In Elizabeth Strout's novel The Burgess Boys, a young woman named Susan has a miscarriage. After learning that the baby was a girl, her husband tries to comfort her by saying, "I hope the next one's a boy." But Strout describes how many women feel after a miscarriage:

They were not toys on a story shelf, one falling and breaking, the next coming in one piece. No, she had lost her daughter! And she learned—freshly, scorchingly—of the privacy of sorrow. It was as though she had been escorted through a door into some large and private club that she had not even known existed. Women who miscarried. Society did not care much for them. It really didn't. And the women in the club mostly passed each other silently. People outside the club said, "You'll have another one."