News & Commentary

Every year, all across the UK, thousands of families come together on 15 October, the final day of Baby Loss Awareness Week to light a candle for the ‘Wave of Light’. This event is organised by the Baby Loss Charity Sands (Still and Neonatal Death), to honour and pay respects to all babies who died too soon. The ‘Wave of Light’ is a beautiful commemoration of every family’s story of experiencing baby loss, of every broken heart and every lost son, daughter, brother and sister. The chance to come together provides an opportunity to foster a sense of closeness and intimacy, and to combat the isolation that so often accompanies such a traumatic loss.

October is breast cancer awareness month, designed to promote widespread education about one of the most common cancer diagnoses. In fact, it is the most common cancer in women, or people assigned female at birth, with around 56,000 cases diagnosed annually in the UK. Therefore, each year during October fundraising projects take place such as the ‘wear it pink’ campaign where people don pink clothing or a pink ribbon to symbolise solidarity with breast cancer patients and to raise money for cancer research.

The British Fertility Society Creating Modern Families Day took place on 23 September 2025 in London as part of BFS Study Week. It delivered an excellent multi-disciplinary training programme that was well attended by fertility clinicians, embryologists, nurses, counsellors and other fertility professionals. Louisa Ghevaert was delighted to be invited back as a speaker to give a surrogacy law update and take part in a lively question and answer panel addressing complex fertility and family law issues in practice.

World Contraception Day takes place annually on 26 September. It was launched in 2007 as a global campaign to raise awareness about contraception and empower proactive management of sexual and reproductive health and family planning. However, access to contraception and its use are governed by a range of legal, political, religious, health and lifestyle factors and varying degrees of regulation, restrictions and uptake around the world.

Stand Up To Cancer Day takes place on 12 September 2025 with the aim of raising awareness about the impact of cancer, its available treatments, and the importance of funding cancer research. his includes testicular and prostate cancer and its symptoms and relevant treatment. It also includes the consequent impact on individual fertility and the importance of effective strategies for fertility preservation and family building including sperm banking, donor conception, adoption and posthumous conception.

September is Gynaecological Cancer Awareness Month, and it is designed to raise awareness about the symptoms, treatments and struggles associated with the diagnoses of five types of cancers. These are cervical, ovarian, uterine, vaginal and vulval cancer. Gynaecological cancer can be life altering, or life threatening in serious cases, and so drawing attention to the symptoms and available screening can increase the chances of an early detection.

This year National Rainbow Baby Day takes place on 22 August 2025. A ‘Rainbow Baby’ is a child born after a family loses a baby and this special child is often seen a symbol of new hope for a family that has experienced such traumatic loss. Established in 2018, National Rainbow Baby Day honours those babies lost to stillbirth, miscarriage, complications during pregnancy or following birth, all the while celebrating the Rainbow Babies who bring such joy to the lives of their family and parents.

National Surrogacy Week takes place in the UK from 1 – 7 August 2025. Its aim is to raise awareness and understanding about surrogacy. It’s also a time to highlight the positive impact of surrogacy, to support open, honest and positive communication and promote ethical practices and policies for professionals and families created through surrogacy. Similarly, it’s a time to celebrate the medical advancements which enable parents to create their families through fertility treatment and surrogacy and reflect on just how far surrogacy in the UK  has come since the landmark ‘Baby Cotton’ case in 1985.