How Hospitals Changed Their Approach to Stillbirth
Updated at 1:45 p.m. ET on February 13, 2020
AARHUS, Denmark—When Ane Petrea Ørnstrand’s daughter was stillborn at 37 weeks, she and her husband spent five days in the hospital grieving with their dead daughter’s body. They held her and cried. They took photos. They welcomed family and friends as visitors. And then they brought her home for four more days, where she lay on ice packs that they changed every eight hours.
If you had asked Ørnstrand before she herself went through this in 2018, she might have found it strange or even morbid. She’s aware, still, of how it can sound. “Death is such a taboo,” she says. “You have to hurry, get the dead out, and get them buried in order to move on. But that’s not how things work.” In those moments with her daughter, it felt like the most natural thing to see her, to hold her, and to take her home. The hospital allowed—even gently encouraged—her to do all that.
This would have been unthinkable 30 or 40 years ago, when standard hospital practice was to take stillborn babies away soon after birth. “It was ‘Go home and
