BUTTERFLY FUN RUN
Sunday,11th October, The Groynes Reserve, Christchurch
This is our annual fundraiser, held every year in Christchurch during Baby Loss Awareness Week. We are campaigning for the government to start recording miscarriage rates nationally and the more people we have showing up for our cause, the more we all help to show how important it is.
See you on the 11th of October, 2026
I want to get email reminders about the Butterfly Fun Run...
Other ways to get involved
Baby Loss Awareness week is an international event that occurs from the 9th to the 15th of October every year. You may like to get a group together to run or walk a track near you, or maybe you can organise a 'Wear Orange' day at your workplace or a 'Butterfly Breakfast' with your loved ones. Help us raise awareness about miscarriage and raise funds to support our work.
Wherever you are in Aotearoa, you can take part in the International Wave of Light by lighting a candle for your baby at 7pm on the 15th of October.
ADVOCACY
- Make Miscarriage Count -
58,887
live births
????
miscarriages
439
fetal deaths
30
infant deaths
We don't know how many miscarriages occur each year in New Zealand. It is estimated that 10-20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. If there were 60,000 pregnancies in a year, that would be six to twelve thousand miscarriages. When we look at the stats for baby loss, we are missing over 90% of the data when we do not include miscarriage.
What are campaigning for?
We would love miscarriage to be recorded as a loss of pregnancy (rather than loss of life which challenges the legal definition of 'life') by Births, Deaths and Marriages. This would be the best outcome because it would include data from the mother and father.
However, we also want miscarriage to be recorded nationally without delay and we believe that a clear pathway is for miscarriage to be recorded as a Maternity Clinical Indicator.
The New Zealand Maternity Clinical Indicators show maternity outcomes for each district and maternity facility, to:
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highlight areas where quality and safety could be improved nationally
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support quality improvement by helping districts to identify focus areas for local clinical review of maternity services
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provide a broader picture of maternity outcomes in Aotearoa New Zealand than is possible from maternal and perinatal mortality data alone
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provide standardised (benchmarked) data allowing districts to evaluate their maternity services over time and against the national average
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improve national consistency and quality in maternity data reporting
What is a maternity clinical indicator?
Progress so far
In June, 2025 the Perinatal Bereavement Care Pathway Advisory Panel presented a bereavement care pathway to Health NZ. Our input into this process is that we presented to the Panel, summed up as follows;
Recommendation:
We recommend that miscarriage be included as a maternity clinical indicator in the establishment year. This action is necessary for early loss to be included in the bereavement care pathway, most notably in steps 6 and 9.
Explanation:
Currently a woman presenting to a healthcare provider with miscarriage is in a situation where her baby's life doesn't count and her physical experience of miscarriage doesn't count either. Including miscarriage as a maternity clinical indicator changes that and gives us the data to review, follow up, and better understand the experience of miscarriage.
The Advisory Panel were expecting this pathway to be released from Health NZ and presented in parliament in October, 2025 (during Baby Loss Awareness Week). However, there is still no sign of this pathway being released. Check out this Stuff article if you are interested in more details about the panel and how many years it has taken to get to this stage.
Why it matters
Recording the rates of miscarriage in New Zealand matters as a first step towards improving care. Miscarriage is so underserved right now that it is hard to get across all the possible avenues for improvement. A national record of miscarriage could lead to...
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opportunities for reliable research, specific to New Zealand
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better information for medical practitioners
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ability to measure effectiveness of initiatives (we currently give out 1000 care packages each year in Canterbury, but how many people are we missing??)
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understanding the scale and wide reaching implications of miscarriage
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better advocacy for miscarriage to be included in the curriculum at midwifery schools
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families feeling more seen and that their experience matters
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more options for miscarriage care (rather than being either at home or in hospital)
The difference between personal health records and national health records
When you experience a miscarriage it may be recorded in various places but these are not collated anywhere - they are strictly your private personal data. Your GP may have a record that your miscarriage occurred but the GP will not share this personal information with anyone else.
Some miscarriage data can be publicly accessed. For example, St John Ambulance releases callout data each year including the number of miscarriage and abortion callouts (miscarriage and abortion and grouped together as one figure). Hospitals record how many miscarriages have presented at ED or were treated. Midwives and GPs can claim an additional maternity appointment payment if a miscarriage occurs. We could gather all these data points together but we wouldn't know if the midwife, ambulance, hospital, and GP visits were made by one person or multiple people. One person could have registered with a midwife, required an ambulance ride to hospital, and had a follow-up appointment with their GP. We do not currently have an accurate national health record of miscarriage.
National health records, for example, maternity clinical indicators, are collected in a way that your personal information remains anonymous. With a maternity clinical indicator your miscarriage can be recorded along with other demographic and health history data. Norway is one a the very few countries in the world that records miscarriage in its national health data. In 2022 researchers in Norway looked at the WHO recommendation that after miscarriage or abortion, couples should wait 6 months before getting pregnant again to avoid adverse maternal outcomes. The Norwegian researchers felt that this recommendation was based on scarce data. When they looked at the over 40,000 pregnancies in Norway that had occurred after miscarriage or abortion they found no increase of negative outcomes for pregnancies that were within 3 months of miscarriage or abortion. This kind of reliable information is so valuable. There is so much that we don’t know about miscarriage and we will never know if we don’t start paying attention.
CARE PACKAGES
We have regional Miscarriage Matters Chapters making care packages in Auckland, Top of the South, Canterbury, Timaru, and Queenstown. Each Chapter operates in their own way. Reach out via miscarriagemattersnz@gmail.com or Facebook if you would like to get involved with a Chapter near you. To learn about starting your own Chapter click here.
Our Mission
To improve the experience of miscarriage in New Zealand by empowering people with information,
advocacy and support. One way we hope to achieve this objective is by giving out care packages.
Purpose of the care packages:
Our care packages are there to show women who are experiencing miscarriage that they are cared for
and important.
What is in the care package:
Our care packages are well presented and personal, with products that make people feel good and
nourished. Each care package is made to this formula: one food or drink item (including
vouchers), one wellness or comfort item, one plant or seed item, one keepsake, and one handwritten
card, all presented together in a home-sewn calico bag or paper bag with MMNZ sticker.
Canterbury Working Bees- Join Us!
We host bi-monthly working bees in Canterbury, where our wonderful volunteers come together to help prepare and pack care packages. These sessions include making seed bombs, sewing bags, writing heartfelt cards and assembling various items for distribution. It’s a team effort and the more hands the better – everyone is welcome, so we encourage you to join in if and when you’re able. Working bees are usually held at a committee members or volunteers’ home in Rangiora or the surrounding areas. Dates are set at the beginning of the year and can be found on this page. If you’re interested in attending or would like more information, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We would love to have you on board!
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For more videos and pictures please check out our social media pages (feel free to give us a like/follow too)