The Schuyler Blanket Project

The Schuyler Blanket Project started on Ravelry (a knitting and crochet website) this summer when Tammany lost her beautiful baby daughter Schuyler Brynne. Many knitters and crocheters on the website got together and each made a square for a blanket for Tammany, in memory of Schuyler. Tammany knew that this lovely effort would bring comfort to other bereaved parents as well, and thus the Schuyler Blanket Project was born.

Quite a few blankets have already been made and delivered to grieving parents. Typically the squares are 8x8 inches, made of any washable fiber in any colors you would prefer. There are hints and suggestions on the project blog.

The link above and on the sidebar here is to the project blog, though most of the work is currently coordinated through a group on Ravelry. Rav is currently by membership only, though membership is free -- you just have to sign up. If you are interested in the fiber arts and not yet a member there, I suggest you sign up as it is a real treat.

Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day

Today is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day

Light a candle at 7pm in all timezones to create a continuous wave of light across the world.

See www.october15th.com for more information.

New blogs submitted

A warm welcome to the following bloggers who recently submitted their blogs

My Yellow Brick Road Has Potholes*
Making Coyne
Still Serving HIM Through The Storm*
West Temple Life
2 Feet on Earth 1 in the Stars*

and the following resource has been added:

Noah's Rainbow: A Father's emotional journey from the death of his son to the birth of his daughter. By David Fleming

Saving Babies' Lives Report - Sands UK

Sands UK

Countdown to Parliament
28.02.09

On Wednesday 4th March we will be presenting our Saving Babies' Lives report which will highlight why we believe that in many cases the devastating impact of the death of a baby on the parents, their families and friends could be prevented.

The overriding message from Sands and the thousands of parents who are supporting the Why17? campaign is that the deaths of 17 babies a day in the UK is totally unacceptable. What we want to see is a clear acknowledgement of the seriousness and extent of the problem and a real, collaborative commitment to address these individual tragedies as a matter of urgency and priority.

The Why 17? campaign parliamentary launch, is an important event in the Sands calendar and will be hosted by Anne Milton MP, between 4pm and 6pm at the House of Commons.
This will give us the opportunity to raise awareness of Sands amongst key parliamentarians, as well as to present our Saving Babies’ Lives Report 2009. This new Report, being published and launched on 4th March calls for a co-ordinated, national strategy to tackle stillbirths and neonatal deaths, and the political will to prioritise the lives of babies as an urgent health issue.

There are many people who have been instrumental to the Why17? campaign. To all those families, staff, volunteers and supporters of Sands who have backed the Why17? campaign since its inception, you are the driving force behind the campaign and our thanks go out to each and every one of you.

Together we can make a difference.

First person

When Thelma Williams' baby died at birth, his body was whisked away and he wasn't spoken of again. It took 40 years to confront her grief and finally give a name to her lost child - James
As told to Kate Hilpern

The Guardian, Saturday 10 January 2009

I know I'm not the first woman to have found something she would rather not have discovered in her husband's suit pocket. In my case, it was a notification of the burial of our son. I didn't even know he had been buried until that moment. I had been told when I was six months pregnant that he would die the moment he left my body and somehow I just accepted it when he was whisked away and never spoken of again. This was the 1960s. You didn't talk about such things.

At least, I think it was the 1960s. That's the thing. It could have been 1970. I couldn't tell you what day it was, what season, let alone which year - such was my determination to follow the advice and forget, a task only momentarily but acutely interrupted by the burial slip.
We had another baby later on. I did everything they told me, resting almost solidly for nine months. On 26 December 1971, in the afternoon, Emma was born, a beautiful little girl weighing 7lb 13oz. Home we went with joy in our hearts and everything ahead of us.

It was only when Emma had her own baby, Millie, that it hit me. They say time heals, but there has been nothing chronological about my journey of grief. Nor anything predictable. Out of nowhere it came, threatening to drive a wedge between me and my granddaughter, a granddaughter I had loved unconditionally from the moment I knew she was conceived. But love is different from bonding, I have learned. Bonding is something I could not do with Millie until I acknowledged the loss of my baby boy. And when I had done that - and at last found a place for him to rest in my consciousness - I discovered a bond closer than I could have imagined.

