The pram is in the hall, the little all-in-one suits are in the cupboard, and on my bedside table sits a book of baby names. My child is due in about four weeks' time and - like most mothers-to-be in the western world in 2002 - I take it for granted that everything will be fine, and that a month or so from now I'll be cradling a newborn in my arms.
We've become complacent about the safety of childbirth and the certainty of a happy outcome, and it takes a terrible tragedy such as the one that has hit the chancellor of the exchequer and his wife this week to pull us up and remind us that where babies are concerned we should take nothing for granted. Certainly our great-grandmothers didn't, in a time when infant mortality was far higher; and even in our grandmothers' and mothers' generations, old superstitions often hinted at dark possibilities. You don't have to go back many years to a time when it was still thought unlucky to have the cot ready or the name chosen before the hurdle of the delivery was past, and the baby was here and healthy.
It's easy to see why our attitudes have changed so radically: infant mortality has declined hugely in recent decades. Even in 1960 the infant mortality rate (which refers to the death of babies in the first year of life) stood at 22.5 babies per 1,000 live births; the most recent figure, for 1999, is 5.8. Whereas a generation or two ago a woman of childbearing age would probably have had first-hand experience of a sister or friend who had lost a baby at or soon after birth, these days anecdotes are more sketchy, more distant, rarely close to home.
The truth is, though, that babies do still die: in 2000, around 2,355 babies of the 604,000 born in England and Wales died before the age of one month (the neonatal mortality rate). We've become very adept at keeping the issue off the agenda: certainly you have to search hard to find a mention of infant mortality in a pregnancy book, and it's not a subject that comes up very often in the antenatal courses we all attend. But putting the possibility of a tragic loss out of mind certainly doesn't help those who do have to go through it, as those who have been there testify. Janet Dacombe lost her baby son 10 years ago after he was born with a heart condition; like the Browns' baby, he never left hospital, but despite that and the fact that she had an older son already, her second child was irreplaceable. "The trouble is that because no one talks about it or acknowledges that it happens, people don't know how to deal with you when it does," she says. "Neighbours and friends would look away, or talk about something else, or say nothing. I'd say to anyone who knows someone who loses a baby, 'Just go up to them and say how sorry you are - it really does help, you do need to hear it.' No one wants to feel their loss is just being swept away, that it doesn't even need to be mentioned. It does matter, it always will, and you do need to talk about it."
The awful reality is that a baby's death is the loss we can collectively least bear: if our society is ill-equipped for dealing with death per se, how much less capable is it of dealing with the loss of its most precious commodity, its newborns? And the sad fallout from that is that we often recoil from the ways bereaved parents need to mourn and grieve; having failed to say the right words to them, we are all too quick to dismiss, as bizarre or distasteful, practices which seem to help. "The truth is that every parent is different, and nothing is eccentric or odd when it comes to mourning your dead baby," says Erica Stewart of Sands, the Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Society. "People often contact us and say there's a bereaved mother who wants to visit her baby's grave 10 times a week, or who still talks about him all the time three months on, and we say that's fine, everyone is an individual when it comes to working through the loss."
One plus point is that, while infant mortality has been on the decrease and our society in general has closed its mind to its realities, those most closely involved have become a lot better at dealing with it. Most maternity units in the UK now have bereavement midwives, specialists trained to help parents cope with the loss of a child at birth or soon afterwards. They encourage parents to cuddle, dress and photograph their dead baby much as they would care for their infant after a live birth; these hours might be full of tears and regret about the life the child might have had, but research shows they are an important first step to acceptance, and that they provide treasured memories in the years to come. Some parents even choose to take their dead infants home with them for a few hours or a few days: Stewart, who lost her baby son Shane 18 years ago, did this herself. "It seemed the most natural thing in the world to want to do, just as cuddling him and wanting to be with him seemed the most natural thing to want to do," she recalls. "You never imagine you'll be holding your dead baby; you recoil from the idea of it, but somehow when it happens to you, it's absolutely the right thing."
These days, says Stewart, maternity units always ensure that memories are kept and stored so that, if and when parents need something to remember their child by, it will be available: handprints and footprints are made, photographs are taken, and even if parents don't initially want them they're stored so they'll be available at a later date. It's all a far cry from 30 and more years ago, when stillborn babies or those who died soon after birth were often spirited away without even a glance for the bereaved parents: some still deeply regret, in their 60s and 70s, the fact that they were never given a chance to look into the face of the little child they had carried with them for so many months, in their hopes and dreams as well as in the physical experience of pregnancy and birth.
Although maternity units have got better at dealing with parents who have lost a baby, not all medical staff are able to deal with the inevitable death of a young child. Stewart remembers how hopeful the doctors were that Shane would pull through. "We really were expecting that he'd hang on, that he'd come home eventually," she says. "The doctors used to say to me that he was stable, but the fact was that he was stable but dying. The thing is, though, that - in an age when we expect so much of medicine - it seems almost inevitable that they will be able to make things OK, especially where a baby is concerned."
If there is a sense in which any dead patient is a doctor's failure, the failure is all the harder to accept when the dead person is someone who has never had even a chance of life: it goes against the grain in every human being - and doctors are certainly no exception - to give up on a baby whose very existence is all about potential.
For those who have been there, of course, the complacency that so infuses the whole experience of pregnancy and childbirth for the rest of us is gone for ever. Janet Dacombe went on to have two further sons, now aged nine and seven, after the loss of her baby: but these pregnancies were nothing like the carefree experiences of her friends. "It does change you - you never have the same certainty that everything will be OK," she says. "And no one is immune. I've heard of families who've lost two babies - it does happen.
"The next pregnancy is a very anxious time, and even when it's over and the baby is here you never take his or her continued good health for granted. The sense that everything is bound to turn out all right is gone for ever - you know it might not, and nothing is ever going to change that knowledge."
