Advocacy

Australia

• Research at the Stillbirth Collaborative Research Centre

Middle East/North Africa

• UNICEF developed a Joint Technical Brief on Stillbirth for the Middle East and North Africa Region in English, French and Arabic, with support from SAWG.

United Kingdom

• National Maternal and Perinatal Audit

United States

• Stillbirth Collaborative Research Network
• On 31 March 2022, U.S. Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) introduced the Stillbirth Health Improvement and Education (SHINE) for Autumn Act, legislation that aims to reduce the high U.S. stillbirth rate. The bipartisan and bicameral SHINE for Autumn Act (H.R. 5012/S. 2647) was reintroduced into the 118th Congress on July 27, 2023. Full text of the SHINE for Autumn Act are here. Quotes written in support of the legislation by national and New Jersey organizations are here. A full list of organizations endorsing the bill is here. 
• Star Legacy
• Return To Zero provides support for people who have experienced pregnancy loss
• Why we need to end the silence around pregnancy loss by Lisa K Hanasono, January 2021
• HB1031, allowing issuance of a Certificate of Birth Resulting in Stillbirth in Washington State, was officially signed into law by Governor Inslee on April 16, 2021.

• The Child Health and Well-being Dashboard from WHO, UNICEF and CAP-2030 tracks indicators on childhood survival, development, protection and participation, as well as related policies. Stillbirth data from nearly 200 countries are available.
• UNICEF/UN-IGME stillbirth data can be found here. 
• The Healthy Newborn Network has updated its Newborn Numbers page and related tools with the latest data to help guide country and regional policies, planning, and implementation of life saving interventions to avert preventable newborn and maternal deaths, and stillbirths.
• World Health Organization (WHO) Global Health Observatory 
• The UN-IGME website for child mortality estimates now includes a stillbirth database and estimates.

• The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health (PMNCH), White Ribbon Alliance, and Every Woman Every Child, sponsored the annual “Accountability Breakfast 2020: Advancing Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health During COVID-19” in September 2020. The event was watched by more than 2,200 people from 110+ countries representing governments, health practitioners, UN agencies, the private sector, civil society, media, researchers and academia. 
• Launch event for the Every Newborn Action Plan (ENAP): Every Newborn Coverage Targets and Milestones for 2025 in September 2020. The event can be viewed on YouTube and the slide deck can be found here; All the documents presented during the launch can be found at this link and include:
  • Every Newborn Coverage Targets and Milestones to 2025
  • Survive and Thrive Transforming Care for Newborns (2019)
  • Standards of Care for Newborn Health (2020)

• ‘The AlignMNH 2023 Conference: progress in raising parents’ voices in stillbirth advocacy’
  • Read AlignMNH conference organisers’ response here
• Leaving no one behind: this BMJ series left behind 2.6 million stillbirths a year! See the SAWG response here

• Lancet 2011 Stillbirths series 
• Lancet 2016 Ending Preventable Stillbirths series: 
  • Executive Summary
    • English
    • Chinese 
    • French 
    • Italian 
    • Portuguese 
    • Spanish 
• Lancet 2014 Every Newborn series
• Lancet 2014 Midwifery series
• There is evidence that scaling up of midwives will reduce stillbirths and neonatal deaths. A study by the SOWMy team on the Impact of Midwives was launched by UNFPA and the Wilson Center. A full recording of the launch is on the Wilson Center website.
  • UNFPA developed an infographic to highlight the key results from this important study, which they encourage to use widely for advocacy.

• ENAP was endorsed by the UN in 2014, and set the first global goals for stillbirth rate reduction. ENAP tracking is undertaken in high-burden countries annually by UNICEF (90 countries in 2019).
• 2014 WHO resolution endorsing ENAP 
• 2018 ENAP Progress Report
• Every Newborn Report & Executive Summary 2019 (2020)

• The Millennium Development Goals were launched in 2000 and did not include a stillbirth rate target 
• The Sustainable Development Goals were launched in 2015 and also did not include a stillbirth rate target 
• The Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health was launched with the SDGs in 2015 and does include a stillbirth rate target in its tracking facility after advocacy from many organizations including ISA 
• The Independent Accountability Panel was established by the UN to provide accountability for implementation of the Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s, and Adolescents’ Health 
  • 2020 report
  • 2018 report 
  • 2017 report 
  • Inaugural report

• The first UN-IGME stillbirth report, A Neglected Tragedy, was published on Oct 8, 2020 with updated data tables
  • Photos from the report are available here. Please credit UNICEF wherever these are used.
  • In addition, Key Messages in English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Spanish and Russian and social media materials in Arabic, French and Spanish are available upon request from UNICEF; email info@stillbirthalliance.org to request.
• The Every Newborn-INDEPTH study involved >68,000 births and aimed to provide evidence to improve population-based survey data regarding pregnancy outcomes. Each year there are 5.1 million neonatal deaths and stillbirths, plus about 0.3 million maternal deaths worldwide. The study was conducted in five Health and Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS) sites from the INDEPTH Network in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau and Uganda, plus a coordinating team at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Makerere University School of Public. 
• The EN-BIRTH study involved observing >23,000 births using an innovative tablet-based system to validate data from routine facility registers and women’s survey report. The study was conducted in five hospitals in Bangladesh, Nepal and Tanzania, coordinated by a team at LSHTM. The protocol was published in 2019 and the main study paper is in The Lancet Global Health.