Advocacy

Organizations

UNICEF has released new data on stillbirth. In 14 countries – including three low- and lower-middle income countries (Cambodia, India, Mongolia) – the stillbirth rate decreased by more than half between 2000 and 2019. More insights into the situation with stillbirths around the world can be found here. UNICEF has also developed a Joint Technical Brief on Stillbirth for the Middle East and North Africa Region in English, French and Arabic.

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.

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.” 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. a portion of the event, you can access it on the, which also contains videos, interviews and other resources for continued advocacy. https://pmnch.who.int/news-and-events/events/item/2020/09/29/default-calendar/accountability-breakfast-2020-advancing-women-s-children-s-and-adolescents-health-during-covid-19

The Every Newborn Action Plan (ENAP): Every Newborn Coverage Targets and Milestones for 2025: 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)

Every Newborn Report & Executive Summary 2019 (2020) 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 http://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/WHA67/A67_R10-en.pdf

2018 Progress Report

https://www.healthynewbornnetwork.org/resource/every-newborn-progress-report-2018/

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. https://pophealthmetrics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12963-020-00243-y

World Health Organization (WHO) Global Health Observatory – http://apps.who.int/gho/data/view.main.GSWCAH06v

Global development goals:

The Millennium Development Goals were launched in 2000 and did not include a stillbirth rate target https://www.who.int/topics/millennium_development_goals/about/en/

The Sustainable Development Goals were launched in 2015 and also did not include a stillbirth rate target https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs

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 https://platform.who.int/data/maternal-newborn-child-adolescent-ageing/global-strategy-data

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 https://iapewec.org/about/

- 2020 report

- 2018 report https://iapewec.org/reports/2018report/

- 2017 report https://iapewec.org/reports/2017report/

- Inaugural report https://iapewec.org/reports/2016report/

The UN-IGME website for child mortality estimates now includes a stillbirth database and estimates; see childmortality.org The UN-IGME stillbirth report was published on Oct 8, 2020 with updated data tables; it can be downloaded here

Parent led activities

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 alarmingly 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 can be found here. Quotes written in support of the legislation by national and New Jersey organizations can be found here. A full list of organizations endorsing the bill can be found here. https://www.shineforautumnact.org/

Star Legacy: https://www.facebook.com/StarLegacyFoundation/photos/a.491805564180287/4487773174583486/?type=3 . https://www.instagram.com/p/CN5OyhQAW0s/?igshid=18ieq3bu6fc3i

Return To Zero: https://rtzhope.org/ RTZ HOPE provides compassionate and holistic support for people who have experienced unimaginable loss during their journey to parenthood.

Why we need to end the silence around pregnancy loss: by Lisa K Hanasono PhD. 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. See links below

Health Care Workers and stillbirth

There is unequivocal evidence that the scaling up of midwives will reduce stillbirths and neonatal deaths and should be a key consideration for ENAP milestones.

A new study by the SOWMy team on the Impact of Midwives has been launched by UNFPA and the Wilson Center. A full recording of the session has been uploaded on the Wilson Center website.

UNFPA have also developed an infographic to highlight the key results from this important study, which they encourage to use widely for advocacy. Midwives Save Lives Infographic_FINAL

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 (in press).

Publications

Read ISA’s latest publication: ‘The AlignMNH 2023 Conference: progress in raising parents’ voices in stillbirth advocacy’

Read AlignMNH conference organiser’s response here

BMJ’s Leaving No One Behind

BMJ’s recent series on Leaving No One Behind which left behind 2.6 million stillbirths a year!

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; please email info(at)stillbirthalliance(dotted)org for assistance in requesting these.

There are opportunities to work with UNICEF to further amplify voices around the stillbirth report. UNICEF says “If you are working on any of your own web stories, newsletters or have any other ideas about how we can amplify these stories further, please do get in touch and we can explore further.” Contact ISA at info(at)stillbirthalliance(dotted)org for assistance in connecting with UNICEF to follow up on this opportunity.

Lancet Series

Lancet 2011 Stillbirths series: https://www.thelancet.com/series/stillbirth

Lancet 2016 Ending Preventable Stillbirths series: https://www.thelancet.com/pb/assets/raw/Lancet/stories/series/stillbirths2016-exec-summ.pdf