Last Saturday, the Times teased an extract from Nicola Sturgeon’s new book which its sister title the Sunday Times was running the next day, promising that it would “reveal a tantalising secret about her private life”. This “tantalising secret”, it emerged, was the fact that Scottish first minister Sturgeon had experienced a miscarriage in 2011.

To describe a miscarriage in this way is sensationalist and insensitive, but it is also unsurprising: the story is “tantalising” to a press with a deeply gendered view of political women, and had remained a “secret” as a result of the ongoing stigma around miscarriage.

Like Theresa May, who found herself answering questions about the fact that she has no children during her campaign to become prime minister, and former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard, who was labelled unfit to lead her party by senator Bill Heffernan because she was “deliberately barren”, Sturgeon has seen even her most high-profile career moments co-opted by a narrative that obsessively returns to her reproductive status. On the very day she was poised to become first minister, for instance, headlines focused on whether or not she might have a child while in office.

Sturgeon says she has chosen to reveal the facts about her miscarriage now, “in the hope that it might challenge some of the assumptions and judgments that are still made about women – especially in politics – who don’t have children”. She also highlighted the ongoing barriers that make it difficult for women to combine motherhood with a career.

While Sturgeon’s decision was a personal one, and its impact extremely powerful, it remains hugely frustrating that we rely on high-profile women to make such self-sacrifices for the sake of disrupting sexist narratives and societal stigmas. While male politicians are able to navigate their careers as individuals, political women are still expected to represent their entire sex.

Equally frustrating is the fact that miscarriage remains a topic so shrouded in secrecy and silence that Sturgeon felt she had to speak out in the first place, to remind people that “sometimes, for whatever reason, having a baby just doesn’t happen – no matter how much we might want it to”.

It might seem obvious, but the subject is so rarely discussed that many people are unaware just how common miscarriage is. According to the NHS, it occurs in one in six known pregnancies, with many more miscarriages happening before a woman is even aware she has become pregnant.

Due to the enormous distress it can cause, it is completely understandable that many feel unable to disclose a miscarriage publicly, even to close family and friends. But for some women, it is the fear of insensitive or even critical responses that prevents them from talking about it or asking for support. So deep is the taboo that it has become entangled with a murky sense of blame and shame.

In the vast majority of cases, a woman’s behaviour has absolutely no bearing on whether she miscarries or not, yet a recent nationwide survey conducted by New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine found that 47% of of the respondents who had miscarried felt guilty, with 41% of them believing it was caused by something they had done wrongly. A fifth of participants thought that the leading cause of miscarriage was a mother’s lifestyle choices, with three quarters wrongly believing that getting stressed could cause pregnancy loss.

This misplaced guilt and subsequent silence means that there is very little awareness of how widespread miscarriage is, leading to even more stigma and self-blame. More than half of the women surveyed believed that miscarriages were “uncommon” (defined as taking place in less than 6% of pregnancies). The study’s author Dr Zev Williams said: “Most people think it’s an incredibly rare event, so when it happens to them they feel very isolated and they will look to themselves and think they must have done something wrong.”

More discussion around the topic would be a good thing, and it doesn’t have to mean women making painful disclosures. Williams pointed out that there is a need for more research into miscarriage, telling Time magazine: “We essentially are living with the same understandings that we had 50 years ago.”

It doesn’t help that we judge women so explicitly according to their reproductive status. In a sidebar headlined “childless politicians” alongside the Sturgeon piece, the Sunday Times singled out female politicians specifically, and did not mention a single childless male politician. It is this gendered focus that contributes to the idea that women’s entire worth should be judged on whether or not they procreate. No wonder women end up feeling pressured, shamed and guilty when pregnancies do not progress.

Perhaps with increased openness and support we will be able to move towards a world where miscarriage will never again be described as a “tantalising secret”. In the meantime, we are lucky to have women such as Sturgeon speaking out, alongside the likes of Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson, whose inclusion in the “childless politicians” piece prompted her to tweet: “I’ll just get myself down Mothercare and stare mournfully at the cribs.”