There has been much international and scholarly attention for, on the one hand, ‘overpopulation’
or ‘high fertility rates’; and, on the other hand, experiences of infertility. Little
light has been shed, however, on the marginal ‘in-between’ situation of women experiencing
reproductive loss, that is: being able to conceive, but having problems with carrying
pregnancies successfully to term. It is the experiences and decisions of those women
who do not immediately attain high fertility rates, but are not infertile either that will
be at the centre of this study. Based on anthropological fieldwork in East Cameroon in
2004-2005, this article places the experiences of these women within their social contexts
by first describing the relevant fields of gender, kinship and marriage in the village
of Ndemba I and exemplifying their significance through a personal illness narrative. It
then discusses the two major themes that were explored through participant observation,
interviews, free listing and pile sorting: the perceived causes and the social consequences
of pregnancy-loss. By understanding both the aetiology of and the help-seeking behaviour
after pregnancy-loss in the light of the given contexts in the village, it becomes clear that
the lives of women who experience pregnancy-loss are characterized by marginality and
ambiguity. Not only are their status as a woman and the status of the foetus as a person
contested; pregnancy-loss itself is also a phenomenon that is surrounded by doubts and
suspicion. It is however this ambiguity that leaves some free room for manoeuvring and
enables women to aspire certain ambitions that might run counter the patriarchal ideal
of bearing many children. Thus, this article shows that the generally assumed distinction
between wanted and unwanted pregnancies or unintended and intended losses – that is,
abortions – becomes blurred within the ambiguous dynamics of the prenatal period. It
argues that both suffering and agency are dialectically connected within the marginal
phenomenon of pregnancy-loss.