Scrap Coins

According to the March of Dimes, about ten to fifteen percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. However, pregnancy loss is often accompanied by a silence that limits those who are grieving from having the public memorials traditionally associated with a death.

In her book I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, A Movement, psychologist Jessica Zucker attempts to transform culturally accepted norms around miscarriage. Zucker identifies a trifecta of responses that accompany pregnancy loss⁠—silence, stigma, and shame. Noting that some people choose to process their grief in silence, Zucker focuses on making sure that stigma and shame are not the causes of the silence around miscarriage.

“We have the right to mourn the milestones reached only in the most hopeful recesses of our minds⁠—the first steps that were never walked, the first words that were never spoken,” she writes. In the quilt “Scrap Coins,” Heather Kinion worked through her mourning by piecing together the remnants of a previous quilt project. The tiny pieces of her small quilt help to publicly memorialize the tiny life lost.

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