"I was so excited when a pregnancy test finally came up positive. Within a week I'd picked out the nursery furniture, the buggy, the names," says Néna, who was 27 the first time she miscarried. "None of my friends had kids at that point, but my best friend had fallen pregnant a month earlier, so I felt like we were in it together."

At 11 weeks, Néna and her husband couldn't wait any longer and told their families. "I hadn't had any sickness, we were going to have the scan the following week and everything felt fine, no bleeding or scary stuff," she says. But then came the moment neither of them had been prepared for. "We went for the scan when I was 12 weeks and three days. I knew what I was expecting to see, but I didn't see it – it was just empty. It was black. The bottom fell out of my world."

Despite not experiencing any bleeding, Néna had suffered a miscarriage. "It's called a blighted ovum, which means there's an issue with the egg. Basically your body still thinks you're pregnant, so it was still growing all the bits to support a baby that wasn't there," she explains. One in four pregnancies end in miscarriage – although the figure drops closer to one in ten for women in their 20s – but it's so rarely talked about that women often feel isolated and left in the dark when that loss strikes.

For Amy, who was 21 when she miscarried, the experience was more drawn out, but no less devastating. "I was only about 8 weeks pregnant and was on the train when I started having this pain – oh my god, it was terrible," she remembers.

By the end of her hour and a half journey Amy was losing blood, and went straight to the nearest hospital. "They kept telling me 'it's just your body getting used to you being pregnant', but I still knew something wasn't right. I was losing a lot more blood than I knew was normal – it was like I was having a period."

After "the longest 48 hours of my life, waiting for a scan", Amy was given the news she'd been dreading. "I think it's harder in your 20s because you don't have the life experience to know how to handle such a big thing," she says. "I had comments like 'lucky it happened sooner rather than later', and 'everything happens for a reason'. But what is the reason? Why? You become bitter."