A Bridge Across Borders: When Stories Meet, Hope Grows

The Institute is often described as a bridge. During our quarterly Instructor Zoom call, that image came alive. Across time zones and cultures, voices met on a single screen, carrying stories of loss, resilience, and hope.

One story in particular stopped us in our tracks. An instructor from the Balkans began to share. Her words were heavy with history:

“Every other woman over the age of 45 has had at least one abortion… but no one talks about it.”

For decades, silence has surrounded reproductive loss in her country. Women carried grief alone because their culture had no words, no rituals, no safe place to bring that pain. It took nearly eight years before women began trusting her team enough to share their hidden stories.

Then COVID came, and something shifted. Women who had miscarried, often more than once, began reaching out online. They spoke of being dismissed by family, brushed aside by doctors, and told simply, “You’re young, you can have another child.” For many, grief had never been named, let alone honored.

She told us what that looks like in hospitals: families left with nothing to bury, nothing to hold. No ceremony. No goodbye. Just silence.

Yet in that silence, new beginnings are stirring. Support groups are slowly taking shape in places where they’ve never existed before. Institute Resources are being translated, adapted to fit cultures that have no framework for loss. Medical staff are being taught how to walk gently with women who have been hurting in secret for far too long.

The instructor shared how the Institute’s teaching expanded her view of reproductive loss, how it includes infertility, children born with disabilities, even the loss of the future a parent imagined. That realization became a turning point. She is now working to educate her community that every story is worth honoring.

As she spoke, you could feel the bridge being built in real time.

One US nurse on the call admitted, “I did not know that in that culture there is no memorialization.” She realized the assumptions she carried in her own practice, and how easily care can become biased without cultural awareness. Another instructor described being in awe, her voice breaking as she reflected: “It didn’t even come to mind that women in other countries don’t get to grieve, or it happens in secret.”

A mental health worker in San Diego agreed, adding, “Even learning the right words for reproductive loss in different cultures has been eye-opening. We’re working with translators, paying attention to language barriers, and exploring how best to translate these experiences.”

The Institute is a bridge, where stories, ideas, and compassion flow both ways, equipping people everywhere to walk with those carrying loss.

The call ended, but the bridge held. And across it, hope keeps moving, quietly, powerfully, from one woman, one family, one culture to another.