Time to target the shocking neglect of stillbirths

http://www.theguardian.com/society/sarah-boseley-global-health/2014/may/21/child-mortality-millennium-development-goals

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Minnie Driver, in a new film from the US, plays a woman who is told a while before she is due to give birth that her baby is dead in the womb. Return to Zero tells the desperate but all too common story of a couple who suffer a stillbirth. It was written, directed and produced by Sean Hanish who went through the horrible experience with his wife himself.

Perhaps it is because it is so sad, but stillbirth is little discussed. In acknowledgement of that, the film's website offers a place for people to tell their own stories. There are charities like Sands in the UK, which offer support, but it is surprising how little attention stillbirths get in affluent and in poorer countries alike. There seems to be a willingness to brush them under the carpet, as if these were babies that were never meant to be.

That's not so. Joy Lawn, professor of maternal, reproductive and child health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and lead author of a new five-paper series on stillbirths and neonatal deaths in the Lancet, which I wrote about here, points out that by 28 weeks' gestation, the point at which the World Health Organisation classifies death in the womb as stillbirth, babies are usually viable.

Every year 2.6 million babies are stillborn. But, says Lawn, these babies, whose loss is a tragedy for their parents, are forgotten by everybody else. And it does not look as though they will be remembered in the post-2015 global targets that will follow on from the Millennium Development Goals. She told me:

We have been told the post-2015 goals should have a target for newborns, but no way will there be a stillbirth target.

Why is there this resistance to focusing on stillbirths? From the family's point of view, there is little difference in the scale of the tragedy between having a stillborn baby and the death of a baby a few days old. And from a practical and economic point of view, while everybody applauds efforts to bring contraception to more people, while parents run a high risk of the death of their babies, there is far less incentive to limit the numbers conceived.