Filed at 6:51 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Five years after a textbook pregnancy suddenly turned into the horror of stillbirth, one of Marcia Bannon's most stark memories is the loneliness, the awkward silence.

``No one knows what to say about the death of a baby, and consequently they say nothing,'' says Bannon, who now has two healthy children but still is moved to tears when recalling that Zachary would have started kindergarten this year. ``We felt people were sweeping it under the rug and not acknowledging it happened.''

Worse, say other parents, is the common refrain that ``you can have another baby'' or that it's better the child died at birth than later.

American women suffer more than 26,000 stillbirths a year, a toll seldom discussed, seldom even studied by doctors who can find no cause for more than a third of those deaths.

Now, bereaved parents are sparking change:

--Spurred by Zachary Bannon's death, the March of Dimes created a special bereavement kit to ease the grief of parents after stillbirth, as well as miscarriage or death of a newborn, and to advise their friends and family on sensitive ways to help. The charity also is teaching nurses how to provide more compassionate care for grieving families.

--The National Institutes of Health is planning new research into causes of stillbirth, including possible links between stillbirth and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which claims about 3,000 babies a year.

--Some parents, wanting simple validation that their babies did exist, are lobbying state governments to issue stillbirth certificates as they issue certificates of live birth. Pushed by a parents group called the MISS Foundation, Arizona recently became the first to do so.

Only 14 percent of stillbirths occur during labor. Most of the time the woman has labor induced to deliver a baby she has just learned is dead.

Problems with the placenta, birth defects and infections account for many stillbirths. Better treatment of maternal diabetes and other pregnancy conditions made stillbirth drop after the 1960s, but little progress has been made in the last decade. And for more than a third of cases, even an autopsy cannot find the cause; the tiny bodies appear normal.

``It's a huge area we haven't dealt with scientifically,'' says Dr. Catherine Spong of the NIH's National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, who speculates it may take better autopsies to find the right clues.

``Stillbirth is aptly named -- nobody talks about it,'' adds Richard Olsen, who began the National Stillbirth Society after doctors could not say why his daughter Camille was stillborn. He wonders, somewhat bitterly, why SIDS gets more attention even though stillbirth's toll is higher.

Regardless of the cause, grieving parents have received little help, from the basics of whether to hold a funeral or what they can take home from the hospital as memories to how to handle the stress of a subsequent pregnancy.

Nor until now has there been training for hospitals, although experienced nurses sometimes hold blankets or ID bracelets, knowing distraught parents may decide weeks later they want the objects.

It's hard to realize that after the immediate pain a parent would want such tangible memories, says Zachary Bannon's grandfather, Bill Zessar. He initially was reluctant to hold the baby's body but now knows he would have forever regretted not doing so.

So families wouldn't have to search out help bit-by-bit as they did, the Bettendorf, Iowa, family helped the March of Dimes develop the bereavement kit, available on a new Web page at http://www.marchofdimes.com/loss.

Among the advice:

--Men and women grieve differently. Mothers have the addition of physical pain, such as milk arriving days after a baby's death. Acknowledging the differences and communicating is vital.

--Maintaining physical health -- eating properly, avoiding alcohol and doing something active every day, even if just a walk around the block -- is crucial for mental health.

--Don't bottle up emotions or be afraid to ask for help.

The kits range from offering medical information about stillbirth, miscarriage and other pregnancy problems to a memory envelope for families to store sonograms or locks of hair.

A separate booklet advises friends and relatives to remember and talk about the child and urges the honesty of ``I want to help, but don't know how.'' Another discusses how parents can tell if they're ready, physically and emotionally, to try another pregnancy.

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EDITOR'S NOTE -- Lauran Neergaard covers health and medicine for The Associated Press in Washington.