SURPRISING FACTS ABOUT S.A.D.S.
Sudden Antenatal Death Syndrome
We’ve all heard about SIDS – the sudden unexplained death of babies in their cribs that occur for no determinable medical reason. In 2000, there were 2,181 SIDS deaths reported in the United States. That year there were over 26,000 S.A.D.S. deaths reported, almost 12 times as many. S.A.D.S. stands for Sudden Antenatal Death Syndrome, better known by the familiar term, stillbirth. Medically speaking, stillbirth is the death of a baby in its mother’s womb, after 20 weeks gestational age and up to the moment of delivery, which is when many die…. at the “finish line”!
Stillbirth is unpredictable and random, and often strikes like lightening in a thunderstorm. There is no way to know if or when or where it will strike next. The reason it is unpredictable is because half to two-thirds of all stillbirths occur for indeterminable reasons, and cannot be attributed to a specific identifiable medical cause.
Because of its randomness, and the lack of any warning, stillbirth, is said to be "An Equal Opportunity Destroyer of Dreams". It cuts across socio-economic classes, races, religions, body types and maternal age groups. No woman is immune from this "last great mystery of obstetrics". Even women who have had several successful prior births can experience a subsequent stillbirth.
That so many stillbirths occur at or near late term - when the developing baby is well beyond the point of viability and could survive outside the womb - is especially devastating, leading mothers and their doctors to speculate what might have been had their baby been delivered earlier.
Autopsies, when performed, rarely uncover any cause of stillbirth not already apparent from a physical examination of the baby and placenta.
There is no uniform stillbirth post-mortem (autopsy) protocol in use today anywhere in America. Every autopsy is done according to local practice. Because of that there is no uniform data available for analysis.
When a post-mortem procedure is performed, it is rare for the mother to be interviewed, in spite of the fact she may have vital clues to her baby's cause of death. A uniform protocol would address this shortcoming.
There is no centralized repository for autopsy data that could permit the analysis and comparison of results, if and when an autopsy is performed. Imagine the chaos if police kept fingerprint cards in each department's file cabinet. Crimes would never be solved, just as stillbirth isn't being solved because the data - when autopsies are performed - is not made available to researchers but kept at each hospital, if kept at all.
Technologies that offer promise of identifying life-threatening events for the developing baby are being challenged by doctors rather than studied, such as home fetal heartbeat monitoring. It’s not 100% conclusive, but it certainly is worthy of further study.
An affordable fetal heartbeat monitor - intended for use at home where 99% of all stillborn babies die - is under development using technology developed by NASA for monitoring the heartbeat of astronauts.
The practice of “counting kicks” – fetal movements – is a low-tech test women can do at home on a regular basis. By monitoring her baby’s rate of activity she can identify any sudden change and immediately have her baby evaluated. Sudden changes are often a sign that the baby is in some form of distress, generally involving the umbilical cord. (The National Stillbirth Society has published a brochure entitled “Kicks Count” that is available for download free of charge elsewhere on this website.)
There is virtually nothing a woman can do to cause the stillbirth of a baby in late term. Late term stillbirths remain a case of "natal roulette", played by nature, and as deadly as the well-known "Russian Roulette".
After suffering a stillbirth it's not uncommon for former close friends to become estranged, and for strangers become one's new close friends. Even family members often become estranged. Few know how to deal with bereaved parents so they simply avoid them. A tragic mistake.
One in every 115 babies delivered is a dead baby. If births were like aircraft landings, Phoenix, with about 600 landings on the average day, would have 4 fatal crashes every day. How long would that be allowed to go on? And yet we allow 70 pregnancies to “crash” daily.
Founded in July 2001 by a bereaved father, The National Stillbirth Society is the first and only parent-led stillbirth advocacy group in the United States. We have the only Internet website dedicated to "educating and agitating" for greater awareness, research and legislative reform.
In fiscal year 2000 the federal government allocated $106,800,000 in funding for polio eradication! How many Americans died of polio that year to justify this lopsided allocation of resources? (Recently the World Health Organization announced polio is extinct in Asia and Europe.)
Despite vast sums being spent on polio eradication, we know of no significant government supported research at this time to look into the cause or causes of stillbirth at the federal, state or local level. To our knowledge there is no significant stillbirth research ongoing at our nation's medical schools either.
A birth defect is as an impairment of an essential life function! But the March of Dimes, our nation’s leading charitable research organization, that claims to combat birth defects, doesn't regard stillbirth as a birth defect! What's a more essential life function than a beating heart? It’s amazing but true. Stillbirth is not on their agenda!
Mothers who suffer a stillbirth do not receive recognition in 44 of 50 states. Only Arizona, Utah, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky and Massachusetts give these mothers a Certificate of Birth Resulting in Stillbirth. Birth is a process, live or dead is a result. Why would any state issue a "Certificate of Live Birth" to one mother, and not a "Certificate of Still Birth" to the other? Both mothers did the same work, only the outcomes differed. A mother of identical twins, who delivers one "still" is given a Certificate of Live Birth for the surviving twin, but nothing for the stillborn twin, rendering the birth of that child all but "invisible", and a non-event!
Official recognition for stillbirth mothers by issuance of a Certificate of Still Birth was opposed (amazingly) in the California Assembly during the 2002 Legislative Session by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the California Medical Association. ACOG wrote a letter in opposition dated April 4, 2002 that is truly shameful, even obscene!
Upon reflection it’s likely that Dr. Spock, who advised mothers to put babies to sleep on their tummies for decades, may have been responsible for more dead babies due to SIDS than any other cause. In the absence of research, how can we be certain stillbirth mothers aren't getting the same bad medical advice too? We know from a survey we conducted that the majority of OB’s don’t tell pregnant women about the value of tracking their baby’s kicks. What else aren’t they telling them?
Until we identify all causes of stillbirth, there can be no cure. Until there is a cure, there can be no peace. Women’s babies will continue to be at risk, subjected to nature's "reproductive roulette", wherein the majority are lucky, but 26,000 a year aren't.
Mary Tudor (aka "Bloody Mary") was born in 1516 to Catherine of Aragon and King Henry VIII. Catherine of Aragon is reported to have suffered six stillbirths, the last in 1518. Mary Tudor, who later became Queen Mary, was their only child of theirs to survive. How might the history of England – which she ruled as Queen - been different if one of Mary's older siblings had survived? She would not have been Queen. How might history have been different if Stalin, Lenin, Hitler or Pol Pot had been stillborn? We'll never know.
The Pharaoh Tutankhamen and his Queen had two stillborn babies whose mummified remains were found preserved in Tutankhamen's tomb, proving that stillbirth is at least as old as the pyramids, and not any closer to eradication after almost 5,000 years!
