These experienced losses may include involuntary childlessness generally, pregnancy loss from all causes (including ectopic pregnancy, spontaneous abortion, induced abortion, and traumatic injury), perinatal death, stillbirth, infecundity and infertility from all causes (including voluntary, coerced or accidental sterilization, and post-menopausal infertility), failed attempts to conceive, failed fertility treatments, failed gestational surrogacy procedures, and losses related to all dimensions of the adoption process.
[1][2][3] Responses to miscarriage, stillbirth, selective reduction and neonatal death are a subtype of reproductive loss called perinatal bereavement.
[6] However, per the Journal of Social Philosophy, processing these experiences is complicated by the lack of "settled cultural—or philosophical—understanding of what exactly is bad or grief-worthy about the death of an embryo/fetus or the failure of a pregnancy to produce a surviving child.
"[8] The ambiguity of the reproductive loss may be central to its experience of the bereaved; Maureen Corrigan called stillbirth a "nightmare that hasn't been quite categorized.
"[10] L. Serene Jones of Yale Divinity School found that both American mainline Protestant and feminist communities had little discourse on the concept of reproductive loss or grief.