Give to Gain: How supporting pregnancy and infant loss helps address gender equality

Right now, someone you know is carrying a loss they've never said out loud.

Maybe it's the colleague who came back to work two weeks after a stillbirth and said she was fine. The neighbour who stopped talking about her pregnancy. The friend who "hasn't been herself lately." The parent at school pickup who waves and keeps moving, because stopping feels impossible.

One in four pregnancies ends in loss. That means pregnancy loss, infant loss, infertility, and the grief that follows aren't rare. They're everywhere. They're in your workplace, your neighbourhood, your family, your community. They're sitting right next to you.

And for women and birthing people, this grief carries a particular weight.

The gendered weight of pregnancy loss

Women and birthing people bear the physical reality of pregnancy loss in their bodies. They navigate the medical system, often without adequate support. They absorb the emotional labour of telling people, or of not telling people. They manage relationships, children, households, and workplaces, often while quietly falling apart.

When grief goes unsupported, the ripple effects are enormous.

Healthcare systems get strained when preventable mental health crises become acute.

Kids need regulated, supported parents, and unaddressed trauma makes that harder for years.

Workplaces lose focused and present team members.

Communities lose connected, engaged people.

Women are disproportionately impacted by all of it. And when women don't have access to care, everyone around them feels it.
 

The Pregnancy and Infant Loss Support Centre gives, so women gain

At the Pregnancy & Infant Loss Support Centre (PILSC), they give grief a place to go.

For seven years, they have been showing up for individuals and families navigating some of the most devastating losses a person can experience: miscarriage, stillbirth, Termination for Medical Reasons (TFMR), abortion, neonatal loss, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), and infertility.

They know that the journey through loss toward healing is as complex as it is individual, which is why they offer multiple no-cost pathways to support. Every single one of the services is free.

PILSC's peer mentorship program connects grieving parents with someone who can truly relate, because they've lived it. Professional one-on-one sessions offer trauma-aware care tailored to each person's unique grief. Support groups create community out of isolation. They meet people wherever they are in their grief journey, whether they're in acute loss, trying to conceive again, pregnant after loss, or parenting after loss. PILSC offers virtual and in-person options, because barriers to support shouldn't include geography.

The numbers tell part of the story. Since 2019, PILSC has made 23,855 individual connections, provided 16,370 support sessions, and shipped 560 comfort boxes to families who needed a tangible reminder that they weren't forgotten. In 2025 alone, PILSC booked 2,539 professional support sessions, 1,323 support group bookings, and 112 peer mentorship sessions, and reached 358 brand new clients accessing services for the very first time.

Yet the numbers only go so far.

Here is what some of the people served say:

• "This is a community nobody would ever wish to be a part of, but being a part of this community makes all the difference when you are going through this type of grief. I'm not sure what I would have done without the peer mentorship program." - Peer Mentee
   
• "I am deeply grateful to have had this opportunity to participate in the grief group series, and for the safe space to express myself. Hearing others' experiences helped me better understand my own loss, and ultimately helped me better understand my own healing journey. I am eternally grateful." - Group Participant
   
• "[My counsellor] created a space where I felt truly seen and understood during one of the hardest times of my life." - Counselling Client
   
• "Coaching gave me a place to arrive exactly as I was. Some days I just sat and breathed while someone stayed with me. Slowly, I learned how to ground myself when grief pulled me under, how to let the ache pass without fighting it." - Coaching Client

Whether you know it or not, someone in your life has experienced pregnancy or infant loss. Let's show up for them, and gain a more connected, compassionate world in return.
 

With support, women can gain themselves back

When grieving women and birthing people get real, timely support, the gains are profound. They return to themselves faster. They parent with more regulation and connection. They re-engage with their communities. They show up at work. They stop isolating. They stop shouldering it alone.

Early grief intervention reduces pressure on the healthcare system. It protects families. It strengthens workplaces. It builds more compassionate, resilient communities. And perhaps most importantly: it tells women and birthing people that their pain matters. That their loss is real. That they don't have to carry this quietly in order to keep going.

Gender equality isn't possible when half the population is silently grieving without support. It isn't possible when pregnancy loss is still treated as a medical event rather than a devastating human experience. It isn't possible when the emotional and physical toll of loss lands almost entirely on women, with little infrastructure to catch them. PILSC gives support so that women can gain themselves back.
 

You can actively support the important work of PILSC

Free, accessible, trauma-aware grief support doesn't sustain itself. At a time when funding cuts are threatening community care programs across Canada, the stakes are high.

The families who need PILSC most are often the ones with the least access to alternatives: families from marginalized communities, those who cannot afford private therapy, those for whom culturally informed support is the difference between connection and complete isolation.

Community participation, awareness, and fundraising protect this access. Grief support should never be a privilege.

This International Women's Day, consider giving visibility to the reality that 1 in 4 pregnancies end in loss, and that this is not a niche issue.

Consider making PILSC a recipient of IWD fundraising efforts. 

Give funding so that PILSC's free services can reach every family that needs them.

Give your time, your voice, your platform to the message that grief education is for everyone, because our world is grief illiterate, and everyone is grieving in some way.

When grieving women are supported, we gain healthier families, stronger communities, and more equitable workplaces. It becomes a world where women don't have to choose between surviving their grief and showing up for their lives.

Giving isn't a subtraction. It's multiplication. 

Give generously. Gain everything.

Donate, volunteer, or partner with the Pregnancy & Infant Loss Support Centre in Calgary, Canada, an IWD Giving ecosystem member that is proud to be part of the IWD Giving Directory in support of the Give To Gain campaign.