This article references baby loss.
Parents who lose a baby before 24 weeks of pregnancy in England will now be able to apply for a ‘baby loss certificate’ in recognition of their bereavement.
In a statement, Health and Social Care Secretary Victoria Atkins said, “Losing a baby can be a hugely traumatic event, and the introduction of certificates to formally acknowledge the loss of life is a positive step towards better supporting women and parents affected.
“I’d like to thank charities and campaigners for their continuous work in bringing awareness to baby loss and making the certificates launching possible.”
Here, we revisit GLAMOUR’s interview with Bex Gunn and Laura Buckingham, who have been advocating for better support for baby loss for years.
“Should we do the usual, mate?” Bex asks Laura. Bex Gunn is gearing up to tell me the story of how she met Laura Buckingham, with whom she co-founded The Worst Girl Gang Ever: a no-frills, no-BS platform for those who’ve experienced baby loss and miscarriage. They’ve both told the story countless times – but that doesn’t make it any easier.
It didn’t occur to Bex that her fourth pregnancy would end in a miscarriage. She had heard the statistic that 25% of pregnancies end in loss, but nothing could have prepared her for the words, “I’m really sorry, but your baby has no heartbeat.”
She describes her grief as being “completely disproportionate” to her loss because “everyone else had forgotten about it almost within a few days or a week.” In the hospital, she was given a flimsy pamphlet with flat advice about “management options.” There was nothing that said, “Oh, your heart will feel like it’s absolutely shattered, and you won’t want to carry on, and you will have to cry in the shower to hide your feelings from your other children… There was no survival guide at all.”
Convinced that there must be other women in the same “void of despair,” Bex wrote a blog about her experience. Within 24 hours, her words had been published by a national news outlet; her inbox had been flooded with women sharing their stories. “There were women in their fifties and sixties saying, ‘This happened to me 30 years ago. This happened to me 20 years ago, and I still think about it. I still remember the due date, I still have the name.’” She ended up creating a Facebook group for everyone to share their experiences. Enter Laura.
By the time Laura joined Bex’s Facebook group in 2020, she’d suffered seven losses. She had started trying for a baby seven years prior and had experienced an ectopic pregnancy, a molar pregnancy, miscarriages, as well as earlier losses. She welcomed a son in 2019. The following year, she published a book, It Will Happen, about her journey through miscarriage, loss, and motherhood.
With a background in nursing, Laura felt she could advocate for herself and fought to get specialist support. When she had her son, she realised that so many other women may not “have had the confidence or the knowledge to ask the right questions and to seek help from the right people.”
“Just because we’ve been through a devastating loss, we don’t cease to be women… We don’t stop finding things funny.”
This is how she became a “warrior” within the baby loss community. “I just wanted to be able to give other people the knowledge and encouragement to do that for themselves.”