THE Bishop of Guildford, the Rt Revd Andrew Watson, spoke within the House of Lords last week in support of a change to the legal definition of a stillbirth: from a death after 24 weeks into pregnancy to a death after 20 weeks.
Currently, the death of a baby before 24 weeks is taken into account to be a miscarriage, with implications for entitlement to bereavement leave and maternity protection, as the child will not be legally considered an individual (Features, 11 October 2019).
Bishop Watson was speaking on the Lords Bill introduced by Baroness Benjamin (Liberal Democrat). It seeks to lower the edge for a death to be considered a stillbirth.
“Up to 10,000 families within the UK lose their babies between 20 and 24 weeks of pregnancy,” Baroness Benjamin said in the talk last Friday. “These parents are excluded from maternity protections, bereavement leave and statutory recognition of their loss as a stillbirth.”
In 1992, the legal definition of stillbirth was modified from 28 to 24 weeks, but this “not reflects the medical realities, nor the profound emotional impact of baby loss”, she said.
She laid the give attention to “human experience of loss” somewhat than medical definitions of viability. “I’m not asking us to redefine viability; I’m asking us to redefine compassion, to recognise humanity for each baby lost from 20 weeks onwards.”
The Government has agreed to explore the potential for extending bereavement leave to the parents of babies that die before 24 weeks of gestation. Baroness Benjamin welcomed this, but said that her Bill “seeks to go much further and extend all rights and advantages that currently exist” to pregnancies lost between 20 and 24 weeks.
The World Health Organization draws the road at 22 weeks, and countries including Australia and the United States put the definition at 20 weeks.
One implication of a change within the law can be that abortions between 20 and 24 weeks would should be recorded on the register of deaths. Baroness Benjamin suggested that, if her Bill became law, it could be appropriate to amend the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953 to exclude terminations for non-medical reasons, so as, she said, to guard the “privacy and dignity” of those that had chosen to have an abortion. Surveys have suggested that the majority of those that terminated a pregnancy for medical reasons would still wish to register a death.
Bishop Watson was the one man to talk in the talk. He related his experience as a vicar in Twickenham, and the event from inside his congregation of the Crossway Pregnancy Crisis Centre, which is now the charity SEEN.
The idea had been to create “a listening service for ladies who had miscarried or were facing difficult or unintended pregnancies”, he said. From it, he had learnt the “sheer extent of the trauma of pregnancy loss for a lot of moms, and sometimes for his or her partners, too”.
The Bill was “each compassionate and sensible” he said. His only concern had was in regards to the requirement it’d create for a greater variety of terminated pregnancies to be added to the register of stillbirths. He felt that this concern had been well answered by Baroness Benjamin.
The Government didn’t support the definition of stillbirth recommend in Baroness Benjamin’s Bill, Baroness Wheeler explained, but agreed with its central concern: “to deal with the treatment, care and support for ladies and their families experiencing the trauma of pregnancy loss”.
She highlighted work being done on this area, including moves to increase bereavement leave, but suggested that the legal definition of stillbirth should remain at 24 weeks.
Moving it to twenty weeks would create “inconsistency” with the law on abortion, and would “remove the link to foetal survival”, she said, as a big majority of babies born before 24 weeks didn’t survive.
Baroness Benjamin thanked Baroness Wheeler for “articulating so strongly the Government’s promise and commitment to make a difference to those that suffer baby loss”, and said that she would “accept a compromise” on her Bill.
The Bill will now pass to the Committee Stage.
