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My husband and I experienced an unimaginable loss when our son, Lucas, was stillborn seven years ago.

On May 14, 2018, just a day after Mother’s Day, my husband and I went to the hospital. I was 39 weeks pregnant with our first child. With joy and anticipation, we were looking forward to meeting our son, Lucas. His name means “light,” because his arrival would light up our world.

Shortly after arriving at the hospital, I experienced a placental abruption — a serious condition where the placenta separates from the uterus, cutting off oxygen and nutrients to the baby. I nearly died and heartbreakingly, Lucas was stillborn.

Words cannot begin to convey the shock and anguish of losing a child in the final moments after a seemingly normal pregnancy. The light that once illuminated my world was suddenly extinguished, leaving me in the darkness of grief and depression.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines stillbirth as the loss of a fetus after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Despite being well-educated, I mistakenly believed stillbirth was a thing of the past — something that only happened in places without proper nutrition or health care. No one warned me, and I naively assumed modern medicine had eliminated the risk, like that of malaria.

My personal loss was a harsh awakening, forcing me to confront the shocking reality of stillbirths in 21st-century America. The statistics are staggering: approximately 21,000 babies are stillborn in the U.S. each year, and around 2 million worldwide. Even more shocking is that nearly a quarter of them in the U.S. and about half of them worldwide are preventable.

Behind these staggering statistics are real people, some of whom I met at my local support group for grieving parents who had lost babies to stillbirth or shortly after birth. Like me, many mothers have experienced late-term stillbirths between 35 and 41 weeks. Some were never given explainations, only vague platitudes like “It happens sometimes” or “There was nothing we could do.”

Like me, some of these mothers were pregnant at an advanced maternal age (35 or older). Though research clearly links advanced maternal age to higher risks of stillbirth and placental abruption, many providers avoid discussing stillbirth to spare mothers’ anxiety, but this well-meaning silence has left many of us blindsided by the stillbirth of our babies.

Like me, some of these mothers were told it’s normal that babies move less as they “run out of room” late in pregnancy. Though research shows that a baby’s movement pattern may change late in pregnancy, it shouldn’t decrease. In the UK, where stillbirth rates have dropped, mothers are urged to contact their providers if they notice any change, especially decreased movement in fetal activity.

Despite being one of the most advanced countries in the world, the U.S. still has a higher stillbirth rate than many other developed nations. We must learn from countries that have made strides in reducing stillbirths. Some of their best practices include public awareness campaigns, and enhanced data collection.

Raising awareness is the first step to reducing stillbirths and saving lives. Health care providers must discuss stillbirth and prevention with expectant mothers, who in turn should advocate for themselves and their babies by asking questions and understanding the risks.

As grieving families, we can make a difference. By sharing our experiences through media, we can reach and inform more families. American families shouldn’t have to fight this alone. The U.S. Congress must prioritize stillbirth prevention by passing the SHINE for Autumn Act, which aims to improve data collection on stillbirths.

The legacy of our stillborn children should not be reduced to heart-rending statistics. Instead, it should inspire profound change to save lives so more babies will be born alive. Let Lucas’ light, and the light of all stillborn children, guide us toward that change.

Helen Raleigh is a Colorado-based entrepernuer, writer, and speaker. She’s the mother of Lucas (stillborn) and Allie (miscarriage).

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Back in high school newspaper class, we were taught that a news article included the who, what, where, when, and why of timely and consequential — newsworthy — events and trends. That’s exactly what Shelly Bradbury, crime reporter at The Denver Post, did in her recent article about DoBetterDNVR, an anonymous social media account that features videos of people behaving badly on Denver Metro streets.

She’s taking heat this week from DoBetterDNVR and its supporters for investigating the contributors and content of the controversial influencer that boasts more than 144,000 followers on Instagram and Twitter (now called X) and has caught the attention of city officials.

Rather than criticize a journalist for doing her job, DoBetterDNVR needs to do better.

If its administrator wants to be the “citizen journalist” he or she claims to be, then the social media organization must try to meet the same principles real journalists strive for: transparency, accuracy, and objectivity.

Many law-abiding Coloradans, including myself, frustrated by vagrancy, urban camping, vandalism, public nudity, theft, and open drug use appreciate DoBetterDNVR’s exposure of such lawless behavior and its support for “tough-love solutions” that discourage it. Ultimately, DoBetterDNVR will lend greater legitimacy to its efforts by rectifying the deficiencies brought to light by Bradbury’s article.

First off, just come clean. Journalists own their work. The names of reporters are in the byline. If an article is incorrect, the reporter must correct it and publicly acknowledge the error. Wrong often, they will lose their reputation and their job. Transparency is fundamental to accountability for journalists and opinion columnists like me. We must stand by our work.

