Paediatricians will not need to be convinced of the value of the necropsy examination. Necropsies have received extensive adverse coverage in the press during the last year, the main issue being the retention of organs without the knowledge of the family of the deceased.

However, patients in the United Kingdom have been receiving a standard of service in perinatal pathology that is unequalled elsewhere in Europe. It is an important facet of reproductive health care, both at an individual level and also for the community. The importance of good perinatal pathology has repeatedly been recognised by bodies such as the confidential enquiry into stillbirth and death in infancy (CESDI), whose remit is to identify ways of reducing fetal and infant deaths. The current controversy is seriously damaging perinatal pathology—there are currently 10 unfilled consultant posts (of a total of less than 40), with only a single trainee in post. The current adverse publicity does nothing to aid recruitment to a discipline that already requires highly specialised diagnostic skills. Perinatal necropsy rates are generally down and thus many parents are not receiving the information they need to make informed reproductive choices. Research output has also suffered.

If we are to recover this lost ground, pathologists and other professionals involved in counselling families about perinatal necropsies need to work hard to reassure parents and explain the importance of the postmortem examination to their future reproductive health.

In recent years, the majority of consented necropsies (that is, those not performed for the coroner) in the …