It was 2004, the year before I turned 70, that Emma became pregnant. It was such wonderful news and at first I accepted my niggles of fear as normal. Doesn't every mother of a pregnant daughter worry like mad that everything will be all right? But my anxiety kept growing. Emma knew the reason immediately. Once she reached adolescence, I told her about my stillbirth. She had wanted to know why she had no brothers and sisters. I had surprised myself with how "together" I sounded when I spoke of it. I could relay the facts - facts of which I had hardly mentioned in decades - without a tear in my eye and after I told Emma, I found I could tell others too. Provided I stuck to the facts - and didn't enter the realm of feelings - I sounded like a survivor.

Emma knows me very well and as the weeks of her pregnancy totted up, she spotted the cracks in my shield. She wanted to protect me, to reassure me that everything was OK, but understandably she was starting to feel anxious too. Could what had happened to me happen to her too?

We spoke to the midwife and the specialist. They assured us that all was well. The specialist knew about the condition that befell me when I was pregnant and was shocked to hear how I was treated. He used the word barbaric. He asked if I would like to see the scan of Emma's baby for myself, so I could feel comforted. I did see the scan but I didn't feel comforted. More

My First Son, a Pure Memory

By DAVID HLAVSA
Published: September 19, 2008

HAVING waited until we were in our 30s to start a family, my wife and I were having trouble conceiving, leading to sperm tests, hormone shots and other extraordinary measures.

Over many months, the process of conception became so technical that when Lisa told me she was at last pregnant, I found it hard to know what to credit. After the first ultrasound, she came home with a black-and-white picture of a tiny curled-up creature. We put it on the refrigerator: my son, the lima bean.

At 20 weeks, we went in together for the second ultrasound. The technician made small talk and popped his gum as he dimmed the lights. Lisa lay back on the table. I shifted in my seat, jammed my hands into my pockets, and stretched out my legs like a teenager settling in to watch a movie. As the technician slid the paddle around on Lisa’s belly, the image on the computer screen wheeled, dipped and blurred.

Finally my son’s image popped into focus. Arms and legs folded, he seemed to be resting on his back, as if lying on the bottom of a pool, waiting to spring to the surface.

I said, “Cool.”

The technician muttered something, hit a button to freeze the image and walked briskly out of the room.

A few minutes later, in walked a small man wearing a rumpled white coat and steel-rimmed glasses, his bow tie askew. He shut the door behind him.

I don’t remember exactly what he said; he looked as if someone had left him out in the rain. What we had taken for a frozen image, he explained, was in fact absolute stillness.

We still refer to the man as Doctor Death, perpetually forlorn, always breaking bad news. They keep him in a closet. (A year later, pregnant with our second son, Benjamin, my wife turned a corner at the hospital and saw him at a nurses’ station; she did an abrupt, involuntary about-face.)

After Doctor Death left, our midwife arrived to explain that we had a decision to make. Did we want to schedule a D and C or induce labor? Her language was very plain, but it took a while for me to understand what she was really asking: Did we want the pregnancy to end in a surgical procedure in the outpatient clinic, or in the maternity ward as a stillbirth? We asked whether there were medical advantages or disadvantages to either choice. She told us it was simply a matter of preference. No hurry. Let us know. More

Miscarriage: must doctors make our grief worse?

Insensitive health workers compound the suffering caused by miscarriage, but a Mumsnet campaign aims to change matters

Belinda Benton's second pregnancy was going swimmingly - or so she thought - until she went to hospital, at 12 weeks, for a routine ultrasound scan. “On my way to the appointment I realised that I was bleeding,” she says. “When I got there they said they would go ahead with the scan and see what was happening.”

When the ultrasound equipment was switched on, says Benton, “there was just silence. No one said anything until I said, ‘There's nothing there, is there?' And the doctor burbled and eventually said, ‘No, there's no baby'.”

For Benton and her partner, the loss of their longed-for second baby was a tragedy - the scan picture showed that the foetus had stopped growing at six weeks - but there was scant sympathy from the hospital staff.

“No one offered any condolences or said they were sorry for our loss,” she remembers. “We were terribly upset, and we had to leave the same way we'd arrived, walking through a waiting room full of women waiting for scans. I felt awful, and the last thing these people needed was to see our devastated faces.”

Benton was told that she could have her uterus emptied surgically - “evacuation of the retained products of conception” or ERPC, in hospital parlance - or she could go home and miscarry naturally. “I asked how bad that would be and they said that it would be like a heavy period, so I thought I'd go home and wait for that,” she says.

In fact, the next few days were agony. “It was horrendous,” she says of her miscarriage three months ago. “It was like a birth. I had painful contractions; it was labour. I almost went into A&E.”

