In Rescue Me, Tommy gets his dead cousin's wife Sheila pregnant. Right around the time Tommy realizes he has to quit drinking to win his real family back, Sheila handily has a miscarriage; now that her baby is out of the way, Tommy can go live a happy life with his real wife and kids. Wait, what?
- In Upstairs Downstairs, Sarah's baby is stillborn, and Hazel has an early miscarriage. This is justified by the setting: infant mortality was much higher in 1909 and 1914. Neither case was coverup for a pregnant actress.
- Katey Sagal's Real Life pregnancy was written into a season of Married With Children, but the baby was stillborn in a third-term miscarriage. To avoid the trauma of an infant on-set so soon after her loss, Peg's pregnancy was made All Just A Dream.
- Sarah Hendrickson in Big Love.
- Caprica-Six and Saul Tigh in Battlestar Galactica with their son (Wil)Liam, possibly due to Tigh switching affections from Six back to his real wife Ellen. Apparently, Cylons need love to breed).
- NYPD BLUE: Diane miscarries her child with Bobby. (He later meets him in the afterlife.) Another time, Danny has a crisis when he gets his girlfriend pregnant, but she has a miscarriage at the end of the episode. Conveniently.
- Kirsty did this on Home And Away: first she lied she was pregnant, then to weasel out of it she lied she miscarried, and then she found she was having a baby for real, and then she miscarried for real.
- Happens constantly in soap operas. Makes you think there's something in the water...or they're all set in Love Canal...or something.
Newspaper Comics
- Curtis's mother in the newspaper comic Curtis.
Professional Wrestling
- Though there have been several pregnancy storylines, almost no children are born in Professional Wrestling, thanks largely to Convenient Miscarriages (or giving birth to rubber hands!). Then again, when the father-to-be insists on bringing the pregnant woman down to ringside, about five feet away from where he and another burly man will be throwing each other around like sacks of potatoes, perhaps this is to be expected.
- There HAS been at least one instance of a pregnancy being carried to term — Stephanie McMahon got pregnant and carried the baby successfully to full term and delivered a healthy baby girl. This is because she was pregnant in real life. As the father of the baby was her husband, WWE wrestler Triple H, (who is NOT her husband for kayfabe purposes), the impact of the pregnancy on any storylines was limited to some Fourth Wall breaking lampshadings by HHH's tag team, DX. Stephanie got pregnant again a few years later; that time, they just shot her using typical pregnancy-reducing camera tricks (slimming outfits, not a lot of camera time with her torso showing, etc.) before keeping her offscreen.
Web Comics
- Lilah in Ctrl+Alt+Del, whose miscarriage was supposedly caused by her immune system detecting the unborn child as a foreign object, which does happen in real life. This would have been particularly dramatic had the comic not been mostly light-hearted and comedic up until then, and had the author not broken up the story with regular game jokes.
- Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw of Zero Punctuation, in his special feature on webcomics, singled this episode out partially as an example of the comic's poor quality (without identifying it). The results were not pretty.
- Monette has one in Something Positive, and it was handled particularly clumsily. The storyline is barely flashed to for a few strips, focuses entirely on the relationship problem arising from it and, rather than using the term "miscarriage," refers to the event with the comic's usual brand of sensitivity ("pushing eight to nine pounds of baby matter out of her nether regions"). The miscarriage storyline was so abrupt, brief (parts disappeared into the archives before many saw them on the front page due to the comic's odd schedule), and unreferenced later that some readers were left thinking that Monette's baby had been Brother Chucked.
- It was a stillbirth, not a miscarriage, which is perhaps a reflection of how poorly it was handled. There's a specific reference to her losing the baby, and later she asks another character to visit his grave for her when she moves to California.
- This seems to have happened in Anders Loves Maria
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