On May 12, 2020, the Support After Abortion Healing Network hosted Michaelene Fredenburg and Tricia Lewis from Life Perspectives. Life Perspectives provides training, research and expertise to health professionals and other care providers to offer support after reproductive loss including miscarriage and abortion. Life Perspectives also offers a safe place, without religious or political affiliation, for those impacted by miscarriage and abortion at MiscarriageHurts.com and AbortionChangesYou.com.
Michaelene, having personally experienced her own reproductive loss, leads Life Perspectives as their President and CEO. She stated during the Support After Abortion Healing Network that, “There’s so much more for us to understand and realize. If we recognize that if people are feeling disenfranchised in their loss, if they’re feeling isolated or shamed and feel like they can’t reach out, then those create problems that compound as the years and the decades go on.” Her wisdom and insight has helped Life Perspectives become nationally recognized leaders and trainers on the topic of Reproductive Loss.
A few of the ways Life Perspectives is helping to equip our country is through Reproductive Grief Care Training and Certification specifically created for pregnancy centers. Tricia Lewis, Coordinator for Life Perspectives spoke about her experience working inside a pregnancy center and why Reproductive Grief Care Training was so impactful to hear. “I remember, in one experience, I had counseled three women in one week. One of which was pregnant with twins. I thought I had served them so faithfully, however all three chose to terminate their pregnancies and four babies were lost. Even as I tell the story today, I still get choked up because it was so impactful.” Tricia further explained how she really wasn’t able to prepare for what she experienced afterwards. She felt ill equipped and ineffective. After this experience, Tricia was encouraged to connect with Life Perspectives. Tricia explained that Life Perspectives gave her the tools she was lacking. The training helped to eliminate her fear of asking clients difficult questions. She also reported that the training helped her to better respond with compassion, ask better questions and to hear more about the client’s life.Life Perspectives encourages pregnancy centers to add one reproductive loss question to their intake. They encourage asking the client- Do you have additional children or have you experienced other pregnancies? If the client responds with yes, Life Perspectives encourages asking additional questions like, Would you like to tell us what happened? By adding these questions, their study showed a 25% increase in clients reporting reproductive loss.
Support After Abortion is excited to be partnering with Life Perspectives to provided FREE Reproductive Grief Care Training and sign-up for the upcoming training sessions.
Read more about Life Perspectives: Reproductive Loss Can Cause Grief