Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what information his Department holds on the number of women who suffered baby loss between 2020 and 2025.

Baby loss can include miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, stillbirth, and neonatal death. Official statistics published by the Office for National Statistics on stillbirths and neonatal deaths are available at the following link:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/childhoodinfantandperinatalmortalityinenglandandwales/2023

NHS England does not hold comprehensive data on miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies as it is not consistently or officially counted in the same way as live births, stillbirths, or neonatal deaths. The Maternity Services Data Set records information from the point of a person booking an appointment for maternity care and therefore does not include losses prior to contact with National Health Service maternity services, nor is the data of sufficient quality and completeness to produce any counts data. Information on miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies resulting in a hospital stay is published in the Hospital Episodes Statistics, although not all such pregnancies will involve an NHS hospital stay and therefore will not be included, with further information available in Table 1i, named Miscarriage and ectopic pregnancies which resulted in an NHS hospital stay, in the document attached.

The most recent available data shows that there were 31,046 finished consultant episodes with a primary diagnosis of miscarriage in 2020/21, 33,352 in 2021/22, 33,126 in 2022/23, and 35,876 in 2023/24. In addition, there were 10,368 finished consultant episodes with a primary diagnosis of ectopic pregnancy in 2020/21, 11,088 in 2021/22, 10,999 in 2022/23, and 12,122 in 2023/24.