Lastly and probably most significantly, there is obviously the loss of an additional individual who would likely have been economically productive over the course of their lifetime
From a common-sensical point of view, it’s difficult to know exactly where to “draw the line”; it seems crazy to imagine a baby dying during labour as anything other than a rich, full potential liife lost, but if we extend that logic too far backwards then we might imagine any moment that we are not reproducing to be costing one “life’s worth” of DALYs.
There seems to be an obvious route of inquiry to address this quandary, which is to ask what impact a stillbirth has on the number of children a woman has during her life. I imagine some nontrivial fraction of women who have stillbirths go on to become pregnant again in relatively short order, and end up having just as many children as they would have had the pregnancy succeeded. If, hypothetically, 90% of women who have stillbirths go on to have just as many children as they would have without the stillbirth, and 10% have one fewer children, then it seems straightforward to me that we should count a stillbirth as costing 0.1 lives. I don’t know actual numbers about how stillbirths impact women’s later reproductive choices, but presumably somebody has studied this.
There seems to be an obvious route of inquiry to address this quandary, which is to ask what impact a stillbirth has on the number of children a woman has during her life. I imagine some nontrivial fraction of women who have stillbirths go on to become pregnant again in relatively short order, and end up having just as many children as they would have had the pregnancy succeeded. If, hypothetically, 90% of women who have stillbirths go on to have just as many children as they would have without the stillbirth, and 10% have one fewer children, then it seems straightforward to me that we should count a stillbirth as costing 0.1 lives. I don’t know actual numbers about how stillbirths impact women’s later reproductive choices, but presumably somebody has studied this.