On Pregnancy and Infant Loss Day, we chart how attitudes to stillbirths have changed and what more needs to be done.
Mayme Lumsden, 93, from Buckland Valley, Victoria. Her eldest sister, Marjorie Langham Henry, was stillborn to parents Ida Langham and Wallace Henry in 1916.
![Mayme Lumsden visiting King Island this year.](http://web.archive.org./web/20161015225232im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/1/u/w/h/image.imgtype.articleLeadwide.620x349.png/1476343009713.png)
Mayme Lumsden visiting King Island this year. Photo: Charles Lumsden
"I must have been about three. My elder sister was out looking for kindling when she found a heap of earth topped with flowers and surrounded by a fence. She ran home and asked my mother whose grave it was. It was the first we had heard of Marjorie, who was stillborn 10 years earlier. From then on, every time we went to the beach, we collected shells and decorated Marjorie's grave with them.
My father never spoke about it. He desperately wanted a son, there were two miscarriages after me but I was never made to feel not welcome.
Our mother told us very little about it. Currie was 7.5 miles away, the only way to get there was by horse-drawn cart, it wouldn't have been a very comfortable ride to the cottage hospital for her.
I always remember her saying that the worst part was going home with empty hands.
I don't think they registered stillbirths then and they certainly didn't allow stillborns to be baptised or buried in hallowed ground. I think of my poor parents having to go home with their dead baby and dig a grave for her. It must have been terribly traumatic."
Laraine Lane from Sydney gave birth to stillborn son, Ben, in 1975 when she was 24. She went on to have a daughter before a second stillborn son.
"It was my first pregnancy. I had no reason to think that I wouldn't deliver a live baby. I got to 34 weeks and this particular morning, a Wednesday, I woke up and noticed the baby wasn't moving. I rang the specialist and went to see him straightaway. He said 'No, no, no, don't worry, as you get closer to the due date, the baby slows down.' I went home and didn't panic.
On Friday, I felt this crashing pain, like something was dropping. I waited a couple of hours before going to Fairfield Hospital, where the nurses came and listened to the baby. I went into labour, the nurses kept whispering and the doctors came in and they left without saying anything. I was desperately hoping the baby was OK but I knew it wasn't and they wouldn't tell me. I gave birth at 10.15 on Saturday night. Still to this day, I can count the tiles in that room. There was no pain medication, not even paracetamol. I was doing anything I could to get through it.
I could hear babies being born and crying because I was in the labour suite. I was a secondary priority. They wouldn't let my husband and my mum come in and see me. I was on my own the whole time.
There was no aftercare, all I can remember is them saying that the baby was a boy and that he had been born still. The last thing I remember was them whisking the baby away. I didn't see him or touch him. It was like nothing was there, it was gone.
That night they wheeled me into a room with a lady who had a live baby and I was in there for two days with her. The pain of her baby coming in and out was intolerable.. Visitors would say 'Oh, where's your baby?' I really just wanted to die, I thought I was such a failure, why did this lady have a live baby and my baby died?
They said that he looked perfect. I don't believe that they did an autopsy. They sent me home on the Monday and they didn't tell me that my milk would come in after three days. The doctor asked my husband to go around and pick up some tablets - they were male hormone tablets to stop the milk coming in. I just remember standing, sobbing in the shower.
We were never asked to organise a funeral for Ben, they only asked my husband for $20 to arrange for 'disposal of the body'. Did they put him in the garbage? What did they do with him? I was never able to find out. A few weeks later, I asked if I could have a birth certificate or a death certificate, they said 'No, he was never born'."
Patsy Healy, a director at WN Bull Funerals in Sydney, delivered her stillborn girl, Melissa, in September 1991. She has two adult children.
"I was at work when I went into labour. We dropped our daughter with friends and headed to King George V Hospital.
Off we trotted, I was 34 weeks and didn't think too much about it until ultrasound testing and the nurse couldn't detect a heartbeat - she didn't tell me, a registrar came in and spoke to the nurse and my husband eventually said, 'Please talk to us.'
The registrar said 'Your baby's perished.' To me, those words didn't fit the situation - tyres perish. I remember vividly this beautiful nurse and it was the first time she had heard a mother being told her baby had died.
Then I had to give birth. It was too late for a lot of pain relief. That was the most difficult bit, knowing that the labour wasn't going to stop and that I was going to deliver a dead baby.
They took a Polaroid photo of her, which I was given. That was the last I saw of her. I never did get to hold her. Our elder daughter named her Melissa. She would have been 25 last month. She was deformed and we learnt later that she would not have survived for long.
They had nowhere to put me. They couldn't put me on the maternity ward, so I ended up on a surgery ward. My boss came to me in hospital the next day and I asked him to look after Melissa, he helped us make the funeral arrangements and brought her to the crematorium and arranged a service.
It's an intensely intimate time. They gave us all these leaflets and so on. You're a logical adult but it's really hard to ring up and say 'Hi, my baby died, I need help.' No-one approached us and asked if we needed support.
In those days, we couldn't register the birth, that later changed, so I do have a document that shows that she was delivered.
It's awkward for a lot of people afterwards. Last week you were pregnant and this week you're not and you don't have a baby to show for it."
Penny Ryan gave birth to stillborn boy, Max, in Sydney in 2006. She now works part-time at the Stillbirth Foundation.
