Regrets and hope from tragedy

In day three of our campaign to raise funds for Tommy's new baby research centre, a woman reveals her own birth experience.

ANGELA and Paul Cates were delighted when they discovered they were expecting twins three years ago.

But their joy turned to tragedy when Mrs Cates went into labour just under 24 weeks into her pregnancy and Amos and Abel were born weighing a total of less than 3lb.

The family spent just an hour with the tiny pair before they died and now hope their story can help boost more research into preventing premature births and treating babies born too soon.

This week, The Scotsman is highlighting the experiences of families who have suffered traumas during pregnancy and supporting the efforts of Tommy's, the baby charity, to prevent such tragedies in the future.

The charity is launching a new state-of-the-art research centre in Edinburgh later this year.

Costing £400,000 a year, campaigners are now appealing for extra funding to get their work off to a flying start.

Mrs Cates, from Memsie, Aberdeenshire, is keen to support the kind of research Tommy's hopes to carry out in Scotland.

She already had one son, Zachery, when she fell pregnant with the twins. Born in 2000 prematurely at 36 weeks with a serious heart condition, Zachary had to have an operation but is now fit and healthy. With the twins, however, the situation was even more serious.

Mrs Cates' waters broke at 23 weeks and five days into the pregnancy. She was rushed to Fraserburgh Hospital before being transferred to Aberdeen.

She was given steroid injections to help mature their lungs, but the family were told that with the twins being born so early there was little that could be done to save them.

"The consultant said that with twins, there was little to be done under 25 weeks. We were told that even if they did survive, they would always really be babies, they would never grow up.

"It was made to sound like a real horror story."

After arriving in hospital at 8pm, the twins were eventually born at 5am the following day. Amos weighed 1.5lb and Abel weighed just 1.25lb.

"The midwives said the twins would be born alive and that we should just make the most of the time we had with them," Mrs Cates said.

"They said we should cuddle them, talk to them. We accepted that this was all we could hope for. While we were waiting for the birth we were just talking about what names we would call them, and then it happened really quickly. They were never put in an incubator. The nurses put clothes on them and we just held them until they died about an hour later."

Mr and Mrs Cates now have two more children. Exactly one year after the twins died, Joel was born, one month premature but in good health. And in June last year, Mrs Cates gave birth to daughter Phoebe.

"I think it was a bit like I had to prove to myself that I could carry a baby to term, that there was not something wrong with me," she said.

Mrs Cates now wants more research to be carried out to prevent premature births and to find new ways of helping premature babies.

She also wishes that the family had pushed harder for the twins to have been kept on life support.

"One thing that I have taken from this is that I would urge other women to get a second opinion. Do not just accept what the first doctor tells you. I wish we had asked for more to be done for the twins. We would have made sure they had everything the hospital had to offer.

"Since then I have seen stories of babies born at that age and surviving."

Andrew Calder, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Edinburgh University, who will lead the new Tommy's centre, said they hoped to carry out wide-ranging research into problems affecting mothers and babies.

As well as preventing and predicting premature births, the centre will look at the idea that what happens in the womb can affect children well into their lives.

"This can include theories such as the fact that babies with a low birth weight have a higher risk of diabetes, stroke and high blood pressure later on," Prof Calder said.

"We need to understand more about what goes wrong in the programming of the foetus which might be responsible for problems in later life."

The centre is also looking at the impact of being overweight during pregnancy and the increased risk of miscarriage and other complications.

EFFORTS TO FIND ANSWER

EVERY year, about 7 per cent of babies in the UK are born prematurely – before the 37th week of pregnancy.

This amounts to 125 babies being born too soon each day, according to Tommy's, the baby charity.

In 2005, 4,174 babies were born prematurely in Scotland out of a total of more than 51,000 births that year.

Despite improvements in antenatal and neonatal care, the number of premature births each year has not dropped significantly since the 1960s.

And it is hard for doctors to identify women and babies at the greatest risk of prematurity because the causes of early labour are not yet fully understood.

This is one of the areas where Tommy's hopes its new research centre in Edinburgh will be able to find more answers.

Being born too early can have a number of serious consequences.

Premature babies often have very low birthweights and their organs are not fully developed.

Sometimes the trauma of the birth means that very small babies do not survive the process.

Some risk factors for premature birth are already known.

The risk increases in multiple pregnancies, which is thought to be due to over-stretching of the womb.

Lifestyle factors such as smoking, drug-use, high caffeine intake, poor diet and being overweight can also increase the risk of premature birth.

But in many cases, the cause remains unknown.

If a woman has had one premature birth, the risk of the same happening again in the next pregnancy is 15 per cent.