15th April 2026: Dr Beth Malory

1.10-2pm [with optional extended discussion time until 2.20pm]

“It just made me feel very broken”: Self-reported experiences of medical misogyny in UK pregnancy loss consultations

Beth Malory (University College London)

Recent years have seen increasing public discourse around so-called ‘medical misogyny’ (Iacobucci, 2024; Nargund, 2024) in the UK. Whilst this phenomenon rarely seems to be defined explicitly, the phrase is often used to refer to “a tendency of doctors to overlook or dismiss women’s symptoms as psychosomatic” (Bloom & Moskalenko, 2021). As Malory (2025) demonstrates, such dismissal of symptoms, both psychological and physiological, is pervasive in UK pregnancy loss care. This paper demonstrates, moreover, that medical misogyny also manifests in the discursive representation of bodies experiencing pregnancy loss as problematic, aberrant, or deviant. This phenomenon constitutes a clear contemporary manifestation of what Malson (2023) describes as “patriarchal discursive strategies by which ‘woman’ has historically been constituted as other” (ii), including within a paternalistic biomedical paradigm which privileges clinical perceptions over experiential phenomenology.

Drawing on metalinguistic focus group and survey data from 200+ participants, the paper reports the findings of thematic and discourse analyses. These findings provide insights into the experience of pregnancy loss consultations in a contemporary UK context, indicating that some types of loss are closely associated with discourses of ‘brokenness’. They show, for example, that consultations for ectopic pregnancy and Pregnancy of Unknown Location (PUL), when a fertilized embryo is known or suspected to have implanted outside of the uterus, are particularly associated with such discourses.

This paper discusses the implications of these findings for terminology recommendations and communications guidance and training for clinical settings, which can ensure that terminology and discourses of brokenness are not perpetuated further in contexts of reproductive healthcare.

References

Bloom, M., & Moskalenko, S. (2021). Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon. Stanford University Press.

Iacobucci, G. (2024). “Medical misogyny” leaves many women in pain, MPs’ inquiry finds. BMJ, q2780. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.q2780

Malory, B. (2025). Language, Gender, and Pregnancy Loss. Cambridge University Press.

Malson, H. (2023). The Thin Woman: Feminism, Post-structuralism and the Social Psychology of Anorexia Nervosa. Routledge.

Nargund, G. (2024). We need to transform women’s healthcare to tackle “medical misogyny”. BMJ, q2813. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.q2813

This session takes place in Room 3.58 of the John Percival Building at Cardiff University or join us via Teams using this link.