by Duaa Eldeib
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The National Institutes of Health has launched a five-year, $37 million stillbirth consortium in a pivotal effort to reduce what it has called the country’s “unacceptably high” stillbirth rate.
The announcement last week thrilled doctors, researchers and families and represented a commitment by the agency to prioritize stillbirth, the death of an expected child at 20 weeks or more.
“What we’re really excited about is not only the investment in trying to prevent stillbirth, but also continuing that work with the community to guide the research,” Alison Cernich, acting director of the NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said in an interview.
Four clinical sites and one data coordinating center spanning the country — California, Oregon, Utah, New York and North Carolina — will come together to form the consortium, each bringing its own expertise. Most will focus on ways to predict and prevent stillbirths, though they also plan to address bereavement and mental health after a loss. Research shows that of the more than 20,000 stillbirths in the U.S. each year, as many as 25% may be prevented. For deliveries at 37 weeks or more, that figure jumps to nearly half.
The teams plan to meet for the first time on Friday to discuss possible research targets. Those include: understanding why some placentas fail and fetuses don’t grow properly; assessing decreased fetal movement; considering the best times for delivery and using advanced technology to explore how blood tests, biomarkers and ultrasounds may help predict a stillbirth. They also may evaluate how electronic medical records and artificial intelligence could help doctors and nurses identify early signs of stillbirth risk. While the announcement did not mention racial disparities, a representative said the consortium hopes to identify factors that determine who is at a higher risk of having a stillbirth.
For many families, the devastation of a stillbirth is followed by a lack of answers, including how and why the loss occurred. The teams will collaborate with the stillbirth community through advisory groups. The North Carolina team will oversee data collection and standardization. Incomplete, delayed and sometimes inaccurate stillbirth data has been an impediment to prevention efforts.
“If we could see the signs and deliver the baby earlier, so that the mom has a live baby, that’s I think what we’re all hoping for,” said Dr. Cynthia Gyamfi-Bannerman, the chair and professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at the University of California San Diego, who will co-lead the effort there.
The consortium follows a national shift in the conversation around stillbirth, which has long been a neglected public health concern. ProPublica began reporting on stillbirths in 2022 and, in 2025, the news organization released a documentary following the lives of three women trying to make pregnancy safer in America following their stillbirths.
Debbie Haine Vijayvergiya, who was featured in the documentary, has spent years asking Congress to support stillbirth legislation and urging lawmakers to pass the Stillbirth Health Improvement and Education (SHINE) for Autumn Act, named after her stillborn daughter Autumn Joy. Two days after that the NIH announced the consortium, Republican and Democratic members of Congress reintroduced the bill.
“I feel like our moment has finally arrived, and we are being included in all this tremendously important lifesaving work that’s being done,” she said.
Congress had previously mandated a stillbirth working group, which the NICHD formed in 2022, and heard directly from stillbirth families. The working group released a federal report calling the country’s stillbirth rate “unacceptably high.” The U.S. lags far behind other wealthy countries in reducing its stillbirth rate.
Dr. Bob Silver, a leading stillbirth expert at the University of Utah Health, has spent decades working on stillbirth prevention. He is the co-director of the University of Utah Stillbirth Center of Excellence, which focuses on both prevention and compassionate care after a loss, and will lead the consortium’s efforts in the state.
“There’s no question that the ProPublica reporting was intimately tied to this,” Silver said. “You can’t always draw a straight line between those things. But in this case, you can draw a very straight line.”
While some studies, including the NIH’s Human Placenta Project, have indirectly contributed to stillbirth research, the consortium is the first stillbirth-specific initiative of this scale since the Stillbirth Collaborative Research Network more than a decade ago. Both Silver and Dr. Uma Reddy, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University, worked together on the research network and will again on the consortium.
“We need to be able to get our rates down to similar high-income countries,” Reddy said. “This initiative to really look at reducing the stillbirth rate and to look at preventing them is so important, and it’s really about time.”
Dr. Karen Gibbins, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Oregon Health & Science University, had just finished her morning clinic when she received the email a few days before the official announcement informing her that both she and OHSU had been selected as part of the consortium.
Gibbins, whom ProPublica wrote about for advocating for more autopsies following the stillbirth of her son Sebastian, almost couldn’t believe it. She logged on to a federal grant website to confirm, then she stepped outside her office and gave her division director a hug.
“Stillbirth is such a huge public health issue, and one that historically has not had as much attention,” Gibbins said. “The fact that we have this investment of centers that are going to be taking these different approaches to fight stillbirth and to prevent stillbirth, and also to provide better care to families who do experience stillbirth, it’s a piece of hope that I think we all needed.”
Gibbins and her team specialize in studying the role of chronic stress, nutrition and heart health.
The NIH has distributed the first year of funding, about $7.3 million, which includes $750,000 provided by the Department of Health and Human Services. Despite the cuts at NIH, officials said they are optimistic that they will be able to fund the project for the remaining four years.
“The reason that we are doing this is because stillbirth affects 1 in 160 deliveries in the United States a year, and it is really traumatic for families, and it is not talked about,” Cernich said. “We are in a great place to really try to tackle this preventable tragedy.”
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