Still-Birth (Definition) Bill [HL]

Lord Bishop of Guildford Excerpts

Friday 4th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Guildford]

My Lords, I will speak in support of the principles of this Bill, and I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, for having brought it to the House. One of the best traits in human nature is using the difficult experiences that we ourselves encounter to speak up for others facing similar situations. I applaud the noble Baroness for using her experience and her voice in this way, and especially for the achievement of the introduction of certificates of loss last year.

During my time as a vicar in south-west London, another inspiring woman from within my then congregation came to me with the idea of starting a listening service for women who had miscarried or were facing difficult or unintended pregnancies. This was partly born out of her own experience and partly out of the fact that she lived around the corner from a large BPAS abortion clinic, where a constant trickle of women, sometimes accompanied by their partners or their mums and sometimes quite alone, would make their way to the front door, often in considerable distress, with very little time or opportunity to think through what was for some a desperately difficult decision. It was not long before my congregation member had assembled a small group of other people—about six in all—who were enthused by the vision. They undertook substantial training, not least given the extreme sensitivity of what they would be doing and the need to ensure that they were both professional and non-directive in their approach.

I visited the BPAS clinic shortly afterwards to let it know what we were doing and was met with considerable suspicion, bordering on hostility. This was understandable, as their previous experience of Christians had been of small groups of people who would occasionally stand outside waving placards. We pressed on regardless, and formally opened our pregnancy centre in 1999, advertising its services through the local press and a few sympathetic doctor’s surgeries. After a very slow start, a journalist from one of the national dailies made use of the service and bravely wrote about the very positive experience of the support that she had received. Similar stories began to circulate, so that the number of those seeking help each year grew into double and then treble figures, with the BPAS clinic itself slowly warming to the idea and eventually advertising it on its notice board. The service continues to this day as an organisational member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, and now has eight part-time staff and 27 volunteers serving those facing an unintended pregnancy or pregnancy loss through termination, miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, preterm loss or stillbirth.

One consequence of our new initiative was that, from time to time, someone would want to see a priest to organise a small-scale funeral, or at least some simple prayers, to acknowledge the life that had been lost. Here, I was much helped by the liturgical resources provided by the Church of England, which themselves draw on the considerable experience of our hospital chaplaincy teams. That experience taught me the sheer extent of the trauma of pregnancy loss for many mothers, and often for their partners too, most especially where that loss occurs in the second half of a pregnancy. This very simple Bill, which reduces the legal definition of a stillbirth from 24 weeks to 20, so opening the way for a wider group of people to benefit from the care given to the bereaved, seems both compassionate and sensible, bringing us into line with other western nations and comfortably within the 22-week term set by the World Health Organization.

The only thing that has given me pause here has been well answered by the noble Baroness, and that was the major reservation expressed in the critique of these proposals, especially the need to register stillbirths at a registry office. This, as was pointed out, would place additional burdens on mothers, including those who, for elective reasons, chose to terminate their pregnancies. Before hearing the opening speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, I was going to suggest that a light-touch registration could be devised in hospitals and clinics, where appropriate, without the need for a further visit to a registry office—not too difficult a task to achieve or monitor, especially in an age when so many transactions are carried out online. The noble Baroness has come up with an alternative solution based on research from the organisation Saying Goodbye. Whatever approach were to be adopted, I am sure that a way could be found around the pastoral concerns expressed. I commend this Bill to the House.