As Baby loss Awareness Week 2020 comes to a close, COSRT’s Jo Coker discusses her personal and professional experiences of baby loss.
“Some years ago, when I was nursing my grandmother through her last illness, we shared an especially poignant afternoon. I had just completed my first course in obstetrics and witnessed my first stillbirth. It was horrendous and the parent’s distress lives with me to this day. Prior to this childbirth, let alone complications thereof, had not been on my radar, I was young and carefree and enjoying life as a nurse in London. On the afternoon in question my grandmother noticed I was not myself and asked what the problem was. I told her what I had witnessed and how I was feeling. She patted my hand and said, “you never forget losing a child, you move on but never forget”. She then told me how she had lost stillborn twins and another baby who died as the result of delivery complications, being too large for my 4 ‘ 11” grandmother to deliver naturally. In those days, the 1930’s, the babies were taken away; she never saw, named, or held them, and they were never spoken about again. In fact, that afternoon was the first time my grandmother had ever talked about what happened to anyone including my mother or her husband. We both shed tears and I was grateful that at least in the early 80’s we had developed a much more humane approach to caring for parents when they experienced infant loss. This week is baby loss awareness week and all over the country families will be bonded by having shared the truly heart-rending experience that is baby loss. Whether that is a neonatal death, still birth or miscarriage every loss will be keenly felt by the potential parents as a child will have been lost who they never got to know. In the modern-day western world pregnancy is confirmed at an early stage, often within six days of implantation. As such parents know that there is a pregnancy at an early stage, often confirmed by sonography, which makes the loss even more real. Natasha Kaplinsky, the news reader has recently gone public and written movingly about how nothing prepared her for the grief of miscarriage and the emotions and fears that come to the surface about being able to carry a child and be a parent. Others have commented how the health professionals are often silent or dismissive of early loss, with one mother telling me her GP told her to cheer up at least she could get pregnant and should try again as soon as possible. These sort of apocryphal comments that try to minimise the loss, often stem from an inability to manage the emotional processes of loss rather than cruelty, but they show how ongoing training for professionals is imperative.In more recent times we have seen a growth in IVF pregnancies. Often the term IVF is bandied around as if it is such a simple procedure, but these parents go through so much to become parents. Hormone injections, scans, harvesting of eggs and sperm, watching the eggs to see if they fertilise and develop into healthy embryos, endless appointments to say nothing of the financial sacrifice that many incur. Many endure chemical miscarriage i.e. when the fertilised egg fails to implant though you are still left felling pregnant because of the hormonal treatment. Often this can happen several times, it is a real roller coaster of emotion from hope to despair.
Every infant loss is different and unique to the parents involved and they will all want to manage their loss differently. As society we all have a role is to ensure there is good support and care available for those parents and families at the worst time in their lives, no matter what stage of pregnancy they are at or how the baby is lost. This is especially important in the time of COVID 19 when so many parents have felt lost and isolated. All parents and families need access to counselling and resources to help them through their grief. No-one should be like my grandmother and carry that grief for over 60 years.
If you have experienced baby loss and are trying to access counselling, please look here for professional support.