Abstract
We will see that fetal death—even when it occurs before the pregnant woman and her family have had any contact with the fetus (i.e., intrauterine death)—causes significant emotional repercussions and family suffering. Thus, “fetal death (FD) is an obstetric event that has a major psychological impact on the pregnant woman, her family, and the healthcare team providing her care. Its effects can be just as profound as the death of a live-born child. The global stillbirth rate in 2015 was 18.9 per 1,000 births; the majority of these deaths occurred in low-income countries and were often preventable. A cross-sectional analysis using data from Brazil’s 2006 National Survey on Demography and Health of Children and Women (PNDS) found a stillbirth prevalence of 14.82 per 1,000 births. By 2015, this rate in Brazil had fallen to 10.8 per 1,000 births; it was highest in the Northeast region (13.23 per 1,000 births) and lower than the national average in the South (8.27 per 1,000 births), Central-West (9.72 per 1,000 births), and Southeast (10.08 per 1,000 births) regions, demonstrating a clear association between these rates and the socioeconomic conditions and healthcare access across the country's different regions” (Eduardo et al., 2021, pp. 2850–2851).