Depictions of childbirth, abortion, or miscarriage are rare in the canon of Western painting,[1] and Kahlo is "one of the only major artists to directly communicate her reproductive grief through visual art.

Per Kahlo's biographer Hayden Herrera, on 26 May she wrote her friend and advisor Dr. Leo Eloesser that she was two months pregnant and had first gone to see Dr. Pratt at Henry Ford Hospital approximately a week prior.

In the letter she itemized her doubts about her ability to deliver a healthy child, challenges with her schedule, her lack of family support, and Rivera's inability to parent.

[3] Whether the experience depicted in both Henry Ford Hospital and a related untitled lithograph[14] should be characterized as an abortion or a miscarriage remains a topic of contention in art scholarship.

[15] In this surrealist self-portrait the artist lies in a floating hospital bed surrounded by blood and totems representing her experience and emotions.

While she was still in the hospital, Kahlo asked for medical illustrations that described her fetus and the human biology of pregnancy loss, but the doctors refused her request.

She is tethered by red threads to a teaching model of female reproductive anatomy, a snail ("a private allusive reference"[1]), a piece of steel-gray medical equipment (possibly an autoclave[12]), a purple orchid, and a human pelvis bone.

[11] Henry Ford Hospital is one of several Kahlo artworks that include simultaneously medically accurate and surrealist images of reproduction; her painting My Birth (1932) is another major example.