Ashleigh Rousseaux Stillbirth Ultrasound: The Story of Dominic, and a Mother’s Life’s Work

Quick answer: Ashleigh Rousseaux is a Queensland-based bereavement advocate and Community Engagement Manager at Red Nose Australia. In 2014, she lost her son Dominic to an unexplained full-term stillbirth at 39 weeks — a loss discovered during her final ultrasound appointment. Since then, Ashleigh has dedicated her career to supporting other bereaved families across Australia.

Quick Facts

TL;DR: In 2014, Ashleigh Rousseaux arrived at what should have been a routine final ultrasound at 39 weeks pregnant. Instead, the silence in that room changed everything. Her son Dominic was stillborn hours later. This is the story of that day, its aftermath, and the advocacy work Ashleigh has built in Dominic’s name — from peer support programs to national steering committees.

Some stories don’t have the ending anyone prepared for. Ashleigh Rousseaux’s story is one of them.

In 2014, Ashleigh walked into her final ultrasound appointment expecting to hear that her pregnancy was on track. She was 39 weeks along — nearly at the finish line. What followed instead was a silence that no expectant parent should ever have to sit inside. Her obstetrician went quiet. Dominic’s heart had stopped.

The official cause, recorded after his birth, was “unexplained foetal demise.” A heart defect had been detected at the morphology scan weeks earlier, but no definitive explanation would ever fully account for the loss. Dominic was born at 3:49am. His funeral was held one week later — on his original due date.

That sequence of events, as devastating as it is to read, is only the beginning of Ashleigh’s story. Because what she did with that grief — how she transformed it into something tangible, lasting, and genuinely life-changing for other families — is the part worth telling in full.

This article draws on verified details from a Mamamia profile by Raffaella Ciccarelli (published February 6, 2026) and Ashleigh’s official profile through the Stillbirth Centre of Research Excellence (Stillbirth CRE).

Who Is Ashleigh Rousseaux?

Ashleigh Rousseaux is a Queensland-based bereavement advocate currently serving as Manager of Community Engagement for Queensland at Red Nose Australia, the country’s leading organisation supporting families affected by the death of a baby or child.

Her professional background is in science, which shapes the evidence-based approach she brings to her advocacy work. But it was personal experience — not professional training — that first pulled her toward bereavement support. After losing Dominic in 2014, Ashleigh began connecting with peer support programs in 2016. By 2018, she had transitioned into formal bereavement services, taking on the role of State Manager at Sands, a stillbirth and neonatal death support organisation.

Today, her work extends well beyond direct family support. Ashleigh is involved with the Stillbirth CRE, Australia’s national research collaboration focused on reducing stillbirth rates and improving outcomes for bereaved families. She also sits on the Safer Baby Bundle implementation steering committee, a national initiative designed to reduce late-pregnancy stillbirth through improved clinical care.

She is, in every meaningful sense, someone who has turned the worst moment of her life into a professional purpose — and has done so without losing the rawness that makes her advocacy resonate.

The Final Ultrasound: What Happened at 39 Weeks

The appointment was supposed to be straightforward. Ashleigh was 39 weeks pregnant — her due date was days away. A final ultrasound at that stage of pregnancy is largely routine: a check-in, a confirmation, a moment of relief before the final stretch.

Instead, her obstetrician went quiet.

That silence — sudden, heavy, and unmistakable — told Ashleigh what no words had yet confirmed. Dominic’s heart was still. According to the Mamamia profile by Raffaella Ciccarelli, the moment the obstetrician stopped speaking, Ashleigh already knew something was catastrophically wrong.

A heart defect had been identified at Dominic’s morphology scan earlier in the pregnancy. But that finding had not predicted this outcome. The cause of his death was later officially recorded as “unexplained foetal demise” — a classification that is both medically accurate and, for grieving parents, profoundly unsatisfying. There was no clear reason. No single failure to point to. Just a devastating result that nobody had anticipated.

Ashleigh was alone at that appointment when she received the news. Her husband Sebastien was at his first day at a new job. She had to call him.

The Hours and Days That Followed

Dominic was born at 3:49am. The details of his birth — the time, the quiet of the early morning, the presence of hospital staff trained to support families through this kind of loss — are the kind of details that bereaved parents hold onto. They are proof that he existed. That he was real. That the moment mattered.

His funeral was held one week later, on the day that had been circled on every calendar as the happiest: his due date.

In the aftermath, Ashleigh and her husband Sebastien made a deliberate choice. They would not silence Dominic within their family. They would say his name. They would speak about him openly. His handprint now lives permanently on Ashleigh’s skin — she had it tattooed as a lasting mark of his place in her life.

That decision — to keep Dominic visible — would prove to be both personally sustaining and professionally formative. It shaped the way Ashleigh later approached her advocacy work, particularly around how families and institutions talk (or fail to talk) about pregnancy loss.

