From left to right: President Lincoln’s Cottage museum Executive Director Callie Hawkins, documentary subject Kanika Harris, video journalist Nadia Sussman, documentary subject Debbie Haine Vijayvergiya and Erin Wallace Morrison, lead of the D.C. Pregnancy Loss and Infant Death Peer Support Group (Taylor Kate Brown/ProPublica)

“Floating was my way of healing. You have to let go of everything when you float, because when you don’t do that, you sink,” Kanika Harris says at the beginning of “Before a Breath,” a new documentary from ProPublica. “There is always purpose in grief, and that is why I’m here with you all,” she tells a group of doula trainees. 

Harris, executive director of the National Association to Advance Black Birth, is one of three women featured in the film, each contending with the grief of losing a child to stillbirth and fighting to prevent future stillbirths.

“Before a Breath” was born out of groundbreaking reporting by Duaa Eldeib on the U.S. stillbirth crisis. More than 20,000 babies are stillborn each year in this country — about 60 a day — and 1 in 4 of those losses are likely preventable. The U.S. lags behind most of the world in reducing its stillbirth rate, as other high-income countries have made some dramatic reductions over the last two decades.

Earlier this month, I went to a screening of the documentary and a panel discussion at President Lincoln’s Cottage, a historic site in Washington, D.C., which hosted one of several in-person and online events sharing “Before a Breath” with audiences. 

The location for the screening wasn’t an accident. The cottage where President Abraham Lincoln spent his summers, just a few miles from the White House, is now a museum hosting exhibits on Lincoln’s life and presidency. This includes “Reflections on Grief and Childloss,” an exhibit that combines the story of the intense grief the president and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, experienced when two of their sons died in childhood with the experiences of several modern families grieving the loss of a child. 

In the center of the exhibit, a willow tree has been built up over time with names of lost loved ones written on paper leaves by those visiting the exhibit. Executive director Callie Hawkins, who had her own experience with stillbirth, created the exhibit as a place to grieve, remember and openly discuss loss.

During the panel discussion, director Nadia Sussman said she was initially unsure if film was an effective way to talk about stillbirth. But the more she learned from Eldeib and realized how little information people were getting about preventing stillbirth or making that loss less traumatic, the more committed she felt to figuring out how to make the film. 

“Parents wanted to talk [about stillbirth] and people weren’t listening,” she said.

Harris ultimately decided to participate in “Before a Breath” in part because she wanted a record of the in-depth doula training program she taught at a historically Black university. She continues to fight for funding to offer that training, which includes how doulas can identify risk factors for and respond to stillbirth. 

Debbie Haine Vijayvergiya, another mother in the film, had been in D.C. the week of the screening to meet with lawmakers. She’s been an advocate for years, pushing for legislation that carries her stillborn daughter’s name. The SHINE for Autumn Act would improve data collection on stillbirth, which is still poorly documented, would fund research and education, and would address the shortage of pathologists trained to do fetal autopsies.

The legislation has not been passed so far, but the effort inspired a working group on stillbirth at the National Institutes of Health, which developed recommendations on what the U.S. can do. 

Other countries have had dramatic success in cutting their stillbirth rates, but without the funding to do data collection work here, the U.S. is at a standstill, Haine Vijayvergiya said. “I said to someone yesterday that if they don’t have the money to do the work, then now’s the time to go look at what we’re doing outside of this country and see if we can use those recommendations.” 

“We’ve made so much progress; it would be such a shame to lose it,” she said.

You can watch Before a Breath on YouTube and learn more about screening the documentary in your own community.