Erin Bromaghim

My first, and probably last, Lululemon purchase was not for Pilates. I bought it at Heathrow because I had miscarried at 30,000 feet and bled through every piece of clothing I was wearing. Nearly £200. That was the price of looking like an ordinary traveller again while my entire world was quietly ending beneath airport lights. I remember cleaning the blood from my body in a Heathrow bathroom, pulling on those new clothes and walking back into the terminal because I still had another flight to catch. People around me bought coffee, watched the departures board and complained about delays. Nobody knew that, minutes earlier, I had been staring at my blood-soaked clothes and trying to understand how I could board the next flight when the future I had imagined was no longer travelling with me. A few weeks later, I am back at my desk. And beside me is this photograph. I cannot put it away. I was told it was an empty sac. I understand what that means medically. There was no baby developing inside it. But it did not feel empty when we saw two lines. It did not feel empty when we calculated a due date, imagined telling our families and quietly began rearranging our lives to make room for someone we already loved. Medicine may call it an empty sac. But it was full of our hopes. Full of plans, prayers and the small, private happiness that begins long before anyone else knows you are pregnant. Perhaps that is what people misunderstand about miscarriage. You do not only lose what was there. You lose everything you believed was coming. Today, the UK Government confirmed that from April 2027, women and their partners who experience pregnancy loss before 24 weeks will have a legal right to take up to two weeks of bereavement leave. That word matters: bereavement. Because too many women return to work while they are still bleeding. Too many partners grieve silently. Too many people call it “sick leave” because the law has never given their loss its rightful name. I was fortunate. My managers showed me extraordinary kindness when no law required them to. But compassion should never depend upon whether you happen to work for good people. The leave will be unpaid, and that cannot be where the conversation ends. Nobody should have to decide whether they can afford to grieve. Still, today the law moved a little closer to recognising the woman who changed into £200 worth of clothes in a Heathrow bathroom, wiped her tears and boarded another flight. And the woman who now sits at her desk beside a framed photograph she still cannot put away. They called it an empty sac. But there was nothing empty about the space it left behind. 🤍