Baby Loss: Covid-19

Patricia Gibson Excerpts

Thursday 5th November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)]

Thank you, Ms McDonagh. I apologise to anybody in the Chamber whom I may have overlooked, but I do have to get on my flight at Heathrow. I do apologise.

I begin by thanking the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Cherilyn Mackrory) for her excellent opening to the debate and for sharing her experiences. Those of us who have suffered baby loss or stillbirth have a space in our lives that stays with us every single day. We do not get over it. We just somehow learn to build our life around that space, in that shadow—it never goes away.

This annual debate is very special to me, because I suffered in 2009 a stillbirth at full term, in which I too almost died, and that stillbirth followed a miscarriage in 2008, after five years of fertility treatment. As is the case for so many parents, perhaps the hardest aspect of coping with the loss for my husband and me—we are not unique in this regard—is the knowledge that our loss was due to glaring mistakes in my care. I am grateful to be able to have a voice in this debate today—a voice not just for baby Kenneth, whom I lost, but for all the lost babies and their grief-stricken parents, who will never be quite the same after such a profound loss.

This year, the context of our baby loss debate is that it takes place in the shadow of covid-19. It is not yet known what risk covid poses to pregnant women, although the points made by the hon. Member for Guildford (Angela Richardson) were certainly worth listening to in weighing that up. It has been reported that there was a rise in stillbirths between April and June this year, at the peak of the pandemic. There were about 40 stillbirths after labour began, compared with 24 in the same period last year, according to the patient safety body, so that is something to consider. It may be, as we have heard, because women delay seeking care because they are concerned about covid. If that is the case, we need to understand that expectant mums clearly need reassurance and to feel secure in the knowledge that the NHS, even as it deals with covid, is still there for them.

Those who have suffered the loss of a child during the covid period report that the new restrictions in our hospital environments, such as the need for staff to wear protective equipment, can present a barrier to delivering the kind of care that bereavement requires. One thing that I always mention in these yearly debates about baby loss is the terrible, isolating grief that such a loss brings. With the best will in the world, people often do not know what to say to you, because the loss of a baby before, during or shortly after birth is like no other loss. In the normal course of events, when we suffer a loss, whether of a husband, father, mother or brother, there is a life that has been lived and there are memories that people can talk about and take comfort from. They can talk about what the person was like and how they lived their life and so on. Those recollections can help people to bring comfort as they share the bonds of grief. But for those families who have suffered a stillbirth or a baby loss, there are no such shared memories. There was no opportunity to make those memories. All there is, is a deep sense of being robbed of a life—a life filled with potential that will never be realised.

During covid, the isolation of grief that always accompanies the unnatural event of burying your child is all the more stark. You cannot have the comfort of close family members. You cannot have people rallying round, as they would wish to, to distract you from your stupor of grief and your sense of bewilderment at the loss of the baby you have been waiting for for nine months and for whom you had prepared, perhaps even for longer than nine months. That rallying round is simply not permitted.

The most heartbreaking thing that a parent will ever have to do is bury their own child, but even the funeral comes with limitations during covid. The numbers of people who can attend are limited, so many people who would wish to attend might not be able to do so. Parents are denied the service that they might wish to have and the flowers, the hymns and the cards that they might wish to have. There are restrictions even on who can carry the coffin. These awful, grotesque choices and decisions that no one ever wants to have to make are magnified by their absence during covid-19.

Post baby loss, when the terrible news has been communicated to the wider family, when bereaved parents leave the hospital and return home and when the funeral has taken place, many bereaved parents seek the support of counselling from baby loss charities. I pay tribute to the marvellous work that those charities do, but they tell us that as they try to support parents and families through the trauma of baby loss, measures they need to put in place, such as social distancing, have had a major impact on access to care and support for bereaved parents and have also complicated the grief and responses to pregnancy and baby loss. The Lullaby Trust has pointed out that social distancing may exacerbate grief and isolation. I think that is something we can all understand. As we all struggle with this ongoing health pandemic, as it challenges us all in different ways, how much more are those parents who have lost their child going to struggle?

In this year’s baby loss awareness reflections, as we talk about the loneliness of grief, which is very particular when we are talking about the death of a baby, the context of covid-19 and the specific isolation it brings with it makes dealing with the awful life-changing event of losing a baby all the more horrific. I hope we can all consider how that can be addressed, to help those we represent who are going through this horror as we grapple with the challenges of covid-19.