![Penny Ryan, Adam Perrett and their boys Harper, 9, and Monty, 7.](http://web.archive.org./web/20161015225232im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/1/u/i/b/image.imgtype.articleLeadwide.620x349.png/1476342559236.png)
Penny Ryan, Adam Perrett and their boys Harper, 9, and Monty, 7. Photo: Stillbirth Foundation
"It was my first pregnancy, I was 30, fit and healthy. I didn't fit any risk category, it was a fairly uneventful pregnancy and I was in the last few weeks. I noticed that the baby had stopped moving as much. Whenever I mentioned it, [doctors] said 'There, there, don't stress, it's just bunkering down.'
I went into labour naturally at 40 weeks and five days. They make you wee in a cup and then they pop you on a bed and measure the heartbeat and that's when we were told they couldn't find a heartbeat.
We had Max at RPA, they were pretty amazing, they looked after us beautifully. The labour was 12 hours, when he was born, we got to name him, hold him. My parents drove up, my midwife was with me the whole time.
We were given a room on the maternity ward, but set back. We had a double bed and they allowed Max to stay with us, family and friends came and visited me and met Max. I was in for two days. He slept between my partner and I.
I was discharged then readmitted as my blood pressure went through the roof and was put on the antenatal ward. The doctor clearly hadn't read his notes and asked me how many weeks pregnant I was.
What was really lacking for me was emotional support afterwards. I didn't want to have to explain myself over and over again. There were no specific stillbirth resources and I was sent a leaflet on how to sleep safely with my baby.
I had clear signs and a gut instinct that something wasn't quite right but nobody listened. We agreed to have an autopsy done as part of a Sydney stillbirths study. Their best bet was that I had subclinical preeclampsia. When we got the result, we had to go to the labour ward, then into a doctor's office, all the doctors were kicked out and we were given our results there. There was no privacy.
We chose to have Max cremated and we had a service in the park. His ashes are on a shelf in the kitchen, my two boys who were born after him put things up there to keep him company."
Lauren Malcolm and Shane Baggett, from Sydney, had a stillborn son, Landon, in 2015.
![Lauren Malcolm and Shane Baggett.](http://web.archive.org./web/20161015225232im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/1/u/i/4/image.imgtype.articleLeadwide.620x349.png/1476342612289.png)
Lauren Malcolm and Shane Baggett. Photo: Stillbirth Foundation
"Landon was born on the May 5, 2015. I was at work, my wife said she just felt a bit different and went up to the doctor to check what was happening. They couldn't find a heartbeat. We went into the mode of 'Wow, is this really happening?' It changed our whole world.
It was just by chance that we met a counsellor through the hospital, we had her around to help guide us through the whole series of checks and ultrasounds. My wife had to be induced, we felt helpless, we were in the maternity ward at Prince of Wales Private. Knowing that there are all these babies around you getting born, it's a hard thing to cop. It's still very, very hard to cope with everyday.
I have a photo in my office of my little girl and my little boy, one is alive and one is not. I talk about him, there is stigma attached, but he is something that I'm very, very proud of. There's no real education as such, if you have a stillbirth, there were no pamphlets, there was nothing support-wise had the hospital not had a counsellor. I don't know how we would have survived without her. The hospital was immensely accommodating. There was an insensitive doctor and I went straight to the nursing staff and complained.
We were so lost, it was just so foreign to us. We spent a good day and night with him. We took photographs, we dressed him, we named him.
We had a cremation. Our counsellor helped us with a funeral plan. They put him in a little nest, we spent time with him the day before his funeral and took foot prints and handprints.
This is a little human life. If he had taken one breath, it would be a whole different world of medical reaction. It's treated completely differently.
This has happened to a lot of families. Once you're in this club, you find out the club has been there for a long, long time - and that it is bigger than you ever realised."
2016 and moving ahead: Victoria Bowring is general manager of the Stillbirth Foundation. She is fighting for funding and awareness of stillbirth
"There's so much still to be done. Six babies a day are stillborn everyday - it's a statistic that has remained about the same for the last couple of decades and is the leading cause of death for children under 12 months.
These days, stillborn babies are issued with birth and death certificates, they are considered lost children. There is still a taboo, still a large percentage of the population who don't see it that way.
For every one baby that dies with SIDS there are 35 babies stillborn. We need education, much like we've had around SIDS.
We're ready to start a national health campaign around the risk factors and prevention methods so that we can start to drive down the rate. Up to a third of stillbirths in Australia are possibly preventable.
Stillbirth is so horrifying to think about when you're pregnant that women choose not to ask about it. We know that lots of doctors and midwives don't bring it up. Many mums say 'Why wasn't I told this could even happen?' It's going to take a lot of considered and thoughtful education. We would love to see protocols and consistent practice across all maternity hospitals.
The Stillbirth Foundation is the only organisation dedicated to stillbirths, yet we have no government funding. We rely completely on donations, usually from family and friends affected. We have written to NSW Premier Mike Baird, hoping to discuss this with him, sadly he declined. We are attempting to get the funding required.
PWC's economic cost analysis shows that stillbirths cost the economy more than $100 million a year. It makes sense for the government to invest in trying to reduce those numbers. It breaks my heart to think that we have to reduce babies' lives to costs."
Pregnancy and Infant Loss Day is on Saturday, October 15.
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