“I was given misleading information on what the experience of miscarriage was like. If I'd known how awful it was going to be, I'd have opted for surgery,” she says. “There is no help for women who are miscarrying at home - there should be someone you can phone or get advice from. I also object to the terminology - ‘evacuation of the retained products of conception' sounds horrible; they should call it something like surgical assistance around miscarriage. And there needs to be a lot more understanding on the part of health professionals that miscarriage is an emotional experience as much as a physical one. It's a huge shock, a terrible loss, and it helps to have those feelings at least acknowledged by the hospital staff with whom you come into contact.”

In recent weeks and months Benson, and hundreds of others like her, have been logging on to the parents' website Mumsnet to chart their experiences of what can seem like the uncaring, insensitive face of the NHS - doctors, nurses, midwives and protocols that appear to take no account of the pain, physical or emotional, involved in miscarriage.

To judge from the Mumsnet comments, health professionals often don't take account of the extent to which losing a baby is a personal tragedy More

Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day

Today, October 15th, is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day in the US. The Wave of Light that marks the day is an international affair, something everyone can be part of. At 7pm local time, across every time zone, all are invited to join in lighting a candle in remembrance and honour of little ones loved and missed.

A wave of light around the world may only go a small way to brightening the darkness and silence of babyloss...both as an individual experience and as a taboo subject. But it is a beginning. May the light illuminate and honour, and if it is bright enough, foster discussion, research and prevention, empathy, and support for those who grieve.

In the UK: http://www.babyloss-awareness.org/

Information from the National Stillbirth Society

The body of evidence is growing that fetal heartbeat monitoring is an effective tool in identifying signs of a potential stillbirth before it has a chance to occur. It is the next step up from Kick Counting and looks at the baby's heartbeat in cases where the potential for loss is above average, possibly due to an earlier stillbirth. (Go to our site, www.protectyourpregnancy.com, and click on the link in the last paragraph for a pamphlet explaining the procedure available on an experimental basis from The Pregnancy Institute.)

Next go to http://www.nbc11.com/video/17479363/index.html# to see a newscast feature from NBC Channel 11 San Francisco. It is an interview with a stillbirth mother who, having lost a daughter a year ago, is using a home monitor to safeguard her current pregnancy. After testing she sends the results via the Internet to The Pregnancy Institute where they're reviewed. She is called if the printout suggest her baby is in any distress. For infomation you can email Dr. Jason Collins at haydel1@bellsouth.net.

Richard K. Olsen
Founder & Executive Director
The National Stillbirth Society
www.stillnomore.org

A Mother's Meditation on Loss

AN EXACT REPLICA OF A FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION
A Memoir
By Elizabeth McCracken
Little, Brown. 184 pp. $19.99

Some friends and I used to call ourselves "The Dead Babies Club." We would meet for brunch and talk about our losses -- miscarriages, stillbirths, terminations after amnios revealed acute abnormalities. We may have been a grief-stricken lot, but we weren't going to be a silent one: We wanted to be seen, to be acknowledged, to mark these events that didn't exactly make us mothers, but made us . . . something. And so, we were willfully conspicuous, overly loud. Because we knew: No one wants to hear about your dead baby.

Elizabeth McCracken knows that, too. That's why, in her lovely, crystalline meditation on the nature of grief, motherhood, marriage and France -- a memoir occasioned by the stillbirth of her first son -- she opens with a quip: "Once upon a time, before I knew anything about the subject, a woman told me that I should write a book about the lighter side of losing a child." See, she seems to be saying, this won't be so bad. What's more, she reassures us, a healthy infant lies on her lap as she writes.

I hope those signposts are enough to ameliorate readers' aversion to the subject matter, the excuse that the book isn't for them unless they, too, have borne a dead child. After all, you don't have to be an alcoholic to love Caroline Knapp's "Drinking: A Love Story." Nor do you have to have lost your jaw to cancer to appreciate Lucy Grealy's "Autobiography of a Face." The best memoirs transcend their particulars, offer a fresh look at the bumpy terrain of sorrow, love, youthful folly, aged folly, resilience and selfhood. McCracken's is one of those, and it would be a shame to pass it by because it strikes at one's deepest fears.

