Funeral director Amie Upton started bringing dead babies home after tragic loss

The funeral director at the centre of the storm involving a dead baby ‘watching cartoons’suffered the unbearable heartbreak of losing her own baby after a violent attack.

Amie Upton, 38, told The Mirrorshe started bringing babies to her home after losing her own in 2017. She revealed how she was left in a coma after her abusive ex-partner repeatedly rammed a child’s buggy into her, causing her tummy to crash against an open freezer door.

Mum-of-two Amie was 17 weeks and three days pregnant with Florrie at the time and the attack ruptured her amniotic sac - 12 weeks later Florrie was stillborn. The baby's father Shaun Birchall, 28, was jailed for two years after pleading guilty to grievous bodily harm (GBH).

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Amie has said she was sure the attack caused the death of Florrie too. He has since been released.

Judge Rodney Jameson QC, at the sentencing of Birchall at Leeds crown court in 2021, said the defendant became “extremely angry” during a row with Amie in the kitchen and deliberately pushed a buggy into the back of her legs or her lower back on more than one occasion.

The court heard he knocked her forward so that her abdomen came into contact with the corner of the open freezer door.

The judge said: “She was 17 weeks pregnant at the time and the impact caused the rupture of the amniotic sac. There is a considerable difficulty in determining exactly the consequences of that fact.

“It is beyond doubt that the rupture of the amniotic sac would on any view have caused serious consequences to the pregnancy. Whether it is in fact causative of death and, if so, to what degree are questions of very great complexity.

“As I have indicated, it is undoubtedly the case that Miss Upton will believe to her dying day that it was a contributory factor and I accept that she may well be right about that, but I can only sentence on evidence, not on feeling, and on evidence of which I have to be sure and the medical evidence is such that, although of course I see that it may well have been a factor, I simply cannot say that I can be certain to the required degree that it was.

“But I remind myself again that this is not a case of child destruction and it may well be that what Miss Upton has thought and no doubt thought carefully about, about whether there should be a change to the law in that regard, it may well be something that needs to be looked at or would be looked at.

“I express no particular view about that other than to understand entirely why Miss Upton has undertaken the research and gained the support that she has to have the issue looked at.

“But on any view this was serious injury to Miss Upton herself and the consequences of it to Florrie, whether causative of death or not, were themselves of extreme seriousness.”

After the case Amie fought for a change in the law, starting a petition saying: “The aim of this petition is to create a law separate to Abortion Law to change the way a foetus beyond 24 weeks is perceived in a court of law after an unlawful killing of that foetus has taken place.” She managed to get 3,311 of the 4,000 signatures she’d wanted.

She wrote: “It is important to myself as I know first hand how it feels to lose a child in this way, to feel isolated and that there is no law in place to protect pregnant women or our unborn babies ...

“Our babies do not get the recognition of the deserving life of which they are.

“...However if Florrie's Law had already been in place beforehand then the outcome of the prosecution would have been a firmer punishment than what was given in all of these cases.”

This week she described her ex as a “rat” and told The Mirror: “He battered me in the kitchen and I lost Florence. The little rat. He’s out now. I nearly bled to death on the operating table.”

She said making funeral gowns out of wedding dresses helped heal her as well as donating items to other grieving mums. “The families keep me going with the positive feedback. It turned me into a different person,” she said.

“When I think of my daughter now, I smile, because I’ve done good by her, she’s not been forgotten even though my name’s being dragged through the mud. I’m the happiest person in this world to go through what I’ve been through.”

Shaun’s family have always stood by him, with his aunty once revealing his entire family had fallen victim to harassment and abuse after the court case.

“It's a tragedy what's happened. But my family has been targeted by strangers - people who don’t even know us are abusing us,” she said.

Amie spoke to The Mirror to defend herself after a BBC investigation revealed she had been barred from mortuaries in Leeds.

A BBC investigation accused Amie Upton, 38, of leaving a mum ‘screaming’ after she found her dead child in a baby bouncer ‘watching cartoons’ in her living room with another dead baby on the sofa.

Another mum, whose stillborn child, was in Amie’s care at one stage and was ‘really smelly’, told them: "It was just crazy. If I told somebody of this story... they'd think it was a horror film."

Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust confirmed they had barred Amie, who runs Florrie’s Army, from its mortuaries and maternity wards, in spring this year after “serious concerns”.