Mother Petitions For Change In Law In Memory Of Stillborn Daughter

A local mother is advocating for a change in the law that required her stillborn daughter's death certificate to label the cause "fetal demise."

Kayla Webster is hoping to make change after experiencing the death of her stillborn daughter, Savannah. Photo provided.

(Osgood, Ind.) - A local mother is advocating for a change in the law that required her stillborn daughter's death certificate to label the cause "fetal demise."

"My daughter wasn't a fetus. She was definitely a baby. She was born at 37 weeks and two days - full-term," says Kayla Webster, of Osgood.

About one in every 160 pregnancies in the U.S. ends in a stillbirth, when the unborn child dies 20 or more weeks after gestation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Webster experienced one of those 160. Now, she is sharing the story of her late daughter, Savannah, who was stillborn on April 26, 2016.

She would have been the third child born to Kayla and her husband, Devon. The couple previously welcomed twins in 2015.

"I had a normal pregnancy up until the day my daughter was born," she recalls.

On April 25, Webster began to experience extreme pain. She went to her doctor thinking she may be in labor. She tried to tell him that it felt like her uterus was ripping apart. She had also warned her doctor that the surgeon who performed the caesarean section at the premature birth of her twins advised that any subsequent pregnancies should not go beyond 37 weeks.

After an ultrasound test that she "barely" passed, Kayla was sent home. Her husband was told not to bring her back to the hospital until her water broke or there were contractions.

Soon after returning home, Devon noticed the color had disappeared from his wife's face. He called 911. She awoke at the hospital after emergency surgery and five bags of blood transfusion.

"I remember waking up and I just knew something wasn't right. My mother-in-law and husband came in and they told me that my uterus ruptured, caused damage to my kidneys and my intestines," she says.

Kayla Webster and husband Devon with their daughter in the hospital. Photo provided.

"The rupture was so catastrophic the baby died. She didn't make it."

She and her husband were able to hold Savannah's body. It was a moment they had anticipated as being full of joy - instead, heartbreak.

Kayla says was lucky to be alive. Doctors could not offer any medical explanation about how she had lived.

Much of the next four days in the hospital were hazy due to the drugs she was on following the emergency surgery. Her daughter's funeral was largely planned without her.

"I checked out. I just quit for a while," she remembers.

The emotional pain the Websters were feeling was multiplied when they later received Savannah's death certificate. It listed the cause of death as "fetal demise." 

"When I read that, it was devastating. It made me feel like she wasn't anything, that she never mattered," Kayla shares.

The doctor who signed the death certificate told the parents that the law required Savannah's death, because she was stillborn, to be labeled as fetal demise.

"Because she never took a breath outside the womb, she wasn't considered a baby or living at any point. But she was to me. I felt her move. I felt her kick. I listened to her heartbeat for nine months. To me she was alive," the mother reasons.

Savannah's death matters to the Websters, and apparently many others. Last September, Webster created an online petition at Change.org asking state and federal lawmakers to change the law to allow babies stillborn on or after the week of viability - 37 weeks - to have their death certificates state "infant death" instead of "fetal demise."

Kayla's petition has received 756 online signatures since September. Titled Stillborn is still born, Our babies matter, it gains a few more supporters almost every day.

She hasn't yet spoken with any legislators about the change she wants to see in the law. She does plan to share the petition with them.

Webster hopes that her story also serves as a lesson to other mothers-to-be.

"If your body is telling you something, never take 'no' as an answer. Just because it's a doctor doesn't mean that they always know best," she says.