What about stillbirth risk after 40 weeks?

When I talk about due dates, this question often comes up.

Baby loss is undoubtedly an incredibly heartbreaking thing for any parent to experience. That said, fear of it happening shouldn’t be used to coerce you, nor do good decisions come from a place of being ill informed or driven solely by fear.

I invite you to look at some figures extrapolated from Muglu et al (2019) which is the best meta analysis available, with data from 15 million pregnancies in high income countries.

For all pregnancies (including high risk pregnancies) the risk of stillbirth

at 39 weeks is 0.42 per 1000

at 40 is 0.69 per 1000

at 41 weeks is 1.66 per 1000

at 42 weeks is 3.18 per 1000

For low risk pregnancies the risk of stillbirth

at 39 weeks is 0.14 per 1000,

at 40 weeks is 0.33 per 1000

at 41 weeks is 0.8 per 1000

at 42 weeks is 0.88 per 1000

I invite you now to invert those figures and see how that feels to you. For example, according to these stats, for low risk pregnancies there is

a 99.967% chance of NOT having a stillbirth at 40 weeks,

a 99.92% chance of NOT having a stillbirth at 41 weeks,

a 99.912% chance of NOT having a stillbirth at 42 weeks.

If you have special circumstances which increase risks for you, I hope your care providers can discuss this with you with nuance, giving you evidence based, absolute risk factors, personalised to your circumstances.

Risk perception is deeply personal. A 0.08/1000 increase may seem significant to one person and insignificant to someone else. Neither is wrong.

Exploring the interventions offered in a bid to mitigate stillbirth risk is a whole other discussion, but if you need help finding good research to inform your decisions, please do reach out. Only you can decide what feels right for you.