To advance the call to action proposed in the Lancet Series on Ending preventable stillbirths in 2016, the Stillbirth Advocacy Working Group (SAWG) was established in 2017 by PMNCH. The SAWG is a group of parents, clinicians, researchers, policymakers, students and others who are interested in using advocacy as a tool to help end preventable stillbirths and support families and caregivers after a death. The group serves as a hub for global advocacy action and accountability for stillbirth prevention and post-stillbirth bereavement support. It also works to ensure that stillbirths are fully integrated into the reproductive, maternal and child health (RMCH) continuum of care, and reviews global and regional reproductive maternal child health reports and publications regularly to check how well stillbirth prevention and post-stillbirth support are integrated. In 2018, the SAWG had members from more than 50 organizations and was co-chaired by the International Stillbirth Alliance and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Launched in Kenya in 2015, Still a Mum has supported over 5,000 moms and dads who have lost a baby through miscarriage, stillbirth and infant loss throughout Africa. Their services and resources cover psychosocial support for child loss bereavement, individual therapy for los and grief, counseling for children and adolescents, training on respectful bereavement care, and counselor training.

The Parent Voice Initiative is an International Stillbirth Alliance (ISA) project funded by the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (PMNCH). The webpages for this initiative are currently being finalized, and should be posted shortly. Check back regularly for new additions that will include a generic advocacy toolkit as well as advocacy toolkits for India, Kenya, and Australia.

Personal testimonies discussing the experience of stillbirth can be fond on the Healthy Newborn Network blog series on stillbirth here. These testimonies offer an important perspective of the human cost of stillbirth and support advocacy efforts.

Global advocacy efforts have also focused monitoring key guiding maternal newborn health documents for inclusion of stillbirth. The findings from these reviews have been published in a number of commentaries. Select commentaries include:

• A comment on “Impact of COVID-19 on maternal and child health” in Lancet Global Health
• A Rapid Response to “Reaching all women, children, and adolescents with essential health interventions by 2030” in BMJ, “Leaving no one behind: Where are 2.6 million stillbirths?”
• Countdown to 2030 blog post on the MamaYe! website: 2.6 million reasons to invest in stillbirth estimates; also here on the website of Harvard’s Maternal Health Task Force.
• A Commentary on Every Woman Every Child progress report in BJOG, Every Woman, Every Child’s ‘Progress in Partnership’ for stillbirths: a commentary by the stillbirth advocacy working group