Civil Partnerships, Marriages and Deaths (Registration Etc.) Bill (First sitting)

Sharon Hodgson Excerpts

Committee Debate: House of Commons
Wednesday 18th July 2018 Public Bill Committees

I would prefer to include the term “stillbirth” rather than “pregnancy loss”, but the term “stillbirth” cannot, as the law stands, be applied to births before the 24-week threshold. I urge hon. Members to support clause 3 and amendment 14.

[Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Sharma. I am happy to be able to respond on this issue again and support the private Member’s Bill promoted by the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham and his efforts to secure this change.

How we feel about the issue will be born out of our own lived experiences for those of us who have lived experiences of baby loss and, in this case, pre-24-weeks baby loss. Those who were present at Second Reading or who have followed the Bill’s progress will know what my lived experience is, as I relived it on the Floor of the House, with lots of tears along the way. That was a very painful experience for me, and I do not intend to relive it again today, for which I am sure everyone will be grateful. However, for the benefit of the Committee and those who may not know, I will just briefly say that I had a stillborn baby girl at 23 and a half weeks. We called her Lucy, and she would have been 20 years old on 19 May this year. We had a naming ceremony for her in a room in the hospital—it was not a bereavement suite, because this was 20 years ago—and that was because of the thoughtfulness of the hospital chaplain, who went on to arrange Lucy’s burial with the Co-op funeral service, which did not charge anything. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East has campaigned for burial fees and funeral costs to be waived in such cases, and the Government have committed to that, which is great, so things do move on—things are getting better—and that is what we are hoping to see here today.

As some hon. Members will know from the Second Reading debate, Lucy was buried in the same grave as my nana and grandad. When we got the deeds back, that was the start of me realising that Lucy formally did not exist, because I was horrified to see that it was my name on the deeds for the burial plot. I realised that that was because, legally, Lucy did not exist; it was a bit of me that was in the plot. I still cannot quite come to terms with that. I hope that it does not confuse whoever is burying someone in that plot next; will they think, “Oh, is Sharon Hodgson in here?” Hopefully I will not be.

I am not sure whether what we are proposing with this Bill would change any of what I have described, but I hope that it would change the feeling that I had nothing other than Lucy’s grave and a couple of photos to prove that she had existed. Also, I do not think that the Bill would change the fact that she is recorded in my medical notes as a miscarriage. Even while I was holding her in my arms—she was a fully formed baby—she was classed as a miscarriage, because she had not taken a breath. If she had, she would have been rushed to the special care baby unit at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, and, because it is one of the best in the country, she probably would indeed have celebrated her 20th birthday earlier this year.

The Bill will not change the miscarriage-recording fact, because we are not discussing viability, as we know where that would lead, and none of us wants to go down that path or open up the abortion debate with this Bill. However, I hope that the Bill will ensure that sensitivity about language and the use of language when the worst happens— especially in the pre-24-weeks period, for all the reasons that I have explained—is improved.

On the subject of what we hope that the Bill will do, I note that the review that the Bill instigated and which the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham spoke about is still under way and has not yet reported. I also share his concern that we have managed to take part in only one of the three sessions so far, so lots of debate would already have happened in the review without the hon. Gentleman or me attending.

I have read through the policy statement from the Miscarriage Association that it probably has submitted to the review, and evidence submitted by the all-party parliamentary group on baby loss. I am proud to be one of vice-chairs of that group. Both groups make the case that any registration or certificate given should be on a voluntary not mandatory basis. I refer to page 4 of the all-party group’s evidence to the review, which states that there were 2,586 respondents to the survey that the Miscarriage Association carried out, and 93% of those responded said they had had experience of pregnancy loss themselves.

It will become clear where I am going with this: the overwhelming majority—74%—were in favour of permitting voluntary registration for pre-24 week loss, miscarriage, ectopic or molar pregnancy at any gestation, and 23% said that they felt that that option should be for only a certain gestation, the cut-off points varying from four to 23 weeks. Just under half of the 23%— 11% of all respondents—suggested that that cut-off point should be 12 weeks. In summary, among the respondents there is overwhelming majority support for allowing registration for pre-24 week pregnancy loss. Some form of registration for pre-24 weeks is agreed, and it seems to be agreed from those respondents that it should be voluntary.

The hon. Gentleman’s constituent, Hayley, who first approached him about the issue with her twins, feels that it should not be a matter of voluntary or mandatory—I agree, because I do not like “mandatory”; I prefer “automatic”—for late-term miscarriage or very early stillbirths, whatever they are called. If it happened at over 24 weeks, it would not be, “You must have a death certificate”, it would just happen. I would not necessarily have liked to have been asked at that stage whether I wanted to have some sort of certificate of registration. It was bad enough that this awful trauma had just happened, without being asked to make a decision that I probably was not in a strong enough position to make. I understand that the Government say that people would have 42 days to make that decision, but I come back to it being automatic at a certain stage.

I have looked at the survey questions in detail—I am not an expert on surveys or questionnaires, although I am pulling apart my clinical commissioning group questionnaire at the moment—and I think it is a fair set of questions. But by the rules of mathematics, it will have been weighted to receive more responses from people who may have suffered, or are connected to someone who had had, a miscarriage from conception to pre-20 weeks, rather than those from 20 weeks to pre-24 weeks. Among the 2,586 people, the latter group will have been smaller than the nought to 20 weeks group. Of the survey respondents, 93% had suffered a pregnancy loss, but I do not think they were asked when that pregnancy loss was. I hazard that if a further survey were done that separated those two groups we might be able to see a difference in the answers. That is something the review should do when it is trying to form an opinion about whether it should be automatic—I will not use the term “mandatory”, because people automatically get a birth certificate or a death certificate after 24 weeks—rather than voluntary.