Historical Stillbirth Burials and Cremations — House of Commons, 2020-02-06
Topic: Mixed Topics
Patricia Gibson (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): I am very pleased to participate in this debate today. I echo the thanks that have been expressed to the hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) for securing this debate and for all the work that she has done in this area. The death of a baby is an extremely traumatic event, which impacts on both parents and the wider family for many years, if not forever. It is not something that can simply be got over. It is an event that families and individuals simply learn to live with. The burial of a child is also very traumatic, but it can, for many bereaved parents and their families, form a very important part of the grieving process, and yet it was only in the mid to late 1980s that the death of a baby was truly starting to be recognised as a major bereavement. Until then, as we have heard some Members mention, any baby who died before birth, regardless of the gestation period, was swiftly removed from the labour ward, and parents were not given an opportunity to see or hold them. Some mothers were sedated after the birth because it was thought that this would help them to forget. It was a generally held view among professionals and, indeed, society that parents should forget their babies and that it was best to carry on as though nothing had happened. Grieving was actively discouraged Stillbirth truly was a huge taboo, and we are now gradually starting to break down that taboo and deal with these matters with more compassion and sensitivity. I agree with what the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) said about the role of fathers in such events. Until fairly recently, fathers of babies who died before birth were pretty much ignored, and their role was considered to be one of merely supporting his wife or partner in her attempts to forget about the lost child and to have another child as quickly as possible. It is genuinely hard to believe that, until very recently, that was how we as a society dealt with stillbirth Some parents did not even give their baby a name, because they were not advised that they could or should do so. Some did not even know the gender of their baby, and many had no idea about what had happened to their child’s body. As a result, the grief felt at this traumatic life event was silenced and frowned upon, leading to unnecessary isolation, family breakdowns and poor mental health. It is down in great part to the work of charitable groups such as Sands—the stillbirth and neonatal death charity—that these appalling practices and attitudes, which, these days, are hard to believe, began to change Recent years have taught us that, although things are better these days, there can be no room for complacency. We have also learned that there are very different practices in baby cremations across the UK, with some parents receiving ashes from some crematoriums, while others are not. The availability of ashes after cremations seems to have depended on the equipment and cremation techniques used and/or how the relevant authority defined ashes. It seems that there was no statutory definition of ashes in the UK. That has now been rectified in legislation, and we have had legislation in Scotland similar to that mentioned by the Minister There is also the issue of parents being told that there were no ashes to be recovered when, in fact, there were ashes, but they were sometimes disposed of without the parents’ knowledge. Indeed, such practices led to investigations in Scotland, going back some decades, at Mortonhall crematorium in Edinburgh.