Relief and Joy After Trauma of Stillbirth

By Miranda Wood, Health Reporter
The Sun-Herald
January 25, 2004

Safe arrival ... Six-month-old Lily Kirkwood at home with her mother Emma and social worker Deborah de Wilde.       Photo: Danielle Smith

Emma Kirkwood was unlike most women when she discovered she was having a baby. Instead of feeling excited about the news, she was scared and confused.

Three months before she became pregnant with her now six-month-old daughter, Lily, Mrs Kirkwood had a stillborn daughter, Olivia.

"I was frightened, there is no other way to describe it, because Olivia died at 36 weeks," Mrs Kirkwood said.

"You look at what you have to get through to get the live baby and you think 'I don't know if I can do that and I don't know if I want to do that'.

"It's just something so big that you can't imagine how you'll handle it."

But a new group for NSW women who have experienced stillbirth or the loss of a newborn and then become pregnant again helped Mrs Kirkwood through a difficult and anxious period.

"It provides information because when you have a dead baby, you are isolated and feel so incredibly alone and in the second pregnancy, the loneliness is intensified," she said. "I think the group is vital. I feel so lucky to have been given that opportunity."

The Pregnancy After Loss Group is provided through the Mater Hospital in North Sydney and is available to all women across the state.

Women join the group when they are between 20 to 24 weeks pregnant and attend six fortnightly sessions.

The program's founder, social worker Deborah de Wilde, said the new service provided counseling and allowed women suffering similar heartache to share their stories.

"I think people around you often assume that the news of the new pregnancy means you are excited and full of hope and optimism," she said. "It goes some way for compensating the sadness and the death of the previous child, but most people will tell you that it's a much more complicated feeling than that. People's anxieties increase to the time when their previous baby died and the time in which their subsequent baby is due to be born."

More than one baby in every 100 is stillborn or dies within 28 days of birth while 10 to 15 per cent of women miscarry.

Mrs Kirkwood said Lily was delivered at the Mater Hospital at 37 weeks. "I couldn't do it anymore," she said. "My obstetrician would have liked me to have gone to 38 weeks but I just couldn't. I just wanted her there in my hands just to see that she was OK."
 

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