BC Business
Leung is using Baby Bean to challenge stigmas around miscarriages
Last year on Mother’s Day, registered nurse Angel Leung launched Baby Bean Consulting to serve an urgent need in her community.
“My husband and I, when we were trying to grow our family, we experienced recurrent pregnancy losses,” she says. It was a situation where her personal life unexpectedly crashed into her professional one, and despite her past experience working in BC Women’s Hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit, she still struggled to access the care that she needed.
“It’s hard… you’re trying to balance your grief and the trauma of losing your baby with accessing medical support, and it’s really, really tricky to navigate the healthcare system.”
Pregnant women in B.C. know this story all too well: services for people recovering from miscarriage or birth trauma—or for those who are pregnant after loss—are so siloed off that finding the right help at the right time can feel like a bureaucratic cat-and-mouse chase. You have to know who to ask and what to ask for, explains Leung, and because miscarriages are a tough (and sometimes taboo) subject to talk about, many people just try to deal with it on their own.
“In turn, women [who are pregnant again] carry that traumatic experience into their early motherhood journey… and that can manifest in ways such as mental health concerns, or it can just really, really make that first year of postpartum transitions super hard,” notes Leung.
Baby Bean Consulting is a care hub for women in these situations—it’s a safe space where people can confront their feelings and reflect on their experiences. Leung is pouring everything she knows about our healthcare system into the business to be able to advocate for women in need and connect them with resources like counsellors, massage therapists, moms’ groups and bereaved parents’ groups.
Leung also offers workshops and webinars/seminars to help corporate and medical teams support their clients and employees. “For instance, a physio group works with moms before and after pregnancy, and sometimes they’ll deal with clients who say, Hey, I actually have a history of loss, but I’m pregnant again and that’s why I want to come see you… that type of conversation should trigger their physiotherapist to understand that they need to come in with the lens of supporting someone who’s gone through a loss. So how do they do that?”
That’s where Baby Bean Consulting steps in with education and resources. The business is personal for Leung, who is on a mission to challenge stigmas around miscarriages and help women who experience it feel less alone.
The Baby Bean website achieves the latter almost right away. “Hi, I’m Angel—founder of Baby Bean Consulting,” it says upon the first two scrolls. “I’m a mother of five, three in heaven and two in my arms.”
Miscarriages don’t discriminate. One in four pregnancies end in a loss, and yet after-care is still hard to find—in B.C. and beyond. A 2021 study found that one in five mothers in Canada’s Maritime region were unhappy with the postnatal care that they received. So Baby Bean is working with fertility apps and extended health providers to make this type of care more accessible. It has also become a preferred provider under Pathways, a BC-wide family doctor directory of community services.
“The resounding feedback that I get from women who I’ve supported is always, ‘I wish I heard about you sooner. I wish someone told me about you when I had my first miscarriage six months ago. I wish you were there two weeks ago when I had my stillbirth in the hospital,’” says Leung. “And the reason for that is because we don’t have this type of support in B.C. at all. So we just need to spread that awareness and bring this type of support to light.”