The moment a baby is born, everyone in the room waits for a sound, a cry that lets them know the baby is breathing.
Crystal Rivera-Velez and Cristian Ortiz are still waiting.
“There was a lot of hoping that I would give birth, and the machines were wrong, and the doctors were wrong,” Rivera-Velez said. “But then giving birth, and not hearing her, I think that hurt just as much as when the doctor told me, there was no heartbeat.”
Crystal gave birth to their daughter Valentina on Dec. 8, 2021. The only cries she heard were her own. Valentina was dead.
“I thought I was going home with my baby and that is not happening now,” Rivera-Velez said. “It was pretty much the worst moment of my life.”
For nine months Rivera-Velez and Ortiz had been loud and proud expecting parents, telling their family and friends the best was yet to come.
“They always told me that I was good, and that the baby was good and that I was like a textbook perfect pregnancy that’s what they were telling me,” Rivera-Velez said.
The cause of death was officially listed as cord compression, but Valentina, who was born full term, was just 3 pounds and 7 ounces. An autopsy showed Valentina’s growth was restricted and her death was preventable.
“That’s when we started the advocacy and started asking questions about how she really died,” Ortiz said. “It wasn’t from cord compression, she was too little. They never caught it.”
The couple planned to bring their baby girl back to a happy loving home. Instead, they brought the quiet from that hospital room back with them.
“I took the car seat out of the car because I didn’t have the heart for her to get into the car with the car seat in there,” Ortiz said. “I cleaned up the baby’s room, threw everything in a closet. It’s too difficult to look at.”
After months of grieving, Rivera-Velez and Ortiz decided to speak up. They created the nonprofit Valentina’s Voice, helping parents pay for neonatal autopsies and collect data to hopefully prevent another loss.
“It is not fair for a researcher to go grab research from this hospital to try and fix stillbirths, and they have unclean data,” Ortiz said. “So part of Valentina’s Voice is data hygiene.”
The couple never got to hear Valentina’s voice.
“This is all I have left of being a parent so I have to do this,” Ortiz said. “I have to as her father I have to and it’s keeping me alive. It keeps me alive.”
But somehow they’re using it to amplify their own.
If you want to show your support just visit valentinasvoice.org.
There you can donate to help pay for perinatal autopsies with the hope of lowering preventable stillbirths.