Brenda is a respected leader in her church and heads a city-wide prayer ministry. To others, she’s a spiritual anchor. But beneath her faithful service lies decades of hidden grief, shared only with her husband. Unfortunately, fear of judgment has kept her silent in the very community where she’s most active. One morning, a breakthrough occurred. At a community meeting, a stranger sat beside her and introduced herself as a director of a local pregnancy clinic. Brenda, surprising even herself, leaned in and quietly shared, “I’ve had two abortions. Three miscarriages. And I can’t have children.”
This is the kind of moment we’re called to be ready for as biblical counselors. Many around us, men and women like Brenda, carry silent grief beneath a variety of appearances. They may come for symptom relief, or to fix a relationship. What they need isn’t more advice, but Spirit-led opportunities where biblical truth and grace meet. In these exchanges, hidden grief from reproductive loss can finally begin to heal in Christ.
What is Reproductive Loss?
When people hear “reproductive loss,” most think of pregnancy loss. While certainly part of it, I define the term broadly as any experience of grief related to a person’s reproductive health, decisions, fertility, the outcome of a pregnancy, or the creation and care of their family. This includes miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, stillbirth, and infant death; infertility and secondary infertility; abortion and embryo reduction; adverse prenatal diagnoses; and the loss of a birth plan. And it includes the layered losses with adoption, a child’s loss of his first parents, a birth mother’s loss of her child, adoptive parents’ loss of hoped-for biological children, and possibly failed adoptions. The more I listen to sufferers, the more this definition broadens.
For abortion loss, we recognize it occurs differently than others, but the grief women and men experience afterward is strikingly similar, often held for years as they deny its impact. And the silence is measurable. A Lifeway Research survey revealed only 7 percent of women who had abortions discussed the decision with anyone at church, and half say no one at their church knows.1 If women are silently suffering, men are as well. Both are sitting alongside us, suffering in silence and vulnerable to the enemy.
But why group such different experiences under one term, reproductive loss? Because most of us carry a “reproductive” story imagined from an early age: a certain number of children, a home, a career, a family created on a timeline. But on this side of heaven, we live with the effects of Genesis 3, in bodies that do not work as they should, and in a real life that collides with that imagined story. What ends is not only a pregnancy, but hopes, expectations, and dreams. Proverbs 13:12 gives this grief its biblical name: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.” Reproductive loss is, at its core, a heartsickness of deferred hope, and Scripture named it long before our counselees walked through it.
Grief Without Witnesses
Why does this sorrow hide so well, even in healthy churches? Because most reproductive loss is unseen and processed in isolation with strained theology. It is more difficult to see infertility, failed adoption, or grief held because of an abortion decades ago. And gestation age does not matter. The mother of a baby lost at six weeks grieves a child she knows only from evidence of a positive pregnancy test, an ultrasound image, a due date, or a name whispered but never announced. But the congregation saw no one, and there is likely no funeral, no meal, no acknowledgment.
One counselee told me, “It’s hard for me to accept this as my lot in life, barren and childless and lonely, while for others in the church body, God doesn’t withhold children.” Another admitted carrying quiet anger over baby dedications scheduled on Mother’s Day. And like Brenda, these women are in the church; they are ministry leaders, missionaries, pastors’ wives, even biblical counselors. They love Christ, yet still wrestle, question, and rage, then feel defeated for suffering “as the world does.”
Unfortunately, men are often overlooked. For example, when loss requires medical intervention, a husband is given his wife’s discharge paperwork, including instructions, medications, and follow-up appointments. But most don’t ask how he is doing. As a man prioritizes his family’s needs and tends to her, he likely stays silent to spare her more pain. And while she slowly heals in community, he remains isolated. Counseling reproductive loss almost always means counseling a marriage, not just the individual.
What Scripture Says About the One Who Was Lost
Biblical counsel begins with Scripture, because God is the Author of Life and holds the precious children who are lost. As Psalm 139:13 says, “You formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.” And God tells the prophet in Jeremiah 1:5, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.” Knowing this, we behold that life begins at fertilization, and every life lost — at six weeks, at full term, or conceived in a laboratory — is an image-bearer of God.