The administrator of DoBetterDNVR should do the same, but thus far has opted for secrecy. Like most newspapers, The Denver Post requires that information be accurately attributed, rarely giving anonymity to sources and only as a last resort. Someone claiming to be the administrator of DoBetterDNVR called The Post but refused to identify his or herself or provide confirmation supporting that claim. Advised of the paper’s policy regarding attribution, the caller then refused to give an interview.

Other DoBetterDNVR contributors were found through their requests to city agencies under the Colorado Open Records Act and were contacted. They said they were not administrators, but confirmed they had contributed in the past as the article states. Two of the most frequent CORA requesters now live in other states. Is this relevant? Readers can decide. It is the reporter’s job to provide the information.

This isn’t doxing and DoBetterDNVR and its backers know it, their caterwauling notwithstanding. Doxing is the malicious exposure of a person’s address to enable potentially life-threatening harassment and abuse; naming names is investigative journalism. An organization that posts videos and photographs of people without their permission doesn’t have any room to complain about being identified. People who claim to be citizen journalists must stand by their work with a byline and endure the negative comments and threats that come with the job.

Such transparency helps uphold the second journalism standard — accuracy. As Bradbury’s article points out, DoBetterDNVR sometimes mixes facts with conjecture, rumor, and outright misinformation. Last year, for example, DoBetterDNVR posts claimed Denver police were too busy to back up Denver firefighters who were forced to engage with Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang members at two apartment buildings. A city investigation found firefighters did not have such interactions with gang members and have received support from the Denver police in their operations.

Had this been a news article, it would have avoided speculation and provided sources to back up claims. Also, the inaccurate post would have been corrected or retracted, which it has not, at least at this writing.

Who is DoBetterDNVR? Meet 3 women feeding information to Denver’s loudest social media critic

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Finally, if the administrator of DoBetterDNVR wants to be considered a journalist, he or she must strive for objectivity, instead of providing a single viewpoint on crime, vagrancy, and associated public policies. While pure objectivity is humanly impossible and journalists often reveal their bias in what they choose to cover, the prominence they give it (above the fold or page 20), who they interview, and the language they use, at least they strive to provide context and multiple viewpoints. Reporters avoid giving their opinion, unlike us columnists.

While no one is perfect, journalists try to capture the whole story. They also provide sources and double-check their facts, issuing corrections when found to be wrong. Journalists stand by their work by putting their name, reputation, and job on the line with every article.

Social media influencers need not even attempt to meet journalistic standards of objectivity, accuracy, and transparency. DoBetterDNVR can continue to be an anonymous site for videos of people behaving badly accompanied by opinion, humor, and semi-accurate information, or it can be journalism, but it can’t be both. If it chooses to be the former, then the administrator cannot grumble when a real journalist calls it out as such.

Krista Kafer is a Sunday columnist for The Denver Post.

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A few years back, my friend Norm told me that when he was growing up in northern New Mexico in the 1950s and early ‘60s, his family often drove up to the La Plata Mountains in southwestern Colorado. From there he could see all the way to the Sandia Mountains outside Albuquerque, some 200 miles away.

His statement saddened me, since in all the time I spent on Four Corners high points, a persistent haze always limited my visibility to maybe 50 or 60 miles, blurring Shiprock’s sharp spires into a fuzzy silhouette. That’s because a fleet of massive coal-fired power plants in the region churned out haze-producing pollutants, harming humans and the ecology and blotting out vistas from the San Juans to the Sandias. It seemed as if I’d never get a view as clear as Norm’s.

But over the last decade, the failing economics of coal and clean air regulations shuttered those power plants. That means the air on the Colorado Plateau — when not sullied by the ever-lengthening wildfire season — has become cleaner as the coal industry faded away.

The shuttered plants include Mojave, Navajo, Nucla, Escalante, San Juan and, most recently, Cholla. The closures certainly sharpened the view of folks all over the region. But more importantly, they kept tens of millions of tons of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and oodles of harmful pollutants (arsenic, mercury, sulfur dioxide and soot) out of the lungs of nearby residents, many of them on the Navajo Nation.

Yet in defiance of the free market that has boosted renewables, the Trump administration is acting to undo those positive changes and make the air dirty again by throwing multiple lifelines to the flagging coal industry.

It has eviscerated environmental protections limiting mercury and other toxic air emissions, ended Obama-and Biden-era freezes on new federal coal leases, and rescinded limits on carbon dioxide emissions. The administration has also blocked utilities from shutting down plants that are old, dirty and more costly than other power sources.

Trump purports to do this in the name of “unleashing” coal from regulatory constraints so it can be mined and burned to achieve American “energy dominance.” Yet it’s unlikely that unleashing the industry will reverse its decline.

