When a baby dies, everyone understands that a family is grieving.

But somewhere in our healthcare system, we often forget something incredibly important:

Someone still gave birth.

Their body is still postpartum. Their hormones still change. Their milk may still come in. Their family still has to figure out how to go home, care for other children, return to work, navigate relationships, and somehow live inside a reality they never expected.

And too often, professional support ends at discharge.

In Episode 97, I'm introducing the next chapter of this podcast, and the reason Pregnancy, Loss and Motherhood has become the Grief-Informed Perinatal Care Podcast.

This isn't simply a podcast about my story anymore.

It's about the practice.

It's about what doulas, nurses, midwives, therapists, newborn care specialists, chaplains, hospital teams, and other perinatal professionals can do differently when grief enters the room.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Why grief-informed care and trauma-informed care are not the same thing
• The massive gap between hospital bereavement care and what happens after discharge
• Why postpartum care cannot disappear because a baby died
• What it really means to provide family-centered care after pregnancy or infant loss
• Why partners, siblings, grandparents, and the larger family system matter
• The importance of continuity of care from hospital to home
• Why professional grief, secondary trauma, and burnout belong in this conversation
• What my own stillbirth experience taught me about the enormous impact one provider can have
• The difference between providers who avoided my grief and the ones who helped me survive it
• One question every professional should answer before a bereaved family leaves their care

Your Grief-Informed Takeaway

Before the next bereaved family leaves your care, ask:

Who is going to call this family, and when?

Not someone should follow up.

A name.

A date.

A plan.

And if you can't answer that question, you've just found a gap in care that you may have the power to change.

We don't have to completely rebuild the system overnight.

We can start by making the next interaction, the next discharge, the next follow-up, and the next family's experience one step better.

That's where grief-informed care begins.

Coming next:

Episode 98: The Baby Died. The Postpartum Body Didn't.

Episode 99: Her Milk Came In, and Nobody Told Her It Would.

And if you've ever found yourself standing outside a patient's room thinking, I don't know what to say, look for the Ask, Don't Assume resource mentioned in this episode.

Because families shouldn't have to teach us how to care for them while they're surviving the worst day of their lives.

Download Your Free Pocket Card with the questions that should never be assumed!

Links + Resources:

• 💌 Visit the Evelyn James Shop on Etsy!
• 🧡 Follow us on Instagram

Welcome back to the Grief Informed Parinatal Care podcast. I'm so glad you're here. I'm so excited to be recording again. So let's dive into our episode.

Episode 97. The baby died, but somehow everyone forgot that the mother still gave birth. This specific sentence is why the podcast has a new name today. We were the Pregnancy, Loss, and Motherhood podcasts, and we were geared towards families. We have a beautiful 96 episodes for families and professionals. And today we're gonna talk about what grief-informed parinatal care actually means and why I think that the entire field has been solving the wrong half of the problem.

Why the name changed. So our old name, Pregnancy, Loss and Motherhood Podcast. This was about my experience. This was about my daughter Evelyn, my family, my mental health journey after stillbirth, what I saw families go through, what I helped families through, what I was seeing in you know, in life. And this podcast, the Grief Informed Parenatal Care podcast, is about the practice.

So doulas, labor and delivery, postpartum nurses, midwives, postpartum doulas, obes therapists, newborn care specialists, hospital staff, chaplains. If you've ever been in a room where a baby was born or a baby has died, this show is for you. Our mission is to train 10,000 perinatal professionals by 2035. It is

a big number and it scares me, which is why I said it. So I just wanted to kind of set the expectations for the new direction of the podcast because some of this will be really uncomfortable, which I believe is good. Because honestly, this is how we've always done it is not a reason to stay comfortable and cause potential harm.

So let me show you the gap I'm talking about because it's not a vibe. It's not just me talking or an opinion. It's actually in the data that we have and that we can see. So let's talk about the problem. So I'm gonna use four separate statistics. roughly 20,000 babies are stillborn in the US every year. About five and a half per 1,000 pregnancies at 20 plus weeks. Okay, so we're talking about stillbursts, not all loss.

And that's according to the CDC and the NCHS 2024 Fetal Mortality Data, which was actually published in December of 2025. Roughly the same number die in the first year of life. So that's about 40,000 families a year. That's not a niche problem. That is a real problem. Number two, care isn't standardized.

