For Eve Alexandra Bailey
Born and died 11 April 2006

"Baby girl delivered; no signs of life" - the stark, cold facts from my labour notes that will haunt me forever. Of course, they mask a much deeper and more painful reality. On the rainy night our beloved daughter died, part of us died too. All our hopes and dreams for our child's future, for our wonderful new life as first-time parents.

It is the cruellest reversal of fortunes that anyone can suffer. To be filled with the excitement and anticipation of a new life and then to have that life snatched away at the very last moment. Like snakes and ladders is how a fellow bereaved mother describes it - you reach number 99 on the board and then plummet down a massive snake that takes you back to where you started.

We had no reason to believe that anything was wrong with our baby. My pregnancy with Eve was mega-normal. No high blood pressure. No abnormal blood sugar levels. A healthy heartbeat every time. At our 36-week scan, our baby was estimated at between 7lb 3oz and 7lb 6oz and she was head-down, ready and waiting to be born. Textbook pregnancy. Textbook baby.

Except that she was overdue. Nothing abnormal in that, though. Everyone says that first babies are late, so when we got to eight days after her due date and she still hadn't arrived, we weren't unduly worried. Our baby was still moving around as enthusiastically as she had ever done and we gladly accepted the offer of a cervical sweep from the community midwife to try to get labour going.

That night at 3.00am, I had a show. Tony and I were both relieved and excited - and eagerly awaited the onset of labour. I had a bit of back pain, but managed to sleep through the night. I felt Eve moving around that morning, as was her pattern, and happily headed out to meet Ellie, one of my new friends from NCT, for lunch.

Towards the end of that lunch, my back pain had intensified and I felt I should return home. Tony was at home that afternoon, which was fortunate, as soon after my return, the contractions started. They began at 3.30pm and were very intense. I was rather taken aback by their ferocity and frequency - I was contracting for 40 or 50 seconds every three to four minutes from the outset - and duly rang the hospital. I said that I was worried as both my mum and sister had had fast labours of under five hours, but they told us to stay at home. 

Like many pregnant couples, Tony and I were keen that we should be able to do as much of the labour at home as possible. However, when, after an hour and a half, my contractions had stepped up a gear - lasting 50 seconds at one and a half minute intervals - we rang the hospital again. Again, they told us to stay at home and to change our pain relief method - from using a TENS machine to getting in the bath. We followed this advice. But I didn't stay in the bath for very long and when I got out, I said to Tony that we had to go to the hospital immediately.

The sky was starting to darken and it had started to rain when we set out. I struggled into the back of the car and Tony drove us to the hospital as quickly and as safely as he could.

When we arrived at the labour ward, they examined me. I was four to five centimetres dilated and they tried to find our baby's heartbeat. Perhaps it was the way she was laying, they said. They brought in another machine. Still no sound. The midwives called for help and the senior registrar rushed in. Again, there was silence from the monitor, apart from the distant sound of my heart beating.

The registrar left the room, leaving the midwives to tell us the bad news. Dawn, the senior midwife present, came close to my face and said that, although they needed to wait for the consultant to arrive to confirm this, she was sure that our baby would be stillborn. They broke my waters and found meconium, perhaps a sign that our little one had been in distress.

All this time, I wasn't quite with it. I was in "labour land", as Rose, our NCT teacher, fondly called it. Although in my heart I knew that they were telling us that our baby was dead, I couldn't really take it on board, because I was too focused on coping with the contractions. Tony, however, knew exactly what they were saying and hugged me as he sobbed and told me that he loved me and that we would get through this.

I used gas and air to give birth to Eve. I wanted an epidural, but there wasn't an anaesthetist available and by the time there was, my labour was too far gone. Tony and the midwives were fantastic. They stayed close to me, comforting me throughout and encouraging me to push with all my might to deliver our daughter. I swore several times during the labour and cried out that my baby was dead between contractions.

About halfway through, I asked Tony to get a photograph out of my bag. It was of me and my dad on my wedding day and I had packed it to take to hospital, because I was so sad that my dad wouldn't be around for the birth of my first child (he had died just a year before). Somewhere inside, I thought that perhaps my dad could save my baby. He had always been the fixer in our family and I thought that perhaps he could fix this too.

The idea seems somewhat foolish now. But I didn't truly believe that our daughter was dead until she was finally born - beautiful and perfectly formed, but lifeless. The midwives delivered her onto my chest and I immediately felt a gush of love. I enquired about her sex and they confirmed that she was a little girl, which is what I had secretly wanted all along.

A precious little girl, whose silence seared through our hearts. No crying, no breathing, eyes shut tight. We carefully explored her face and body. She had a little button nose and full lips, like her dad, a long body and big hands and feet. She was perfect in every way. 

The midwife, Alli, bathed and dressed Eve in the clothes we had brought to the hospital for her to come home in. Then Tony, myself and Eve went into a bathroom together so that I could clean up and so that we could be alone together as a family. When we returned to the delivery room, I looked out of the window into the dark, rainy night. A ferocious wind was blowing and the rain pounded on the hospital windows. It was as if the weather was mirroring our trauma.

After her birth, we spent three hours at the hospital with Eve. We went home that night - in extreme shock and heartbreakingly empty-handed - to try to steal some sleep, then returned the next day to the hospital with Tony's mum and younger brother to see our beloved daughter again. We saw Eve another three times thereafter at the funeral directors in the chapel of rest. Every moment of this time we spent with our daughter is precious. Indeed on the morning of her funeral, it was a shock to realise that this would really be the last time we would touch her body and see her gorgeous little face.

It has been nearly six months since Eve died and still the pain of her passing pounds through every ounce of our being. We have replayed the labour again and again in our minds, beating ourselves up that we should have gone to the hospital earlier (even though we were told not to), that we should have known that something was wrong.

We will never really know why our daughter died on the day she was born. The consultant obstetrician said that given her weight (8lb 6oz), the fact that she had moved on the morning of her birth and had relatively normal colouring when she was born (only her lips were slightly discoloured), he could only conclude that something "acute" had caused her demise - either that she had suffered a rare heart arythmia before or during labour or that she had died in the early stages of labour while we were still at home, unable to survive the strong contractions.

For us, natural childbirth and labouring at home ended in disaster. My labour was five and three-quarter hours end to end. We will never know whether this was my natural state of labour (given my mum and sister's history) or whether it because my body knew something was wrong and was acting as quickly as possible to give birth. If only Eve had been breech and we had had a caesarean, I feel sure that she would have survived (indeed the consultant said as much). But few couples would opt for a caesarean for their first child, unless there was a pressing medical reason to do so.

So we are left with a huge hole in our hearts and in our lives. No one told us about stillbirth in antenatal classes (NCT or NHS) - that sometimes babies' hearts simply stop beating and they die in the womb or during labour, that stillbirth was even a possible outcome of pregnancy. The priority is to focus on the positive, to sell the dream of parenthood. Whilst I understand that new parents don't even want to contemplate this worst-case scenario, I also feel that the "hush-hush" attitude to stillbirth among the antenatal community and in society at large only serves to reinforce our sense of isolation, of being singled out for this terrible pain and suffering.

We aren't the only ones. We know that now. Through Sands, the Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Society, we have met other bereaved parents who are also experiencing the devastating impact of losing a child either through stillbirth or in the first 28 days of life.

We have no choice but to wait for the sharp edges of our pain to slowly soften, for our faith in life to be restored. And we can only hope that in her tragically short life in the womb, Eve knew how precious she was to us, and that, in her death, she continues to feel the warm glow of our love.

Rest in peace, little button.

Julie Bailey, for my beloved daughter, Eve Alexandra