Keeping Dominic’s Memory Alive

For Ashleigh and Sebastien, keeping Dominic’s memory alive has never been about performance. It’s been about honesty — with themselves, with their family, and eventually with the wider public.

They chose to speak openly about Dominic with their other children. His name is used. His existence is acknowledged. The grief is not hidden behind language designed to soften or deflect.

This approach runs counter to a broader cultural tendency to treat stillbirth and pregnancy loss as topics best left unspoken — particularly around children. Ashleigh has been clear, through her advocacy work, that silence rarely protects. More often, it isolates.

The tattoo of Dominic’s handprint is a physical expression of that philosophy. It is not a private memorial. It is visible, permanent, and deliberately so. It is, in its own way, a statement: this child existed, this loss was real, and that reality does not have to be concealed.

When the Classroom Collides With Grief

One of the most striking incidents Ashleigh has shared publicly involves her eldest child and a school writing prompt.

Her child, responding to a classroom exercise, wrote: “The baby is dead.” It was an honest, age-appropriate expression of what their family had experienced. And yet, according to the Mamamia profile, the child was shamed for it in class.

The incident is painful on multiple levels. It illustrates how ill-equipped many educational settings remain when it comes to supporting children who have experienced pregnancy loss within their family. It also demonstrates the unintended consequences of families choosing honesty over silence — a choice that Ashleigh and Sebastien made deliberately, only to find that the institutions around them were not prepared to meet that honesty with care.

For Ashleigh, it reinforced something she had already come to understand through her advocacy work: bereaved families do not just need support for themselves. They need the systems around them — schools, workplaces, healthcare settings — to be better equipped to respond.

Advice for Bereaved Families Navigating Schools

Ashleigh’s experience with her eldest child has informed the practical guidance she offers to other bereaved families navigating similar situations. While Ashleigh’s specific advice varies by context, several principles emerge consistently from her advocacy work:

Talk to teachers early. If a child has experienced a family loss, letting educators know before it surfaces in a classroom setting gives teachers the opportunity to respond with care rather than surprise.

Normalise honest language at home. Children who are taught that grief is speakable are better prepared to encounter it in social settings. Shame is not a natural response to loss — it is learned.

Request support proactively. Many Australian schools have access to counsellors or welfare officers who can provide additional support to children navigating bereavement. Bereaved parents don’t need to wait for a crisis to ask for that help.

Advocate for school-wide awareness. Organisations like Red Nose Australia offer resources and programs specifically designed to help schools support bereaved students and families. These resources exist — but they require someone to ask for them.

Ashleigh Rousseaux’s Stillbirth Advocacy Work

Ashleigh began formally engaging with peer support programs in 2016, two years after Dominic’s death. By 2018, she had moved into professional bereavement services, becoming State Manager at Sands Queensland.

Her current role as Manager of Community Engagement for Queensland at Red Nose Australia places her at the centre of one of the country’s most significant bereavement support networks. Red Nose provides free, specialised support to anyone affected by the sudden and unexpected death of a baby or child — including support for miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, medical termination, stillbirth, newborn death, and SIDS. Their 24/7 Support Line (1300 308 307) is available to parents, siblings, grandparents, healthcare professionals, and anyone else affected by such a loss.

Beyond direct support services, Ashleigh contributes to systemic change through her involvement with the Stillbirth CRE and the Safer Baby Bundle implementation steering committee. These bodies work at a national level to reduce stillbirth rates and to improve the clinical and emotional care families receive when a stillbirth occurs.

Her science background gives her credibility in these evidence-based spaces. Her lived experience gives her something harder to teach: the knowledge of what it actually feels like to be on the other side of the statistics.

Conclusion: What Dominic’s Story Asks of All of Us

Stillbirth affects approximately six families every day in Australia, according to Red Nose Australia. The vast majority of those losses — like Dominic’s — go largely unwitnessed by the wider public. They happen in hospital rooms and quiet mornings and on the other end of phone calls to husbands starting new jobs.

Ashleigh Rousseaux has spent the better part of a decade making sure those stories are not buried alongside the babies they belong to. Through peer support, professional advocacy, national research committees, and the simple act of saying her son’s name, she has done what the grief literature suggests is one of the hardest things: she has made meaning from loss without pretending the loss itself was anything other than devastating.

Dominic was born at 3:49am. He had a heartbeat detected at a morphology scan weeks before his birth. He had a mother who had his handprint tattooed on her skin, a father who was called away from his first day at a new job to receive the worst news of his life, and siblings who were taught to say his name.

He existed. Ashleigh has made sure the world knows it.

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Emma Clarke

Emma Clarke is a content writer at Gaukurinn.is, specializing in celebrity news, pop culture, movies, and music. With a strong focus on accuracy and trending topics, she creates engaging and well-researched articles that keep readers informed and entertained.
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