A 2024 survey of U.S. hospitals by birth volume found significant gaps in stillborn bere stillborn stillbirth bereavement care, with lower volume hospitals least resourced. And that's from Gold Boggs and Plague Maternal and Child Health Journal. So what is this? What does this mean? It means the quality of care a family gets depends substantially on which building they walk into.

or what luck they have and who's on staff. Number three, what we call the discharge cliff. The Insight study found there was no consistent plan for how follow-up care would be delivered after discharge. Parents didn't know when they'd be seen or by whom.

pronounce his name, Siasakos at all. not the plan. Not that the plan was bad, but there wasn't a plan for these bereaved families. Let's not even talk about just postpartum. We have a well established plan for the baby, but not the mother or birthing parent parent.

Number four, nobody's even measuring. Postpartum visit attendance after stillbirth is still an open research question. We aren't we are not tracking whether these families come back. And that tells you everything about how visible they are in our system. So 40,000 families a year, care that varies by building and luck, no follow-up plan, and no one's counting. That's the gap.

Now let me tell you what I think we do about it. Okay. So kind of what the entire podcast will be based on, the framework around which Evelyn James and Company works. so number one is grief-informed is not the same as trauma-informed. Both are beautiful lenses through which I absolutely believe that perinatal care should be seen through.

but trauma informed asks more what happened to you, okay? what happened to you at your birth, what happened to you, you know, before you gave birth, what caused this? Grief informed care kind of asks more along the lines of who died and what does what has this done to your family and what does your family need right now. We know that grief affects

the entire infrastructure of that person and their family and their life. There's so many intersectionalities where grief changes everything.

And so to me we need both. but I think at the end of the day when we kind of look at at what's being used, I feel like trauma informed care is more prevalent and I think that the grief piece is the one that gets dropped, honestly.

Because trauma-informed care often has protocols, regulations, and grief doesn't. Grief isn't even covered in therapy if it's termed it, you know, if it's coded in a certain way as grief therapy. Grief therapy, I mean, grief is not not even looked at in the DSM other than prolonged grief disorder. Okay. So

Trauma-informed care has taught us not to re-injure people, not to harm people farther. Grief-informed care asks what we owe them after, how we can help them after, how we can set them up in their life, in their specific circumstances, in their experiences, to help them survive whatever it is that causes grief, but then not just survive, but to thrive.

Number two, postpartum does not disappear when the baby does.

That mom, that birthing person has the same body. They're going to go through the you know, roughly six weeks of afterbirth and bleeding and discharge. They're going to have the same hormonal crashes.

They're going to and I will say depending on age, gestation of the baby, milk coming in. Lactation. This stuff does not go away.

So make sure the next ninety eight, episode ninety eight, ninety nine. episode ninety eight will be The Baby Died, the postpartum body didn't. And episode ninety nine will be her milk came in or their milk came in and nobody told her it would.

Number three, family centered has to mean the whole system. Partner, siblings, grandparents, not mom plus support person. Okay, so

Yes.

After a loss, responsibility falls unfortunately on the birthing person, the mom and the partner, dad, whoever.

To keep going. And if they have other living children, and they do have a partner, they have to worry about these relationships, they have to worry about daycare, they have to worry about work. They have to include this ha this the care has to include the family system. Because if it doesn't, it puts the stress on the mom or birthing person.

And we also have some great episodes coming on, you know, the baby wasn't only hers, the grievers we keep forgetting. We need to remember that the loss of a baby, the loss of a child, doesn't happen to just one person. It happens to an entire family system that they are a part of. It also happen it also affects the entire, you know, medical team, if you will. It's a ripple effect.

And a lot of people are touched by a loss like this because it's so significant and so devastating.

We have to think about the other people. And it isn't this isn't this part of community care, right? Number four, continuity is the entire point. Hospital to home. The first year after. It makes me so angry that we think care ending at discharge is grief-informed care. It's not.

It's a nice moment in the hospital room and then it's done and over. And they're just sent home. Only without a baby. An empty car seat in the car probably. And no one specific to reach out to.

Number five, grief-informed care includes the professional. Why is this an afterthought? Why are our medical professionals thought are just an afterthought? The provider grief, the secondary trauma from experiencing these losses, multiple ones, compounding ones.

and then burning out because they're not able to sustain their level of care without being cared for. None of us are walking out of that room with a baby who has died being unaffected. Some of us may be better at compartmentalizing. Totally.

But it will come out in some way.

And we don't need our medical system quitting. We don't need our nurses quitting. Our nurses who do a majority of the work. Who provide a majority of the empathetic, compassionate care that people need. A depleted provider gives worse care. So our well-being as I'm not a medical provider. I'm non-clinical, non-medical provider.

But providers in general, our well being is part of the family's care plan. It has to be.

So if you are new here, my name is Valen Webb. In twenty nineteen I was pregnant with my third daughter, Evelyn. I had two living children. at the time they were four and three, I believe.