The dead baby has a name, by the way: He is Pudding, one of those goofy place-holders you give a fetus after seeing its inscrutable shadow on an ultrasound screen. McCracken, author of the wonderfully weird novel "The Giant's House," tells his story, and hers, with heart and wit, but amazingly little self-pity. Like any woman who loses a child -- say, to a random comet that drops from the sky -- she strafes herself with self-blame. Our bodies, ourselves, our fault, right? Eventually, she displaces that recrimination onto the entire country of France, where she and her husband, Edward, led a classic boho writer's life before Pudding's death. Understandably, she swears she'll never go back. I imagine she will even shun French dressing, french fries, French braids. It seems a reasonable and healthy choice. More

Short film

You can see a short film named Stars made by Robert Stillman for his wife after the stillbirth of their son at 8 months here.

Update: thanks to the commenter who highlighted that this video has been removed. Hope some readers were able to view it before this happened.

Healing and hope through stillbirth research

The hardest day of Tara Adams' life was the day she returned home after giving birth last summer. Instead of carrying Kylie in her arms, Adams clung to tokens: molds of her stillborn daughter's hands, wisps of hair, a photograph. And she made plans to bury her baby.

Adams had a healthy pregnancy she felt her daughter kick just one week before her delivery one month early so one question was constant: "Why? Why would this happen?" the 31-year-old South Jordan mother of three recalls. "You almost think back, what did I do wrong? Did I do something I shouldn't have?"

To help parents nationwide seeking similar answers, the University of Utah is analyzing all stillbirths in Salt Lake County from 2006 through 2008 and attempting to pinpoint the many causes of death.

Most parents who lose their babies during pregnancy never find out the true cause. With almost 27,000 losses a year, stillbirth is 10 times more likely to happen than Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. But pregnancy loss remains largely unscrutinized in the United States. Doctors are hesitant to suggest autopsies. Insurance companies may not cover them. And there's an attitude that fetal death is "God's will," or is at least unavoidable.

For the thousands of parents who never get to bring their babies home, the research under way represents hope. Doctors can't prevent stillbirths if they don't know what caused them in the first place.

"Look at SIDS: SIDS deaths have dropped dramatically [since] they started doing research," says Rose Carlson, program director of the Missouri-based national office of Share Pregnancy and Infant Loss Support. "People haven't focused." The U. is doing its research as one of five universities in the Stillbirth Collaborative Research

The network is attempting to answer basic questions: How often does stillbirth occur? What are the causes, and what are the best protocols to investigate the deaths? Robert Silver, chief of the U.'s division of maternal and fetal medicine and principal investigator for Utah's portion of the study, notes researchers have done a better job of preventing infant death. Infant mortality dropped 35 percent from 1985 to 2001; stillbirth rates declined just 17 percent in the same time period. More

My baby was put in a shared grave

Years after losing her son through hospital blunders, Alvina Carrington discovered a new horror
Denis Campbell, health correspondent
Sunday December 2, 2007
The Observer

In late 2004, on a visit to her son's grave, Alvina Carrington was surprised to find fresh flowers. 'I knew I hadn't put them there, so I thought it was odd,' she recalls. But Alvina assumed a friend or member of her family had brought them, and was touched someone had made the journey to Alperton cemetery on the north-west fringes of London to remember Luke, who had been stillborn at seven months.

After his death in October 2003 Alvina's life fell apart. She had lost the first child she desperately wanted and had spent six years trying for. An appalling series of blunders by doctors and midwives meant her pre-eclampsia went unidentified, with fatal consequences. Amid the shock, grief and anger, her relationship broke up. Previously very sociable, the 33-year-old became introverted and virtually housebound. She gave up her job, unable to stop crying every night after she got home. Alvina thought she had reached the lowest point of her life.

But more than a year after that trip to the cemetery, in early 2006, she suffered another heartbreak. In the course of asking what sort of headstone she could put on Luke's grave, Alvina discovered that what she thought was her son's final resting place also contained the bodies of several other babies. The flowers were for one of them, not Luke.

'I'd rung the cemetery, told them Luke was buried there, given them the plot number and asked them what size of headstone I could erect. I'd decided that I was going to have gold lettering saying "Blue: in our hearts always", because that was the nickname I'd given him, and then 'Luke' underneath.

'That would have been the final act. But the cemetery people explained to me that it wasn't my property, that it belonged to Brent Council, that I'd need to get their permission for the headstone and that there were other babies in the grave,' says Alvina. 'I was devastated. I thought it was Luke's grave and only Luke's grave, and that it was my property. I thought the cemetery had got it wrong. But they said to me: "It should have been explained to you that the grave belongs to the council and that other babies are there."

'I wanted to know how many other babies were in there beside Luke, and whether they were on top of each other or side by side. I wanted to know if there was another baby on top of Luke.'

