Christmas is every child’s highlight of the year. For my family however, Christmas 2024 proved to be the most traumatic time of our lives. Instead of sitting around the tree with our 11 year old son and opening presents, we ended up in a hospital bereavement suite, saying goodbye to our stillborn baby daughter Louisa.

Three days earlier, at six months pregnant, I had gone to hospital to check upon my baby’s slowed movements and heard the haunting sentence, the sentence that has followed me (and many other women) ever since: ‘I’m sorry. Your baby’s heart has stopped beating.’

There had been no warning. All routine checkups had been perfectly fine, nothing pointed towards any complications. On the contrary; just three weeks earlier we had been issued with a 'fit for flying' certificate. The letter from the doctor read: “There are no complications with the mother or her baby.” But three weeks later, we held our dead baby in our arms.

What happened? To our utter disbelief, the answer was: ‘We just don’t know.’ What do you mean? What do you mean you don’t know why our baby died, in the year 2024? ‘Sometimes things go wrong. We just have to accept that.’

Nobody who has ever held their dead baby, nobody who has ever had to say goodbye to them and then turn their backs and walk out, leaving them behind forever, nobody who has ever lived through the trauma of delivering a stillborn, nobody who has ever faced the challenge of living with permanent grief for the rest of their lives, will ever be able to accept "that we just don’t know”. It is too much asked for, it is humanly impossible.

My family got “lucky” in the end. For us, the post mortem brought answers. However, 60% of families who go through what we have gone through, do never get an answer. They will forever face the challenge of “having to accept”.

It is this terrible demand on grieving families that made me start my research into what is being done to find the answers so many families crave. My search brought me to Tommy’s. Tommy’s is the leading charity in the UK funding research into baby loss. They fund and run research projects into miscarriage, stillbirth and neonatal death, doing their best to find answers to the unknown and to reduce baby loss of any kind.

Every day, approximately 8 babies are stillborn in the UK. Every fourth pregnancy ends in early miscarriage. Thousands of babies die shortly after birth every year, many of them also for unexplained reasons. All too often during my own traumatic experience, I heard the word “unavoidable” being spoken. I don’t believe that what happened to my baby and other people’s babies is “unavoidable”. Once we know more about the causes, it will become avoidable.

I have decided to make a first step helping to reduce the trauma epidemic by joining Tommy’s 8,000 steps a day challenge this March. Help me help Tommy’s to make the unavoidable avoidable, find answers for grieving families and reduce the number of families having to face major life trauma. Every little donation helps. Thank you!