The Loss Mother's Stone

Photography can be therapeutic, and after losing both of my parents within 364 days of one another, I knew this to be true. I remembered this healing power when I was 13 months postpartum with my healthy baby son and deeply depressed. His birth was traumatic; I was invisible, and my pain went ignored for days at the hospital. I felt like I was drowning and needed to feel less alone, so I turned to Facebook and asked others to share their experiences of birth trauma. "Are you looking for stories about stillbirth?" one grandmother asked, and that’s how The Loss Mother's Stone began. A 2023 National Institutes of Health report found that more than 20,000 pregnancies are lost at 20 weeks or more every year: that’s 1 out of every 175 pregnancies. And, unlike many of our international peers, like Finland, Norway or the U.K., where stillbirth rates fell by more than 20% or 30% between 2000 and 2019, the U.S. stillbirth rates fall by less than 10%. Despite this, I think there continues to be a reluctance in the U.S. to discuss the issue, with some people afraid that merely mentioning the word "stillbirth" might make it a reality. I was pregnant with my second son during this project, allowing me to experience first-hand how empowering it was to be informed about preventable stillbirth. My hope is to raise awareness that this neglected tragedy of stillbirth, educate the greater population on measures that can be taken to prevent many stillbirths, and destigmatize the conversation.