Queenie’s pregnancy and miscarriage

Queenie Jenkins’s pregnancy and miscarriage expose the difference between believing she does not want a child and having the choice taken out of her hands. Although she has an IUD and initially regards pregnancy as incompatible with her plans, the miscarriage becomes a real loss—one that unsettles her understanding of her body, her mother, and her own responsibility for the pain in her life.

Diagnosis and uncertainty

During a medical examination, a doctor returns to check Queenie again and asks whether there is any chance she was pregnant. After consulting another doctor and reviewing the ultrasound, she tells Queenie that it looks as though she has had a miscarriage. Queenie asks why and seeks recognition of what the news means for her, but the doctor continues looking at the screen. The diagnosis is delivered in a clinical encounter where Queenie’s need to be acknowledged is not met.

The IUD becomes part of the uncertainty surrounding reproductive choice. On the bus afterward, Maggie tells Queenie that contraceptive implants and IUDs were historically put in Black women without their knowledge, and warns that the device may be affecting her. These are Maggie’s claims, not a medical explanation established by the diagnosis. Her intervention nevertheless brings a history of reproductive coercion into Queenie’s interpretation of a pregnancy that occurred despite contraception.

At a sexual-health consultation, Queenie asks for a pregnancy test even though the nurse notes that she has an IUD. She struggles to explain herself. The nurse also raises concern that her injuries are consistent with sexual violence; Queenie denies trying to protect an abusive boyfriend. The exchange shows that reproductive uncertainty and questions about her safety are both present in her encounters with care, without resolving the circumstances of the pregnancy.

Grief and the meaning of choice

At home, Queenie’s bleeding has stopped, but her cramps continue. In the bath, she prods her tender stomach and tries to reconcile the loss with what she had believed about becoming a parent. She is twenty-five and says she was not going to have a baby; she also recognizes that having contraception placed in her body suggested she did not want to carry and raise a child. Yet that preference does not erase her sense of loss: she reflects that it would have been nice to have the choice. The distinction is central to her response. The miscarriage is not transformed into a wished-for pregnancy, but neither can her earlier intention make the loss meaningless.

The experience also arrives amid separation from Tom. Unable to sleep at midnight because of the pain, Queenie begins packing her share of their belongings while he is still out. She wraps objects from their shared history—the Paris snow globe, the porcelain donkey from Spain, and a Turkish eye ornament—then takes the donkey back out of its box and returns it to the mantelpiece. The scene places physical pain beside the work of dividing a relationship’s memories; it does not make the breakup a consequence of the miscarriage, but shows how the two losses occupy the same unsettled period.

Retelling the loss in therapy

When Queenie later speaks with Janet, she says she pushed Tom away because she did not understand what was wrong or how to talk to him in time. She names the miscarriage as part of her experience of loss, then immediately tries to diminish it by joking that perhaps it does not count because she did not want a baby. In the same account, she describes feeling that friends are tired of her problems and mentions Cassandra’s move to the countryside with Guy, a man Queenie had slept with without knowing he was Cassandra’s boyfriend. Janet tells her that none of this is silly. Queenie’s tentative disclosure is met as significant rather than dismissed as trivial drama.

The pregnancy also gives Queenie a way to ask why her distress returned and why she stopped caring about her life. She wonders whether the possibility of becoming a mother brought her unresolved feelings about her own mother back to the surface. Janet agrees that pregnancy, whatever a person chooses to do, is the kind of life event that does not simply pass without an effect, and asks whether it has changed how Queenie sees her mother.

Maternal history and self-blame

Queenie answers that she had regarded her mother chiefly as someone who should have protected her, rather than as a person with her own history. She recalls the consequences of her mother’s relationship with Roy: losing a home, living alone in a hostel, becoming isolated, pursuing a court case to recover money, and becoming so fragile that she could no longer work. Queenie recognizes a resemblance between her mother’s collapse and her own, but turns that recognition into self-accusation, insisting that this time she is to blame because she has done it to herself. The pregnancy and miscarriage therefore enter a larger reckoning with inherited pain, protection, and responsibility; therapy makes room for Queenie to name those connections without establishing that she alone caused her suffering.