Welcome to the official web site of The National Stillbirth Society, an activist organization comprised of parents and other family members and friends who, having lost one or more babies to this vilest of all "birth defects", are fighting back.

Last year over 28,000 babies in the United States were delivered dead. For the most part they were of viable gestational age. About two-thirds evidenced no observable physical cause to explain why they died. And yet, babies, like adults, die for a reason. Medical science just has to search harder to find that reason so many otherwise healthy babies are dying before birth.

At the Pregnancy Institute in New Roads, Louisiana, Dr. Jason Collins, an OB and medical advisor to our group, believes he is on the track of what may prove to be the leading cause of stillbirths. Working with empirical data he has drawn a construct wherein he postulates that late term babies are often the victims of simple cord compression during maternal sleep. If he is right this could be a major breakthrough, much like SIDS "Back to Sleep" discovery which was also based on a positional causality.

We assume you have come to this site either because you suffered a loss, or have a family member or friend who suffered a loss and are trying to understand this thing called "stillbirth". Speaking as one who became a stillbirth father at age 60, I can tell you I had no idea it could and was still happening. That's because no one - the medical community especially - is comfortable talking about it so it sits there like the elephant in the middle of the living room floor. Not even the instructor in our birthing classes we attended faithfully warned us it could happen. Why?

Until recently it was thought there was nothing one could do to prevent stillbirths. That simply is not true. Through monitoring "Kick Counts" at home and demanding more extensive use of ultrasound and non stress testing to screen for high risk pregnancies, conditions conducive to stillbirth can be detected and appropriate steps taken to prevent it. (See www.protectyourpregnancy.com  for details of a prevention protocol recommended by The Pregnancy Institute.

There is no excuse to allow stillbirths to continue on as it has for all of recorded history. Whether your loss was a year ago, a decade ago, or as recent as last week, we need your help to win the battle. We parents are the ones with a stake in the outcome. We are the ones who know the pain of losing. We are the ones who can make a difference.

The National Stillbirth Society was formed by stillbirth father Richard K. Olsen to "educate, agitate and legislate" for greater stillbirth awareness, research funding, and the passage of legislation in every state to recognize our babies births by requiring states issue a "Certificate of Birth Resulting in Stillbirth". The medical profession would like to maintain the fiction that our babies weren't babies but merely "fetuses". But that fantasy fades in the light of reality when one considers that our stillborn babies, most of them viable, could have survived had they been born just days earlier.

Stillbirth is an "Equal Opportunity Destroyer of Dreams". It cuts across age lines, color lines, race lines, class lines, and all lines. Norman Rockwell type mothers can have stillbirths and "crack mothers" can have live births. At present there's no way to predict who will be next. Though stillbirth is as random as lightening strikes in a thunderstorm it is rarely caused by anything the mother did or didn't do during her pregnancy.

Substance abusers often have early miscarriages or deliver developmentally impaired babies, but stillborn babies are also born to mothers who followed the rules and had adequate pre-natal care. This tells us there is no simple answer. The cause or causes of stillbirth lie somewhere else - other than the obvious - and we need to find it quickly because 70 babies are being born dead every day! Monitoring "Kick Counts" and improved screening can cut the numbers of deaths in half.

There is no shame in having a stillborn baby, only profound sorrow.  There is no fault to be found, only frustration in what a mother sees as her failure. Having said that, join us as we share what we have learned so far. There is work to be done to change public awareness and attitudes and we hope by the time you've finished viewing our site you'll want to become a member and volunteer in your state to change the laws.

One last thing before you leave, please subscribe to our e-mail notification service. It will only take a few moments but it will enable us to inform you of recent developments both nationally and in your state. Thank you for stopping by the only parent-led activist site on the Internet that fights stillbirth...... because all our children matter.