Don’t forget stillbirth! (with a focus on racial inequities and advocacy)

Description

Dr Leisher will describe the global and national stillbirth burden, explaining its relevance to the grief treatment and bereavement care community and sharing her personal story as a stillbirth parent. She will then present the results of her recent research on racial inequities in stillbirth in the U.S. and comment on their possible relevance to grief treatment and bereavement care. She will conclude by describing her work as a global stillbirth advocate and the potential for advocacy as a tool parents can use in their own journeys within bereavement and grief; initiatives to be discussed include the Stillbirth Advocacy Working Group, the Parent Voices Initiative, India and Kenya toolkits for stillbirth care and parent advocacy, the Stillbirth Support Organizations Global Registry, the Scorecard for Ending Preventable Stillbirths, and the Global Guide for Stillbirth Advocacy and Implementation.

Learning Objectives

1. 1. Participants will be able to define stillbirth and describe the stillbirth burden and its relevance to the bereavement care/grief treatment community.
   2. Participants will be able to describe some of the racial inequities in the US stillbirth burden and the relevance to the bereavement care/grief treatment community.
   3. Participants will be able to describe some ways that stillbirth parents have used advocacy as a tool to navigate their bereavement/grief journey.

About the Presenters

Susannah (Zan) Hopkins Leisher is a stillbirth epidemiologist who received her PhD from Columbia University in 2023; she is also a global stillbirth advocate and mother to Wilder Daniel, stillborn at 38½ weeks on July 13, 1999, with no cause found. Her stillbirth research interests include structural racism and epigenetic mechanisms of effect. Dr Leisher was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal and then spent over 20 years working on global poverty and social justice in Asia, Africa and Central America, including ten years in Vietnam. At the University of Utah, Dr Leisher is co-director of the first Stillbirth Center of Excellence in the United States. She is an honorary research fellow of the Stillbirth Centre for Research Excellence at the University of Queensland, Australia; ex-officio chair of the International Stillbirth Alliance; co-chair of the Stillbirth Advocacy Working Group (SAWG); and a member of the Steering Committee of AlignMNH, the MFMU Network’s Community Engagement Board, and the WHO/UNICEF’s Every Woman Every Newborn Everywhere (EWENE) Management Team.