The church must offer grieving people the foundational truths that they are not alone, they have lost a person made in God’s image, and that their grief will never be greater than God’s mercy and grace. Using Scripture eliminates platitudes and false comfort that often minimize: “You’re young, try again.” “It was so early.” “Maybe it’s for the best.” “Just adopt.” God’s Word offers truthful validation of the most substantial kind. So, as the community with the highest view of life in the womb, we cannot be the quietest in its loss.
What Scripture Says About the One Who Grieves
The secular world is quick to offer identities through diagnoses and experiences. But the truth is, those grieving are image-bearers and sufferers, and if in Christ, new creations walking through affliction. In a biblical approach, most often reproductive loss is suffering to be comforted before sin to be confronted. Scripture instructs us to grieve with the sufferer. Romans 12:15 commands, “Weep with those who weep,” and notice that Paul does not immediately say here to explain to those who weep or to correct them.
To better understand those who are suffering, I often draw on Dr. Howard Eyrich’s booklet, Grief: Learning to Live with Loss. In it, he outlines a triangular model he calls The Dimensions of Grief. He describes that after loss comes disorganization. Everything is upside down, and the days feel like a “fog” that hovers forever. We can counsel that this season is normal and being in it does not mean they are faithless or lost. The question is where our counselees run in the fog. Is it to unhealthy coping, or to the Man of Sorrows? Isaiah 53:3–4 reassures them that Jesus was “acquainted with grief” and “has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.”
In this dimension, we can counsel honest prayer through biblical lament. Many Christian women, never hearing of lament, ask me, “How do I ask God hard questions without sinning?” Here we can turn to the Psalms, often 88, the seemingly hopeless Psalm ending with darkness as its only companion. Sufferers are often surprised how the Word distinctly describes their pain yet retains their identity in Christ. Reproductive loss tempts one to believe God has forgotten them, but Scripture brings the truth of a compassionate and loving God, even in the chaos and confusion.
And in time, with truth spoken in love, we then counsel through the dimensions of acceptance and reorganization. Unlike secular models, a biblical grief journey does not have a concluding stage; instead, one can vacillate between the dimensions as the Lord leads in their sanctification. The key across every dimension is to recognize that God is in the middle as they pursue a heart and identity rooted in Christ, remaining surrendered and saturated in His promises.
The Hope We Bring
Unlike the world’s surface-level solutions that offer only survival and acceptance without redemption, we bring deep, restorative, and authentic soul care. With biblical precision, we excavate, seeking their hearts, the inner man. Because for many, grief is laden with something deeper. Shame.
What surprises many counselors is how much shame accompanies even miscarriage and infertility. Consider the accuser at work, whispering lies such as “My body failed.” “God is punishing me.” “I am a defective wife or husband.” And for the one grieving after an abortion, shame can feel like a life sentence, with no relief from sin. Here the Gospel says what lament alone cannot. Hebrews 12:2 tells us that Jesus, “for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame…” He scorned shame at the cross so His people can live in freedom in Him. 1 John 1:9 promises that “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Christ brings victory to those the world had written off to permanent guilt or victimhood. When shame is rightly identified through the application of Scripture, counselees can experience the living hope and redemption in Christ alone. And at last, the day has come where they can rejoice in the promise of Romans 8:28 that God works all things together for good.
Grief Care Belongs to the Whole Church
This ministry was never meant to stay in the counseling room. 2 Corinthians 1:3–4 describes the pattern for the whole body, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.” I call this God’s math: comfort received becomes comfort multiplied. Galatians 6:2 commands the entire congregation to “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”
- Lifeway Research, “Women Distrust Church on Abortion,” Nov. 23, 2015, sponsored by Care Net — https://research.lifeway.com/2015/11/23/women-distrust-church-on-abortion/ ↩︎
