'A kick in the guts': Calls for fees associated with registering stillbirths to be waived

Families of stillborn babies and their advocates want the fee for birth certificates waived.

Changes to the registration process for stillborn babies were announced on Wednesday, allowing parents to use a separate website - Whetūrangitia - with built-in resources to find support for coping with grief, and fewer questions which might be traumatic for someone grieving a child.

Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey said the previous method of registering stillborn babies took people through a process designed for parents welcoming a live birth.

Families had told him this was upsetting and inappropriate.

The new process had been built specifically to support families who have experienced the loss of a baby.

Perinatal and infant loss educator Vicki Culling said she welcomed those changes, but a "lovely thing" do for grieving families would be to waive the birth certificate fee, too.

"In amongst this raw grief, to hop online to register your baby who has died, and then you get to the end ... and it's, 'That's $37, thanks'."

She said one parent had summed it up: "She said, 'My baby's not going to ever cost this country anything, and I have to pay for this certificate'. One quote is, 'It felt like a kick in the guts'."

A birth certificate was important because it was "an acknowledgement that this baby was here", she said.

"We have them with us for such a brief time ... it's a way to show that their life matters."

Culling said by her calculations, it would cost the government less than $20,000 a year.

"A drop in the bucket, if we think about how much we spend on a lot of things in this system."

Doocey said it was something he was open to.

"At the moment, DIA and Health NZ are actively working on that. I'll take advice from them when that is ready."

About 700 to 900 New Zealand families each year experienced perinatal loss, and another 13,000 to 15,000 are affected by miscarriage before 20 weeks.

Millie Simcowitz was among the families at the launch of Whetūrangitia. She and her husband lost their son Mohi in 2024, shortly after he was born.

Despite the grief, "I love talking about him", she said.

"We love to talk about him as much as we would if he was earthside."

Everyone was different, of course.

"Some people, I think, sometimes shy away from talking to people about their lost baby, or asking someone about their baby just in case it brings feelings up."

"But what I would like to say is we're thinking about them all day every day anyway, and so to be able to think about them out loud with other people is really helpful."

He remained a big part of their lives, and they had since welcomed his younger brother to the world.

The website Whetūrangitia had existed in a previous form when they lost Mohi, and Simcowitz said she used it as way to find support.

"One of the spaces that I spent a lot of time on was the memory mapping tab," Simcowitz said. "What can we do to hold on to these bits of our baby?"

She also found everything from handprint casts to "huggable hearts" - fabric hearts the same weight as your baby, made by a charity in Hamilton.

The new registration process would be "really helpful for whānau because while they're registering their child's birth they can also see the range of other supports and information and resources out there," she said.