10 Songs About Pregnancy Loss To Keep You Company

It might be only seven lines long, but Beyoncé manages to pack an emotional punch with her song, “Heartbeat.” She wrote and recorded the song in 2010 after having a miscarriage. She shared her story in her 2013 HBO documentary, Life Is But a Dream, and shared how she had heard her child’s heartbeat for the first time, and then went back to New York for a check-up and there was no heartbeat. She went into the studio to record what she called “the saddest song I’ve ever written in my life.” And with lines like: “This love wasn’t enough for us to survive/ I swear, I swear, I swear I tried/You took the life right out of me… I’m longing for your heartbeat,” you can feel Bey’s pain.

“Small Bump” is about a parent’s hopes and dreams for their unborn child. Sheeran wrote the song about his friend who suffered from a pregnancy loss while she was five months pregnant. The song has sweet lyrics like, “You can wrap your fingers ‘round my thumb/And hold me tight/And you’ll be all right.” But it’s the last few lines that will make you cry:

“'Cause you were just a small bump unborn

For four months then torn from life

Maybe you were needed up there

But we're still unaware as why”

This song is a reminder that often it’s both partners who struggle to put the pieces together after a miscarriage. “I Still Know You” is a song by Jacob Lee, an Australian singer-songwriter and former contestant on Australia’s The Voice. He sings: “You were just a heartbeat, yet to come alive/Just two feet, yet to stand upright/Was just three times we cried that night/'Cause it was four months until you arrived.”

Not all songs about miscarriage have to be sweeping ballads. It took rapper Jay Z to talk about miscarriage in his song “4:44” to show that partners also suffer when a loss occurs.

In the song, he says:

“I seen the innocence leave your eyes

I still mourn this death and

I apologize for all the stillborns cause I wasn't present

Your body wouldn't accept it”

Most likely, Jay Z is referring to wife Beyonce’s multiple miscarriages, something she openly spoke about in an Elle interview: “Having miscarriages taught me that I had to mother myself before I could be a mother to someone else. Then I had Blue, and the quest for my purpose became so much deeper.”

From the moment you get a positive pregnancy test, it’s hard not to imagine your child and who they’ll be. You think about all the amazing memories you’ll make together, like hearing their first real giggle or seeing them taking their first steps. That’s the premise of “Gone Too Soon” by Daughtry, and all the moments (like a first birthday) that will be missed. It mourns the loss and shows the constant questioning that people have about why a miscarriage happens, which, oftentimes, is never really answered.

“Not a day goes by that I don't think of you

I'm always asking why this crazy world had to lose

Such a beautiful light, we never knew

Gone too soon

You were gone too soon.”

British singer/songwriter Gary Barlow wrote “Let Me Go” in honor of his stillborn daughter, Poppy back in 2013. But from the upbeat tempo, you’d never guess it was a song about something so sad. In an interview with James Corden, Barlow said of the song: “It keeps a life and a flame in the whole thing… It’s not my voice, it’s someone else’s.” “Let Me Go” offers hope for the future, with lines like, “Fly high and let me go/That sky will save your soul/When you pass by then you’ll know/That this is gonna take a bit of getting used to/But I know what’s right for you/Let me go.” Cue the waterworks.

“She's convinced she could hold back a glacier

But she couldn't keep baby alive

Doubting if there's a woman in there somewhere

Here, here, here.”

And so starts “Spark,” the 1998 song by Tori Amos. It deals with the emotional trauma of feeling out of control when you have a miscarriage, like your body let you down in every way imaginable. It also touches upon the notion of what it means to be a woman, particularly referencing the “Doubting if there’s a woman in there somewhere.” As if you cease to be a person of value simply because you miscarried, which couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Maybe it’s Halsey’s angelic voice, or the fact that she’s had multiple miscarriages in the past. But there’s something about “More” that hits hard, especially when she sings about “wooden floors and little feet… feelin’ so incomplete… wonder will we ever meet?” You can especially hear the pain in lyrics like, “I sit and stare at your clothes in the drawer/I cry and my knuckles get sore.” Happily, Halsey had her rainbow baby, Ender Ridley Aydin, on July 14.

If you need to sob unconsolably, put on “Heaven Needed You More” by Mikalene Ipson. The lyrics are so incredibly relatable that you feel like Ipson has seen straight into your soul. There’s the recurring theme of not being able to get up off the floor, and wondering why it happened at all. The intro alone says it all:

“No words can describe the heartache

No words of comfort anyone can say

I’ve never felt a pain like this before

A piece of my heart died with you.”

On the surface, “Thy Will” looks like another song about getting through the ups and downs of life. But Lady A singer Hillary Scott explained in an interview with Good Morning America that the song was written after she’d experience a miscarriage in 2015. Scott explained that “Thy Will” was written while “experiencing everything that comes with a miscarriage. So it was my most raw place that I could've ever been when this song truly poured out of me."