It often becomes clear that pregnancies carried to term after one or more previous losses are shaped by those earlier events, not only in terms of the quality of the emotional investment in the baby, but also in terms of the intensity of the distress that affects the mother during the postpartum period.
Difficulty carrying a pregnancy forward, in fact, often conceals deep conflicts, both personal and generational, tied in particular to the relationships the woman experienced as a child with her mother, her father, her brothers, and her sisters. These conflicts are unconscious, that is, they belong to that part of the mind that cannot be known through rationality and logic, but that acts as the engine driving a person in one direction or another regardless of their conscious will. For exactly this reason, it would be important for a woman, after a miscarriage or an abortion, to be able to do some work on herself, in order to try to process these conflicts, that is, to reduce their intensity, which might otherwise surface again in other unpleasant situations, such as a subsequent loss. Even so, in cases where these conflicts do not compromise the ability to conceive, so that the loss is followed by the birth of a baby, they remain latent and easily find an outlet during the postpartum period.
This is a physiologically difficult time, one in which the changes a newborn requires occur precisely when the woman is particularly fragile, because she must accept separation from a baby who is no longer part of herself, and must find her new identity, different both from that of a pregnant woman and from the one she had before the pregnancy.
The distress women experience after one or more losses (spontaneous or induced), if left unaddressed at the time, often resurfaces with particular intensity after the birth of a later baby. The postpartum period, in fact, acts as a litmus test for the conflicts tied to motherhood, present in every woman but with varying intensity, so much so that in some cases the symptoms can become so painful and disabling that they finally have to be addressed. If this processing had taken place after the first loss, these new mothers would probably experience future pregnancies differently. Above all, their children would have a different relationship with their mother from as early as intrauterine life. Infant psychoprophylaxis, in fact, begins even before conception, through the preparation of a «maternal environment» that is less conflicted, and therefore better suited to hosting an embryo/fetus and later caring for a child.