It’s true that delaying implementation of the mercury rule will enable the Colstrip coal plant in Montana — one of the nation’s dirtiest facilities — to continue operating without expensive new pollution control equipment. Generally, though, utilities such as Xcel Energy, Intermountain Power Agency and Tri-State Generation & Transmission are moving forward with plans to retire their coal plants, namely because the aging facilities are dirty, inefficient, inflexible and, most of all, no longer profitable. They just can’t compete with natural gas, solar, wind, and other, cleaner energy sources.

When signing one of his fossil-fuel-friendly orders, Trump said he would “save” the Cholla coal plant near Holbrook, Arizona, from destruction, adding, “We’re going to have that plant opening and burning the clean coal, beautiful clean coal, in a very short period of time.”

But its operator, Arizona Public Service, said it had already procured cleaner, cheaper generation for the plant, and had no desire to keep burning coal at Cholla. There was no save needed.

If Trump were truly interested in energy dominance and abundance, he would have supported the fastest-growing energy sources — wind and solar power. Instead, his administration is doing all it can to stifle them, from eliminating production tax credits for renewable energy in his “big, beautiful” budget bill, to slowing down permits for clean energy developments on public lands. Both utility-scale and rooftop solar will be affected, boosting the prospects of oil and gas, coal and nuclear.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, in an Economist column, revealed the philosophy behind the administration’s fossil-fuel fetishization. He wrote that climate change is “not an existential crisis,” merely a “byproduct of progress.” He said he was willing to take the “modest negative trade-off” of climate change — along, presumably, with ever more devastating heat waves, wildfires and floods— “for this legacy of human advancement.”

He is probably correct in saying that climate change and the sullied air over the Colorado Plateau are byproducts of so-called progress. But they are also nasty, deadly and avoidable. Ultimately, going backward toward coal will not only wreck progress, but perhaps life on earth as we know it.

Jonathan Thompson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He has long covered the West’s natural resources.

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First things first: You can get an abortion in Colorado, whether procedural or medication abortion. If you are on Medicaid, you can still get an abortion in Colorado. Individual providers can still provide abortion care to people who need it, regardless of whether they have public or private insurance. And if you have a problem paying for your abortion, please reach out to the Cobalt Abortion Fund for help.

What’s happening to Planned Parenthood is terrible, it’s very real, and it is hurting access to abortion care in Colorado. Planned Parenthood was targeted by President Donald Trump’s budget bill, just as they have been for years, and their patients are paying the price. The chaos is intentional: health care providers are scrambling to adapt to the latest court rulings, patients are seeing their appointments cancelled, rescheduled, and moved around, and nobody has a clear idea of what’s next.

The recent federal budget bill, which should be called the Forced Birth Bill, penalizes Planned Parenthood not only for offering abortion services but also for providing comprehensive reproductive health care, including STI testing and contraception. It is a direct attack on bodily autonomy and the right to control a person’s own body, their reproductive health and freedom, and their social, economic, and political power.

The bill imposes a punitive one-year ban on Planned Parenthood for offering these services, preventing them from receiving federal Medicaid funding during that period. The result has been a denial of basic health care to people most in need of it, and a denial of control, dignity and self-determination.

As current and former providers, we are feeling the attacks ourselves, just as we did in those terrible days right after the Dobbs decision. The deliberate trauma hurts everyone. And it has again created a crisis of care here in a state where abortion is protected both in law and in the state Constitution with Amendment 79.

It’s important to understand Amendment 79 is not nullified by the federal bill. Instead, it becomes even more vital, making it more important to ensure Coloradans’ guaranteed access to abortion care. Coloradans have a constitutional right to access abortion under Amendment 79. But now, thanks to Trump’s budget bill, Coloradans are being forced to navigate a system that delays, deflects, and denies.

Reproductive freedom is not a theoretical policy value. It’s a lived need.  We have heard that need every day, from Colorado patients and those fleeing abortion bans in other states. It’s one that fundamentally affects the present and the future of our patients.

We are under no illusions that as abortion providers we are all under threat and that abortion opponents will come for us, too. The goal has always been to ban abortion, whether it’s by explicit legislative dictate or by making it impossible to provide care by burying patients and providers both in a pile of confusion and red tape.

The crisis for Planned Parenthood is not just a political issue. It directly impacts some of the most at-risk people and populations in Colorado and across the nation.  It’s a racial and economic justice issue, and our communities deserve better.

The bottom line is that people with abortion care appointments with individual providers should keep them.  Those needing appointments should make them. And those who need procedural or practical support can reach out to the Cobalt Abortion Fund for help.

We don’t know what’s next. But we stand in solidarity with our colleagues at Planned Parenthood, and to anyone who comes to us in need of abortion care.

Don Aptekar is a retired ObGyn who served patients in Colorado for 50 years. Kara Alexandrovic is a practicing ObGyn in the Denver Metro area. 

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