Notts mum raising money to fund refrigerated cot allowing families to spend time with stillborn babies

The cuddle cot.

A Nottinghamshire mum is fundraising to pay for a refrigerated cot to allow bereaved parents to spend more time with babies which are lost through stillbirth or miscarriage.

Jane Mann, from Newark, has Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS), a condition which affects one in ten women and reduces fertility.

Tragically Jane has lost eight babies through miscarriage – her latest loss being a little boy in January.

She is working with Angel Wings Forever Dressed in Love, a Facebook-based group which provides free clothing, and other memory items, to families to commemorate babies who are stillborn.

A Go Fund Me page has been set up to raise £1,600 to fund the cot, which will be a Moses-like basket complete with a cooling system to enable families to take home their stillborn babies or those lost through miscarriage.

The Pheonix Cuddle Cot will be named after Jane’s sixth miscarried child, baby boy Pheonix, who died in October 2015.

It will be kept at the Co-op Funeral Directors, Beacon Hill Road, Newark, and families will be able to spend up to three days with the babies before they go to a morgue and the cot is returned.

Jane, 29, who has two living children, Brandon, ten, and Freya, two, said when Phoenix was born she kept him in the fridge for around a week before his funeral, because she could not bear to see him go straight to a morgue.

Jane Mann pictured with her son Brandon, left, and daughter Freya, middle.

“It seemed so undignified,” she said, “I wish I had access to a Cuddle Cot.”

“It would have helped me so much with the grieving process to have had a few days with him that way, to take him up to bed and help me say goodbye.”

She added having the cot in memory of her late son, to be used by local families, would be an “honour”.

“I feel privileged. It’d be absolutely amazing, while heartbreaking at the same time,” she said.

Angel Wings Forever Dressed in Love has already raised money for 45 Cuddle Cots nationwide – but this is thought to be the first in Nottinghamshire.

Refrigerated cuddle cots allow parents to spend more time with stillborn babies.

Founder of the company, Michaela Street, said: “It’s every bereaved parent’s dream, taking their babies home from hospital, and the cots are much nicer than coffins,” she said.

“The cooling system will preserve them for a few days and to allow relatives like grandparents to spend time with them.”

Jane has had PCOS for ten years and the condition means her eggs can grow in tiny-fluid sacs – called cysts – in the ovaries.

The ovaries of women with the condition produce higher-than-normal levels of the male hormone androgen, which stops follicles from breaking open and releasing mature eggs — ovulation.

It results in irregular or absent periods; and it is increasingly difficult – but not impossible – to conceive.

Jane is part of a PCOS support group, called ‘PCOS Tribe UK’, to help other women with the condition.

She says PCOS increases the risk of miscarriage and gestational diabetes, which can affect the placenta.

She added: “Most ladies who develop gestational diabetes will be induced a little earlier to prevent any further problems, stillbirth being a small possibility if the placenta was to fail.”

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