The day before doctors had scheduled Amanda Duffy to give birth, the baby jolted her awake with a kick. A few hours later, on that bright Sunday in November 2014, she leaned back on a park bench to watch her 19-month-old son Rogen enjoy his final day of being an only child. In that moment of calm, she realized that the kick that morning was the last time she had felt the baby move. She told herself not to worry. She had heard that babies can slow down toward the end of a pregnancy and remembered reading that sugary snacks and cold fluids can stimulate a baby’s movement. When she got back to the family’s home in suburban Minneapolis, she drank a large glass of ice water and grabbed a few Tootsie Rolls off the kitchen counter.
Every year more than 20,000 pregnancies in the US result in a stillbirth, but not all of these tragedies were inevitable. As many as one in four stillbirths are potentially preventable.