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Good morning. By the time that many people hear this, they will have been woken by all manner of extraneous noises.Ìý It might have been a feline dispute in the road outside, a plane flying overhead or even the sound of the radio itself.Ìý Of all the sounds in the world, the hardest to ignore is a baby’s cry.Ìý The survival of our species depends, quite literally, upon our inability to ignore it …we are hard-wired in such a way that we cannot let it go unchecked.

I want to spare a thought right now for those who would love to be woken by that sound.Ìý They are the people who long for their nights to be interrupted by a baby’s cry or their days by the rhythm of a baby’s life – feeding and changing and caring. Right now 1 in 4 pregnancies in the United Kingdom ends in early miscarriage or still birth.Ìý One quarter of those who long for the sound of their baby’s cry do not get to hear it.

Last year, people started using the word ‘miscourage’ when talking about miscarriage – and I applaud the initiative.Ìý For too long the stigma of something unmentionable has been added to the considerable heartache of failing to carry a pregnancy full term.Ìý This should not be so, surely?Ìý And if talking about it helps then the least the rest of us can do is listen.

There’s a touching verse in the Psalms where David says that God has ‘kept his tears in a bottle’. In other words, none of them have gone un-noticed.Ìý Could you let somebody talk who needs to today?

Dear God, we pray today for those who long to hear their baby’s first cry, and those who are working to ensure that they can. Amen

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