Starting as a pilot scheme in 2018, the Still Life project worked directly with women who had experienced stillbirth with the aims of:

• reducing taboos around discussing stillbirth and neonatal death;
• raising awareness of the impacts of stillbirth;
• encouraging people to have their say on which areas of stillbirth research are important to them.

Women were invited to take part in a series of creative workshops developed by an experienced artist. Each workshop used a different simple art activity (painting, collage, clay sculpting) to focus on a specific theme. The workshops provided an opportunity for relaxed guided discussions about stillbirth and stillbirth research.

A booklet was created by the women who took part in the pilot project to showcase the artwork they created and to help raise awareness of stillbirth and the importance of the research taking place to prevent it.

• Download the Brave HeARTs booklet

In January 2019, the Still Life project began working with women from Manchester’s Jewish community. This larger scale project also involved a series of creative workshops, allowing those who took part to:

• explore their own experiences of pregnancy loss in a safe, supportive space;
• find out more about pregnancy research happening in the Maternal and Fetal Health Research Centre;
• help improve future pregnancy research by discussing what was important to them and their community.

Workshops were led by Katharine Cresswell, a Patient and Public Involvement Project Manager from Vocal, and Jewish artist Chava Erlanger.

Support was provided by Alex Silverstone from Jewish Maternity Liaison Services, and midwives and researchers from the Centre.

• Find out more about the Still Life project and view the online gallery.

Stillbirth Stories was a pilot project to create an online, audio archive documenting the experience of stillbirth from the perspectives of bereaved parents, midwives and obstetricians. These personal and professional recordings, collected on the Stillbirth Stories website, are a unique resource for those directly affected by stillbirth. We believe the opportunity to listen and share in parents’ stories, told in their own words, engages others with this little-talked-about subject in a way that statistics and facts cannot. The audio archive is available at Stillbirth Stories.

The audio archive was established by Nicola Gibson and Emma Beck both of whom had a wealth of experience of broadcasting and production of audio material and both had experienced the death of a baby either during pregnancy or shortly after birth. Prof. Alex Heazell acted as advisor to the project and conducted an evaluation of the impact of the audio archive.

Stillbirth Stories was supported by a Wellcome Trust People’s Award which is a scheme that supports projects that encourage the public to explore biomedical science, its impact on society and culture, its historical roots or the ethical questions that it raises.

The Still Born Project is an art and poetry project initiated by artist Adinda van ’t Klooster in 2017 supported by Prof Alex Heazell from the Maternal and Fetal Health Research Centre. Launched in 2020 the participatory artwork Each Egg a World, is an online piece that aims is to raise societal awareness of stillbirth and pregnancy loss and give people who have experienced a stillbirth a voice with which to talk about it to the outside world. This project aims to reach bereaved parents worldwide and reduce some of the social isolation and stigma experienced.

The online artwork contains 44,061 dots that together create patterns of human female egg cells inside a larger egg shape. Each dot represents one stillbirth and all that that entails in each case. It is hoped that the artwork will help to break the taboo on stillbirth and make people feel slightly better equipped with understanding when they come across a stillbirth in their own lives.

This artwork hopes to create an inclusive picture of the impact that a stillbirth can have on people’s lives. It is common complaint of people who have experienced a stillbirth that the magnitude of their loss is ill understood by their wider community and that although they would like to talk about it, they feel pressure to stay quiet because it is a difficult topic.

The Still Born project has been made possible through funding from the Arts Council England (in 2017 and 2020), crowdfunding and from the Wellcome Trust through a Wellcome Institutional Strategic Support Fund award administered by the University of Manchester and from GX project with a grant funded by the ERDF.

More and more people have IVF (in vitro fertilisation) in the UK each year, as opposite-sex couples, same-sex couples or a single person.

The process can be long and emotional, and the care people receive can make a big difference to their overall experience.

Currently, people who are pregnant through IVF usually receive the same antenatal care as everyone else. For some people this works well but, for others, this can be difficult.

We want to develop research that will improve the experiences of IVF for everyone. Our approach is to work with people and partners from a wide range of backgrounds who have experienced a pregnancy through IVF (including Intracytoplasmic sperm injection- ICSI).

We provide a secure and supportive environment for members to get involved in research in ways that best suit them.

For more information visit the group’s webpage on the Vocal website. To join the group please contact mfhrc@manchester.ac.uk.