Yvette Cooper acknowledges ‘unthinkable pain’ caused by practice between 1930s and 1980s after campaign by Wirral woman and others

The health secretary, Yvette Cooper, has issued a “profound apology” for the “unthinkable pain” caused to parents whose stillborn babies were buried in mass graves.

Parents spent decades not knowing where their babies were buried, owing to a practice in which stillborn babies taken away from mothers at hospital and buried in communal graves.