In 2025, UCC introduced a Pregnancy Loss Support Policy for staff, recognising the impact of losses under 23 weeks.
Miscarriage impacts one in four pregnancies, and these policies and practices have the potential to make a very meaningful difference to people’s lives.
These are very recent changes, but pregnancy loss and infertility have always been part of human life.
While we can often trace ancestors through a family tree, the history of infertility is much harder to research.
Sometimes it is visible in documents and census records, and sometimes it may be hidden through histories of adoption or through different kinds of family units being formed in a household.
It was often an experience associated with sadness and stigma, particularly in societies which prioritised and privileged the family above all else.
Historical archives tend to hold sources on high-profile and high-status cases — where a royal couple could not produce an heir, for example.
Literate women sometimes recorded their experiences of miscarriage in their diaries and reflections.
Nineteenth-century newspapers carried advertisements for cures and solutions of different sorts, aimed at both men and women.
On January 2, 1850, the Kerry Evening Post advertised ‘The Cordial Balm of Syriagum’, which promised to be "a renovator of the impaired functions of life", including "total impotence, barrenness, or sterility".
On 12 August 1876, the Irish Times let people know how to obtain a guide to ladies’ health from Dr Val Mulvaney of Christ Church Place in Dublin, which included "instruction for both single and married life, explains the cause of weakness, hysteria, irregularities, sterility, &c.
and the names of medicine in each case required to effect a cure".
People also turned to folk medicines, cures, and practices to try to find help and support.
In early 20th-century Ireland, the family unit comprised of parents and children living together was held up as the ideal.
This was evident across legal systems, in the media, and in cultural representations.
On 9 February, 1928, the Irish Independent newspaper reported approvingly on a series of pro-natalist measures taken in Hungary.
This article noted that "super-taxes" would be imposed on "bachelors capable of founding families", that children would be "taught at school that childlessness is tantamount to treason to the country".
A series of stained-glass windows from the 1950s in All Saints’ Church in Drimoleague, Co.
Cork, clearly visualised the family ideal.
A group of young people stand underneath a signpost which has three options —....