My husband was in the Navy, he was on a seven month deployment on the his destroyer. And we knew that I was going to need support because he couldn't be there. It was the first child and the only child that he was never there for that he couldn't be. I hired Adula for the first time ever. her name was Kendra.

Other than having Kendra and a newer military spouse friend Jenna, I was alone. As alone as you can be. And there's a lot of things that happened that day that caused trauma.

And grief.

And doula, my doula Kendra, my nurse Michelle, and my midwife Gretchen are probably the reason I do this, and the reason that I'm still here, and the reason that I I understand what people and providers need, families and providers need. Everything they did mattered. And

I don't know if they were trained specifically in loss. I don't know if they were trained in trauma or grief informed care. But what I do know is they knew what to do and they knew what to say.

Michelle was the one who taught me that I was still a parent. My nurse Michelle.

Nurse Michelle was also the one who showed me how I could still make memories with her before I had to leave her for the funeral director.

She's the one who talked to Evelyn and held her like a baby, a living baby. Talked to her in the present tense. Called her pumpkin. Your pumpkin. Let's go get dressed for your photos. Let's go take our bath. Let's go do this.

She's the one who showed me that it was okay to hold her.

My midwife Gretchen, it she came in at Shift Change and changed the entire story for me. I was coerced into giving birth in a way I didn't want to, because at from what I could tell it was inconvenient for them. And they also thought they knew what was best for me. So I was forced to labor for ten more hours, to give birth vaginally. but Gretchen came in

And took over and was just like, give her any fucking thing that she wants. Within medical parameters, of course. But anytime the medicine was done and she could have more, give her more if she wants it. If she wants a drink, if she wants to move, let her. Help her. If she wants to scream and cry, let her.

I

had the privilege of having a shift change and having the best people by my side. And before that I had providers who couldn't look me in the eye, they could not get the fuck out of that room fast enough.

And they were doing things to me that they weren't telling me what they were doing, weren't necessarily asking permission, like all the blood tests that they were doing, I mean the blood draws, the It's a whirlwind.

And then when I got discharged?

I was sent to Riteaid for a sleeping prescription instead of being given some at the hospital. I stood in line next to all these unknowing people.

Freshly just given birth, grieving, standing in a fucking line waiting. Because the hospital couldn't give me two sleeping pills.

And I I I I wanna be careful here because this show is not just about Evelyn and my story. It's about what we do differently because families like mine exist. So here's what I want you as a professional to understand from all of that.

I didn't fall apart just because my baby died. I fell apart because my baby died. And then I was sent home. And I I had a wonderful meal train and friends who loved me and cared, but then everybody went home.

They had to. Everybody has to return back to their life.

The only appointment I had was a six week checkup.

to make sure my postpartum body was healed six weeks after I gave birth, which we know is shit.

And so this week your grief informed takeaway is this. Before your next brief family is discharged, just answer this question in your phone in a note. But who is going to call this family and when? Not someone should put a name and a date down. If that's you, if it's one of the other nurses, one of the, you know, maybe it's the head nurse, whatever it is.

Or if you have a chaplain or a midwife who does that.

And if you think about that question and the answer is blank in it's like, I don't know. You ju you just found your gap. You're standing in it. And you can do something about it. Grief-informed care asks that we do not leave them alone in their grief. And that we help provide the care.

Because they are not in any capacity to ask or beg.

I know this episode was a bit heavy and I don't want you to come away from this feeling sad and depressed, but I think there is just so much we tiptoe around because we don't know how to fix it, we don't know how to change it, we don't know where to start. Hell. Like I don't know what to do half the time with my business.

And I'm not saying that because I'm incompetent and I don't have education. I say that because it's so fucking hard to change things at the level that I wanna see changed. The easier thing would be to give up. Maybe I would just do a podcast, you know?

But I believe in this so much and I know I can't do it alone. I need providers like you, professionals like you, who care enough to be like, No, we you know, we don't actually have a you know, a follow up

Any type of follow-up for breathed families. Or maybe you do, but it's not enough. What's one step you can make to make it one step better? That's all I'm asking. Where's a gap that you see in your care? In the perinatal space, it doesn't have to be lost, but even postpartum mothers are being dropped right through the cracks. Birthing people are being dropped right through the cracks.

Especially if they are different.

So I do want to leave you with something.

I know that ask, don't assume sounds obvious when I say it out loud, you know, in this microphone. But it's a lot less obvious at say two in the morning when you've never met a family that you have to support and their baby died. You don't know what they believe, you don't know really anything about them, and you have like ninety seconds until you get in that room. So I made something for that.

Until then, see you next week.