Meeting of the Parliament 03 December 2025
Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer.
It is more than 12 years since we lost Todd Bennett—one of the great indestructibles. I still have his number on my phone, and I still have all his social media and his texts. Earlier this year, I lost somebody really close to me. I still have her number and all her social media and her messages. I have photographs and reminders that pop up in my social media—just when I feel safe, there is that jab in the stomach again.
People say that time is a real healer and that we eventually get over our grief, but I do not think so. To me, when it comes to grief, we actually learn to carry it, and to accommodate it, but it is never away. How we accommodate that grief is, perhaps, what we are discussing, and where the role of bereavement care comes in.
What I really wanted to talk about was the grief of losing a child, especially in childbirth. One of my first-ever constituency cases involved a gentleman by the name of Fraser Morton and his partner, June. They lost Lucas in childbirth. The hospital said that he was stillborn; Fraser and June disagreed. They needed to know that Lucas had been there, even for the briefest of moments, and that they could register him and get a birth certificate.
It was a fight, which included meetings with the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport and the chief medical officer, and a Health Improvement Scotland investigation, before it was accepted that there had been a failure of the NHS and that the neonatal unit had been 24 staff short.
A couple of weeks ago, Fraser posted on social media that Lucas would have turned 10. I cannot imagine a loss such as Fraser and June experienced or how it affects you, with no chance that it will ever go away. As Elena Whitham said, bereavement care is supposed to be in place in all NHS boards, but there is evidence, as Fraser Morton’s case suggests, that that is not the case across Scotland.
A couple of weeks ago, as it happens, I spoke to the Sands charity about the lack of bereavement services. My daughter is a midwife, and midwives often do not have the time to deliver the bereavement care that they are trained to provide.