Four labor and delivery nurses at Progress West Hospital in St. Louis noticed a gap in the system they worked in every day: there was no standard for how hospitals should care for a family experiencing pregnancy or infant loss. In 2023, Kayla Hollingshead, Jennifer Koskela, Janie Mullinnax and Jeannette Hickey founded Butterfly Kisses Alliance to fix that. The nonprofit now trains hospital staff, ultrasound technicians and others on how to speak to and support grieving families, and it mails comfort kits full of books, cards and self-care items around the world.
For Kelsey Fussner, the care was personal. After losing her daughter Nora at 38 weeks in 2023, she received a weighted elephant matching Nora’s birth weight of 8 pounds, 13 ounces, along with a memory kit from those same nurses. Fussner later welcomed daughter Abigail on April 10, 2024, the exact date Nora had been due. The alliance’s resources extend to mothers, fathers, siblings, grandparents and friends, recognizing that a loss touches an entire circle of people.
If there’s a family in your life who has been through a pregnancy or infant loss, the alliance’s online resources are worth knowing about, and so are the local support groups here on the Suncoast. What do you think hospitals in our area could learn from this model?
