Let's Talk About Stillbirths.
- Karla Wobito
- Sep 5, 2023
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 27, 2023
Walking down the maternity ward hall on our way to our baby’s final fetal Doppler test, I thought to myself, “We’re fine. The baby is fine. This doesn’t happen to people. This won’t happen to us.” When I first heard our doctor tell us “We couldn’t find a fetal heartbeat” I thought “This is real. This IS happening to us.” I instantly questioned (minus the expletive I used when crying out the question to my doctor), “How could this happen?” There was no immediate explanation that she could give us, but she did say that this is something that happens more commonly than we would think. How was this possible when we had heard little to nothing on stillbirths up until this soul crushing moment? Though I was sadly aware of several friends and acquaintances’ painful experiences with miscarriage, I could not fathom the very real possibility of losing a baby at 36 weeks pregnant.
When the news of our loss started to spread, I was shocked by the amount of people who reached out to let us know that they either knew someone who had gone through this same heartbreak or had experienced it themselves. I started to spend a lot of my time researching stillbirths -- people who have gone through them, what pregnancy looks like after they happen, and why they happen. A stillbirth is a loss of a baby at or after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Though there are some explanations on how they can happen, none of these explanations really helped us to understand our circumstance. Some of the causes included smoking during pregnancy, high blood pressure or preeclampsia, other health complications with the mother, problems with the placenta, and genetic birth defects. As far as we knew from our doctor, none of these applied for me.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are nearly 2 million stillbirths yearly, 40% of which happen during labour. Canada has a far lower percentage of stillbirths than some lower income countries; about 3,174 stillbirths in 2021 (Statistics Canada). According to CNN, the US had over 21,000 stillbirths reported in the same year. Through all of the numbers and possible causes I was reading, I was and still am just one mother asking, “Why?”
When we were at the hospital preparing to deliver our still baby boy, we were asked if we would want to have an autopsy done as well as my bloodwork looked at to determine any possible cause. The answer seems obvious now, but at the time, when the rug had just been pulled from under us, nothing was easy to answer. We did agree to move forward with all of the tests, in hopes that we would get some sort of explanation, especially to possibly help in a future pregnancy, but we were told that the chances of finding anything definitive would be very low. How was it possible that in today’s modern advanced world of health we were likely going to come out of this nightmare with no answer on how our baby died only three and a half weeks from his due date? We have robots that can perform surgery and Artificial Intelligence that can provide medical advice, but we might not be able to figure out why our baby didn’t make it to term. With no explanation on how this happened, how could we prepare for this to not happen again? The answer – nothing really. How terrifying.
Even if there was a clearer explanation on stillbirths and why they happen, would we have known about it leading up to ours? Probably not. I don’t know if the possibility of a stillbirth came up anywhere during any stage of my pregnancy journey. Even when following multiple pregnancy social media accounts, joining pregnancy apps, and reading articles, I never read anything about it. I do understand that most of these mediums are there to empower pregnant women by providing them with knowledge that enforces comfort and positivity, but sometimes we need to discuss the difficult scenarios as well. Would reading and getting informed on stillbirths have prevented ours? No. Would it have helped to make me feel a little bit more normal, seen, and heard? Probably. I think society is doing a slightly better job now with discussing infertility issues and miscarriages more openly, but there is certainly still a stigma around these topics. This is the hardest thing that I have personally ever had to go through in my life – I should not only feel comfortable in being able to openly talk about it, but others should be able to openly receive and discuss it with me. It is difficult. It is sad – no, it is utterly heartbreaking. It is uncomfortable. But it is still something that we should talk about.
Resources:
Comments