More

Handle with care

Handle with care
October 6, 2007
Sydney Morning Herald
Kate Benson and Bellinda Kontominas.


Karina Jensen was halfway through delivering her dead baby at Sutherland hospital when a midwife handed her funeral brochures, suggesting she read them between contractions because "we have other people with live babies that are our priority".

After holding her daughter, Amber, for less than two hours, Jensen said farewell on advice from a midwife who wanted her "cooled at the morgue because it's better for the post-mortem" - only to find her dead baby then spent 10 hours alone and uncovered in a corridor of the busy maternity unit.

"It was a horrifying experience," she says. "Amber was right outside my room all night and I didn't know it. My husband, Jack, found her. She had been born at 9pm and he had left to go home about midnight. He saw her in a crib in the hallway and thought she'd be taken to the morgue soon. But the next morning when he came back she was still there in the corridor, with mothers walking past."

Jensen says she spent all night listening to other women in labour and the piercing cries of newborns, before discharging herself the next morning.

"It's such a small thing, but being in the maternity ward that night made a painful process that much more painful. It rubbed salt in my wounds."

A day later Jack Jensen received a phone call from a staff member at the hospital asking him to bring Amber back for a hearing check as they had "rushed off" before it could be done. Stunned, he replied: "Our daughter is in your morgue. If you find out that she can hear anything, you give us a call and we'll come get her."

But their agonising experience does not ring true for all parents.

Fiona van der Plaat's first child, Nicholas, died hours after birth at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in 1998 and, even though she spent five days on the postnatal ward with mothers and newborns, apologetic staff gave her a room of her own as far from the sound of crying babies as possible.

Van der Plaat and her husband, Paul, were allowed to hold Nicholas for as long as they needed after his death. They were given photos of them as a family, a lock of his fair hair and prints of his tiny hands and feet. For days afterwards, midwives would bring Nicholas back from the morgue so relatives could meet him and find closure.

"He had had a post-mortem but they had dressed him in a knitted cap and a blanket so we couldn't tell and they were very encouraging that we should all hold him," van der Plaat says. "It was an extremely painful experience but we couldn't have been treated any better."

For Michael Grosvenor, those emotionally charged weeks after the stillbirth of his daughter, Amelia, left him with little time to mourn. Funeral arrangements and phone calls had to be made to inform family and friends of the couple's loss, but he says he and his wife, Suzanne, were treated with great sensitivity at Calvary Health Care, formerly Hurstville Private Community Hospital.

"You couldn't fault them. The nursing staff went beyond the call of duty, and one even came back to see us on her day off," he says.

The Grosvenors were given all the time they needed with Amelia. Their family and close friends were allowed to visit at all hours and midwives comforted and supported them. More

MISS Foundation-From Hopelessness to Hope

'I set up website to commemorate son'

'I set up website to commemorate son'
Jane Elliott Health reporter, BBC News

When Helen Savage lost her first baby at 39 weeks she and her entire family were devastated.

Little Samuel was to have been the first grand-child on either side of the family and his arrival was very much anticipated.

But just a week before being born he had died from Group B streptococcus - one woman in four carries this bacteria in her vagina, although she may have no symptoms and be unaware it is there. Babies can come into contact with it while still in the womb or during birth. Some develop serious conditions like pneumonia, meningitis or septicaemia, while, others, like Samuel die.

Some women know they are at risk of the infection, because of previous problems, a premature rupture of their membranes, or because a urine test during pregnancy, reveals that they have the infection. But in Helen's case there were no indication and she only found out the cause of death six weeks later.

"I had a trouble free pregnancy," said Helen, 29, from Lisburn, Northern Ireland.
"We first found out we were expecting Samuel in June 2004, and from the moment we saw two lines on the pregnancy test we were so excited about his arrival. Daddy was sure he was a boy right from the start, but Mummy took a bit more convincing. More

Many baby deaths 'can be stopped'

Growth problems could be spotted during pregnancy

As many as 1,000 stillbirths each year could be prevented if clinicians were able to spot when foetuses were not developing properly, a study suggests.

The NHS's Perinatal Institute will unveil research this week which points to "restricted foetal growth" as the key factor in many stillbirths. If this was picked up in pregnancy, these babies could be delivered earlier and have a greater chance of survival.

Britain has one of the highest stillbirth rates in Western Europe.

The 10-year-study by the Perinatal Institute found that some 40% of the 4,000 babies stillborn each year have growth problems. Of these, around two thirds may have survived if action had been taken.

"We are excited about these findings," said the institute's director, Professor Jason Gardosi.

