It was two days before her 27th birthday and she was at the hairdresser, 12 weeks pregnant with her first child.  

“The voice on the other side said, are you sitting down?” she recalls.

“I said yeah, what’s wrong? And they said your baby has a one in four chance of Down Syndrome. I was absolutely blown away.”

A flurry of medical procedures followed within the next fortnight, but Ms Gill clung to hope she could deliver a healthy baby.

When she returned to John Hunter Hospital, her specialists broke the news - the little girl was not considered “viable for life”.

She had defects in chromosomes 10 and 13, along with a severe case of Down Syndrome.

Ms Gill terminated the pregnancy the next day.

“They said I could go ahead with the pregnancy [but] there was a really high chance that she wouldn't make it,” Ms Gill said.

“If she did make it, she would definitely be severely deformed and there was a good chance she could be a vegetable.

“I didn't want to put her through any undue pain. I said to my partner, at the moment she's comfortable, she's safe, that's the way I want to leave her. It's the only time in her life we could do something compassionate for her.”

Ms Gill and her partner had been living in Williamtown for two-and-a-half years, in a duplex less than two kilometres down Nelson Bay Road from the RAAF base.

But they only stayed at the property for a few months after losing the baby.

“There was a lot of trauma in that house,” Ms Gill said.

They moved to Tanilba Bay, where Ms Gill gave birth to two healthy children - Liam, born in 2010, and Amber, born last year.

But the couple were tormented by loss of their first daughter.

“They [the doctors] asked me over and over had I used drugs, had I been a drinker?

“I was so angry about it because I’d done everything right. I’d been on the folate. We don’t have any family history. There was just no explanation. Even the doctors were baffled.”

Ms Gill’s partner fell into a deep depression and their relationship broke down.

“It was an accumulation of everything but that was a contributing factor,” she said. 

They were separated for two-and-a-half years before they reconciled. 

When maps of the plume of firefighting contamination from the RAAF base were released last September, Ms Gill said the penny dropped “pretty much straight away”.

Her former property was “smack bang in the middle” of the red zone and she had been eating eggs and vegetables from her garden throughout her pregnancy.

There were hundreds of pumpkins in her back garden, as well as radishes, tomatoes, potatoes and lettuce.

“It all grew really easy because you didn’t have to water the ground very often,” she said. “It would slush underneath your feet.” 

She began researching the links between the firefighting chemicals she believes her baby would have been exposed to in utero - perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) - and birth defects, discovering the same questions she was asking had already been asked before, more than three decades ago in the United States. 

It was in 1981 in Parkersburg, West Virginia, that Sue Bailey gave birth to her son, Bucky, born with only one nostril and a severely deformed eye.

Ms Bailey had spent her pregnancy working in the Teflon division of DuPont’s Washington Works Factory, where she was responsible for channeling PFOA waste in to on-site pits.  

She became suspicious when she returned to work and found a memo on a locker-room bench, outlining a study by 3M – the manufacturer of PFOA – where unborn rats exposed to the chemical had developed eye deformities. 

DuPont had also begun transferring female workers out of its Teflon division, but denied a connection between PFOA and Bucky’s deformities. 

However the Huffington Post has reported that Ms Bailey was then put in touch with another female employee, Karen Robinson, who had given birth to a baby with eye deformities. 

“That pretty much clinched it for both us,” she told the publication.

Robinson and Bailey were two of seven pregnant DuPont workers to deliver babies with birth defects, a ratio that sparked concern among the company’s researchers, when compared to a rate in the general population of two in 1000. 

In advice released last month, the US Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found that some, but not all studies in humans have shown that certain PFAS – the family of perfluorinated chemicals which includes PFOS and PFOA - can affect the developing foetus and child, “including possible changes in growth, learning and behaviour”. 

In the town of Oakey on Queensland’s Darling Downs, the advice brings little comfort to the family of Imogen Phillips, an eight-year-old girl who was born with no hand and only two fingers. 

They now know that Imogen’s mother – Angela Jaeger – was consuming eggs, fruits and vegetables tainted with firefighting chemicals from the nearby Army Aviation Base while she was pregnant. 

Imogen’s grandmother Jenni Elliott said the family believed the chemicals were to blame for her malformed arm but they had “no proof”. 

Convinced that the loss of her baby has a toxic connection to her time in Williamtown, Ms Gill has been in touch with lawyers, in the hope of legal action against Defence over the health effects of the chemicals. 

She has been told they are only pursuing claims for economic losses at this stage. 

But she hopes with time, that will change. 

“I don’t want my daughter’s passing to be in vain. 

“I think about her every day. Having another daughter feels bittersweet, because I look at her and think would she have been the same?” 

- Newcastle Herald