In Belgium 4,3%* of births are stillbirths. Losing your child is the worst thing a parent can imagine. But for parents of stillborn babies the grief is complicated as they have very little of their children to remember them by. They also feel they can’t always talk about it with their surroundings, as other people may find it hard to imagine the connection parents already had with their unborn child.

According to the grief counselors of Child and Family, a governmental agency for child wellbeing, parents can be helped in their grieving process by recognizing the existence of their baby. How? By holding onto details like weight, length, ultrasound pictures or anything that else they can remember their baby by. But unfortunately, during pregnancy there isn’t much to hold onto.

*https://statbel.fgov.be/nl/themas/bevolking/sterfte-en-levensverwachting/foeto-infantiele-sterfte#:~:text=In%202020%20werden%20494%20kinderen,doodgeboorten%20daalde%20in%20alle%20gewesten. Official numbers for 2020 (last known year)

When you first hear you are expecting a baby it’s hard to already imagine this new life. The moment you truly become a parent is when you hear your baby’s heartbeat for the first time. This moment is when you connect emotionally and become a parent. In Belgium these heartbeats are data registered on ultrasound pictures and logged in the database of the hospital, only stored for medical reasons. When a baby is stillborn, parents never hear the heartbeat of their baby again. They have no memory left of when their baby was alive.

The University Hospital of Ghent wanted to recognize the grief of stillborn babies’ parents and help them in their grieving process. So, we found a way to reconstruct the heartbeat of stillborn children and bring it back to the parents:

Shortest lives, a new grief support and the first living memory for parents of stillborn babies.

Shortest Lives is a serene audio-visual reproduction of a stillborn baby’s heartbeat. It gives proof that your stillborn baby actually existed and offers a new and personalized way of grieving. It was initiated by the University hospital of Ghent, with the help of ‘Berrefonds’, a foundation that helps parents of stillborn babies receive the recognition and support they deserve.

On the Shortest Lives’ website, you can request to receive your audiovisual experience of your baby’s heartbeat. Besides the heart rhythm, we also used other specific and personal data points like the baby’s gender, its size and the days of pregnancy to transform it into an audiovisual image of your baby’s heartbeat. Every part of the design was chosen to recognize and honor a stillborn baby’s life.

The website was launched on 27th of January 2023 and promoted nationwide through PR by spreading a video of the stories of the parents of stillborn babies and their reaction to the audiovisual experience of their babies’ first heartbeats.

- Shortest Lives had 4,99M earned impressions within the first week of the initiative.

- Immediately after the launch there have been 223 requests by parents of stillborn babies to receive a personalized heartbeat of their baby.

- Of all the parents who already received the heartbeat of their stillborn baby, 3 out of 4 shared it with friends and familie, thus creating more awareness for the subject and helping to break the taboo.

- 86% of the parents who already received the heartbeat of their stillborn baby, said it helped them in their mourning process.

- Today, 1 in 3 of the parents whose baby was stillborn in 2022, already filed a request to receive their baby’s heartbeat.

- Other hospitals have reached out to offer this service to their patients as well.

Belgians are reserved. They don’t grieve in public. Grief counselors that have accompanied parents of stillborn babies during the days of the stillbirth witness an additional difficulty to grieve because the existence of their babies isn’t acknowledged. They are not considered to be on the same level as parents that have lost a child that was already born. They don’t have many memories and their friends and family never got to meet the baby.

A lot of stillborn babies also didn’t exist legally. In neighboring country The Netherlands, the law does allow to register stillborn babies at an earlier stage of the pregnancy than Belgium. This means it’s harder for Belgian parents to grieve. They can’t even take official grieving time off.