A BIRMINGHAM woman who has lost four babies to miscarriage is urging people to take part in a walk to raise awareness of the problem.

One in four pregnancies results in miscarriage and yet Catherine MacLennan says for many it remains a taboo subject.

After experiencing the heartbreak of baby loss four times, Catherine knows only too well that talking about the problem helps – but that many people are fearful of mentioning it.

“It can become the elephant in the room,” she says. “People are afraid to ask you about it or to even mention children at all. But it is our problem, we need to deal with it, and I would never want people to feel they cannot talk about it.”

Catherine is keen to spread the word so she has taken on the organisation of a series of Midnight Walks across the country – including one in Birmingham next month.

The 40-year-old project co-ordinator with Birmingham City Council admits that she had little experience herself of the issues surrounding miscarriage until it struck her own family.

Catherine’s first miscarriage happened in 2006 when she was 16 weeks into her pregnancy and nothing could have prepared her for the blow.

“I had suffered really bad sickness during the early months of the pregnancy but all the scans had shown everything was OK,” she recalls. “I got to 14 weeks and we thought the worst was over.

“I went to visit some friends in Kent while my partner, who is now my husband, stayed back here in Birmingham. It was while I was there that my waters broke.”

The next few hours were a dazed nightmare for Catherine as she suffered miscarriage far from home and away from her husband. Taken by ambulance to hospital, she was told the baby had fallen from the womb and she would have to deliver it.

“It was all so awful and painful,” she says. “The baby was delivered and put in a clinical waste bin at the end of the bed. I was given a form asking me how I wanted to ‘dispose’ of the body.”

Doctors then needed to remove the placenta and it was during this procedure that Catherine haemorrhaged.

“ It was all a bit surreal actually. My friend had done some research and found out that we could have a funeral for the baby.

“My partner arrived and we said we wanted to do that, so we went to the mortuary and there was our baby. We seemed to fill in so much paperwork and then we brought our baby back up here in the boot of our car.

“We had a very small funeral, just the two of us. It was part of the healing process.”

Doctors were unsure of the reason for the miscarriage, particularly so late into the pregnancy, but suggested it may have been ‘cervical incompetence’.

“Can you believe that term?” says Catherine. “I was already feeling awful about it and now I was being told it may be my fault because I had an ‘incompetent cervix’.”

The couple received no counselling, but decided to go ahead and try for another baby.

“That baby had really been wanted and we really felt its loss,” recalls Catherine of Kings Norton. “I hadn’t realised before, but once you are pregnant you start planning everything. You adjust your life to the idea of a baby and all the changes that will make.

“I don’t think I had ever realised what a big deal a miscarriage could be. Emotionally the impact was huge. We made sure that we talked about it so we could both look at how we felt about it.

“And yet for many people it is a taboo subject. People are afraid of asking about it. And there is a sense of shame with it. You keep asking whether it was something you did, or whether you could have done something different.”