This story is part of The Wall of Wombs, our 2024 exhibition sharing honest, deeply personal journeys of motherhood.
What you’re reading is a direct transcription of a spoken story — shared bravely, in the speaker’s own words.
Listen to this story and explore others at wallofwombs.com.
My second daughter, Bronte, was stillborn two months ago.
I was one of those really annoying pregnant women who loved being pregnant. No symptoms. Happy. I was almost 37 weeks pregnant when I realized that I hadn’t felt Bronte’s movements as much as I normally did. When I didn’t feel the movements like I normally did, I thought, “I’ll do the right thing. I’ll go to the hospital. I’ll check, and it’ll be fine.”
I went to the hospital and didn’t go with my husband because I thought, “It’s fine. I’m just doing the right thing.” I won’t give the full details, but it was a chaotic flurry of events—just escalating panic, drip slammed into my wrist, hospital bracelet on. I thought, “Okay, something’s not good here, but maybe they’re going to deliver the baby now.” No one actually said to me, “There’s no heartbeat.”
It was a very normal birth, funnily enough. It was exactly the birth I wanted to avoid because I was induced and didn’t want an epidural, but I was really encouraged to have it so that I didn’t have any physical pain. It was actually a really beautiful birth because it was very calm. She was born after a six-hour labour.
We are lucky in this day and age that you actually get to spend time with your baby, which sounds morbid, but we had two and a half days with her. A photographer came in and took photos. Someone took fingerprints. She was born with so much dark hair, so we cut a piece of her hair to keep. We got to hold her, and our parents came and met her. She was perfect. We don’t know what happened and probably never will because everything was fine. That was two months ago.
The last two months have been an interesting time of reckoning with the idea of how to be a mum to a baby who’s not here.
People who saw me when I was pregnant and then saw me when I’m not pregnant would obviously say, “You had the baby.” Then I have to tell them what happened, which I’m getting better at doing. The response is always that people don’t want to hear about it. It’s sad, like all death is sad, but when you’re expecting a baby, that is literally the happiest thing that can happen in life. The contrast is hard for people to hear.
I still identify myself as Bronte’s mum, but how you mother a baby is difficult when you can’t really talk about it.
On average, six babies are stillborn every day in Australia, which means most people will meet someone who has experienced it. There is a lot of stigma around talking about baby death because it’s so uncomfortable. Not talking about it means the rates of stillbirth aren’t decreasing. Maybe if people were more comfortable talking about it, those rates would decrease. Other countries have managed to decrease it. The more people are comfortable talking about it, I think it would help. It’s a lonely thing to go through if you can’t connect with anyone.
This is just my experience. I don’t think there’s any mum who’s lost a baby that doesn’t want to hear their baby’s name said, but finding a way to do it without making others uncomfortable is hard.