On 13 October 2025, during Baby Loss Awareness Week, MPs returned to the floor of the House of Commons to debate baby loss — a topic that lives at the intersection of heartbreak, policy, and systemic failure. The debate is a moment when public policy meets personal grief, and it matters profoundly to families who feel their stories have too often been ignored.
Here is what stood out — and what it means for parents, advocates, and professionals in maternity care.
Key Themes from the Debate:
1. The scale of loss is stark — and persistent
The following statistics were quoted:
- 13 babies die each day either just before, during, or shortly after birth.
- In 2023, there were 4,478 baby deaths: 2,545 stillbirths and 1,933 neonatal deaths.
- Perhaps most telling: in about one-third of stillbirths, no cause is ever found.
The numbers are heartbreaking in themselves — but the debate underscored that they are not inevitable. Systemic failures and preventable harm often lie behind many of those tragedies together with evidence of institutional cultures of denial and cover up.
2. Inequalities remain glaring and unforgiving
One of the most impactful threads in the debate was about inequity, which reiterated the following, quite rightly, widely publicised inequalities:
- Babies from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds continue to have significantly worse outcomes. For example, stillbirths among Black babies are over twice the rate compared to babies of White background.
- Babies born in the most deprived areas are twice as likely to die in their first month compared to those in the least deprived areas.
In plain terms, the combination of socioeconomic inequalities and institutional racism has a double impact on black women and their babies’ experiences of maternity care and its outcomes.
The debate called out that despite decades of data, too little has changed in practice to close those gaps and again reinforced the call-to-action to effect policy change to explicitly address inequality to avoid the same failed outcomes persisting in certain communities.
3. Bereavement care needs to stop being optional
One of the often-overlooked parts of maternity policy is how we care for parents after loss. Good bereavement care is especially important as we know bereaved parents are at significantly higher risk of developing mental health problems and poor care at the time of the death of their baby can exacerbate their trauma.
Sands’ 2025 report found that over 80% of bereaved parents needed specialist psychological support post discharge, yet despite the introduction of NHS maternal mental health services in England, only 17% of bereaved parents were actually able to access it.
Several MPs pressed on this:
- The National Bereavement Care Pathway (NBCP) was praised, but criticism was swift: its adoption is voluntary, funding is inconsistent, and many trusts lag in full implementation.
- Some hospitals lack trained staff, bereavement suites, or protocols for memory-making moments (holding the baby, naming, photos).
- Equally serious was the mental health aspect: bereaved parents are at greater risk of psychiatric illness, yet many services are inaccessible or too short-term.
The message was clear: caring well after loss is not a “nice to have” — it’s essential to enable dignity, acknowledgement and a foundation for healing.
4. Targets, accountability, and the danger of complacency
A recurring anxiety was that many past recommendations have stalled.
For example, the 2015-2025 maternity safety ambitions (halving stillbirths, neonatal deaths, maternal mortality) have either fallen short or slipped off the policy radar, and so MPs called for new national safety targets, with clear timelines and enforcement.
Many contributions during the debate underlined the need for real accountability — not reports gathering dust, but enforceable oversight, transparent reviews, and active follow-through.
Time and again, investigations into maternity and neonatal care have revealed the same issues: poor communication, missed warning signs and families left to fight for answers.
The newly announced national maternity and neonatal investigation was framed as a possible turning point, but this is only if it delivers both rigorous analysis and binding action.
What This Means — A Lawyer’s View, a Parent’s Hope
The debate contained both urgent warnings and cautious hope.
- Promises alone will not fix systemic neglect. Without clear teeth, safety leads, resources and accountability, we risk another decade of failure.
- The spotlight is sharper now. Families’ voices were central in speeches. The opportunity exists to demand that grief no longer be hidden, failures no longer be accepted, and lessons no longer be buried.
What Families & Advocates Can Watch For
If you are a parent, campaigner, or professional caring about change — here is what to follow closely:
- Whether accountability data is gathered by ethnicity, area, trust and whether underperforming units are required to improve.
- The wording of new maternity and neonatal safety targets, and whether these are incentivised.
- The progress of the national investigation — especially whether it mandates change or just “suggests” it.
- Whether bereavement care becomes mandatory, funded, and standardised across all trusts.
- How mental health support for bereaved parents is commissioned and guaranteed beyond ad hoc measures
Final Thoughts
No one law nor debate can undo grief. But law and policy can shape how that grief is handled.
The debate on 13 October 2025 did not shy from the raw truth: babies still die, families still hurt, and systems still fail them. But it also carried a collective voice saying: this matters, and change must come.
We in the legal and health communities must ensure that the words spoken in Parliament translate into safer maternity care, better postpartum support, and a system that treats every parent’s loss as serious, seen, and worth preventing.
Because beyond the statistics are lives — and one life lost is too many and is a system broken.
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Quote from author. MDS Legal Director, Hannah Carr, who represents those families affected by baby loss said “What stays with me the most from this debate is the silence between the statistics – the space where a baby should have lived, and a family still waits for answers so poignantly highlighted by the lived experiences spoken about.” "As a maternity lawyer I meet families whose lives changed in moments that should have been safe. When families reach out, they’re not looking for blame – they’re looking for understanding, for someone to listen and to act.” "Each story shared in Parliament sadly reflects the heartbreak I see every day in my work. The debate matters because words in Westminster must become action. Real progress will be measured not in reports or apologies, but in the lives saved from preventable loss and the families who no longer need to seek answers through the legal system.” "What is clear is that there is much impetus behind the drive to improve our maternity and bereavement services, pushing for change for women and the babies of the future. This is no longer just a campaign; it is a movement, and one the Government and the NHS must heed and act upon.”
