eli5: Is a chemical pregnancy the same thing as a miscarriage?
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Technically, miscarriages during the first 20 weeks of pregnancy have traditionally been referred to as “[spontaneous abortions](https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/issues/2005/1001/p1243.html)”. Miscarriages are reserved for the next few months. And in the third trimester they’re stillbirths. But people usually just call most pregnancy loss “miscarriage” as a general term. So a chemical pregnancy is a spontaneous abortion, which is a miscarriage, but spontaneous abortion is the term traditionally used. They’re sort of a recent discovery in that until we had easy at-home pregnancy tests, it was more of an ordeal to determine if one was pregnant, so we didn’t necessarily notice that around 50% or more of fertilized eggs do not implant or are flushed out quickly. Women might have only a slight delay in their period, perhaps, so we didn’t realize those were actually fertilizations. So “chemical pregnancy” is a recently determined concept
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