"If we can recognise that babies are not growing as they should then they can be further investigated and, if necessary, delivered at the right time, and in a good condition, rather than being left in the womb and at continued risk of dying."

Professor Gardosi said in addition to the findings on foetal growth in relation to stillbirth, researchers were also starting to identify "an issue about resources", particularly when it came to the number of cases midwives must deal with.

These remarks chime with statements made by the new president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, Professor Sabaratnam Arulkumaran, who believes there are too few consultants and midwives to guarantee the safety of mothers and babies.

In a speech next month, he will cite data showing that most babies die during the night when hospitals have fewer consultants on duty. In an interview with the BBC last month, he said he believed there was too much focus currently on allowing women to give birth at home, and not enough attention on improving conditions in hospital where the majority ultimately give birth.

The tragic human cost of NHS baby blunders

Errors and negligence that result in stillbirths or disabled babies are costing Britain's hospitals billions in compensation. In this investigation, The Observer reveals how staff shortages are wrecking the lives of countless parents.

Denis Campbell
Sunday September 23, 2007
The Observer

What began as a routine pregnancy but turned into a tragedy for one family will finally end this week in a West Midlands courtroom. The hospital charged with caring for the mother will finally agree to pay £5m in damages to the parents of a boy left in a wheelchair, unable to communicate or do anything for himself, after suffering cerebral palsy because of mistakes made by staff during his birth.

It might sound like a lot of money. But consider - it costs £120,000 a year to provide the 24-hour, all-year-round care needed by the boy, who is now 16. The imminent award also reflects the fact that he will never be able to work, and that his parents have had to move to a bungalow and had it specially adapted to cope with his needs, such as a therapy room where he tries to do gentle exercises to stop his muscles from wasting away from moving around so little.

His parents, who have asked not to be named for legal reasons, would rather it had never come to this. 'When I told the boy's father that the report into the case we had commissioned from an independent obstetrician had said that it was negligence, that someone at the hospital hadn't done their job properly and that the care was sub-standard, he began crying,' recalls the family's lawyer, Lindsay Gibb, of solicitors Irwin Mitchell in Birmingham. 'He wanted us to tell him that it was no one's fault, that it was just one of those things, so to learn that it was avoidable was very difficult for him.'

The hospital's first blunder was to send the boy's mother home after hospital staff had failed to induce the birth. An expert witness who gave evidence for the family said that, given the late stage of her labour, she should definitely have been kept in until the baby arrived, if necessary by Caesarean section.

Later, when she was back in hospital again, the child became distressed while he was being delivered and suffered a sudden loss of air to his brain when meconium, the result of his first bowel movement, seeped into his lungs.

Usually, when maternity staff realise that is occurring, they suck out the meconium. But when the anxious personnel attending the woman sought advice by phone from a neonatologist, a specialist in dealing with newborn babies, the doctor seems to have failed to appreciate how serious the situation was. Her guidance meant nothing was done to tackle the baby's oxygen starvation and respiratory collapse. More

Stillbirth Support Symposium

First Candle (SIDS Alliance) is pleased to announce that it will host its inaugural Stillbirth Support & Advocacy Symposium October 22-23, 2007.

Set to coincide with a meeting of the Stillbirth Collaborative Research Network, the symposium will offer stillbirth parents an opportunity to hear from leading stillbirth researchers and meet with representatives on Capitol Hill. Additionally, we will launch a National Stillbirth Peer Support Network, providing training to peer advocates who will offer support to bereaved families in their communities.

As space is limited, First Candle is asking interested individuals to complete a pre-registration application on the First Candle web site at www.firstcandle.org. It is their goal to select a geographically diverse, ambitious group of participants that will help us gain the momentum needed to push this important agenda forward.

Deborah Boyd
Executive Director
First Candle/SIDS Alliance
Phone: 1-800-221-7437

CiaoLapo Onlus

Please note the addition of a new link in the sidebar - to CiaoLapo Onlus.

The founder, Claudia, writes:

www.ciaolapo.it/en is the website of CiaoLapo Onlus, a non-lucrative, non-religious association founded in 2006 by my husband and I (both medical doctors) after the stillbirth of our second child, Lapo. Aims of CiaoLapo Onlus are to promote research on stillbirth and to offer psychological support to parents after stillbirth or perinatal death. We are currently offering weekly online self-help groups to breaved parents and free online psychological and gynecological consults to the associates. During last March, our first national congress was held in Florence and the second one is going to take place in October.