TThe news that NHS England will offer paid leave to staff who have suffered a miscarriage in the first 24 weeks of pregnancy, as part of a wider pregnancy and infant loss policy, made me gasp. It is almost startling, both for its compassion and for the light it shines on the enormous burden that parents have had to bear alone until now. The biological parent can take ten days, a partner five. Employees who have a miscarriage after six months can make recordings paid maternity leave. This is a significant amount of time for something that people have only had to suffer through until now.
Loss is all around us, often suffered in silence. A friend had a miscarriage last weekend. Another friend recently lost her long-awaited twins. Another remembers her losses by lighting a candle and posting a photo of it online, as part of the Wave of light during Baby Loss Awareness Week in October: I had no idea she had gone through that until social media gave her a chance to grieve. These are just three that I know by heart. I know that even as I walk down the street, I am likely to encounter people experiencing the mixed feelings of pain, sadness and, for some perhaps, relief that come with a miscarriage. One in four pregnancies ends with baby loss. That’s a huge amount of pain swallowed.
My own experience wasn’t necessarily a baby loss, but it highlighted to me the importance of having time to recover. In 2019, after almost four years of trying naturally, my husband and I had two IVF cycles that failed because my eggs were not mature enough to fertilize. My employer was kind enough to give me the occasional afternoon off to go to appointments without asking questions; I booked our egg collection dates as a holiday. Some companies are now offering IVF leave, but one thing at a time.
We were diagnosed with ‘unexplained infertility’, and that’s what it turned out to be told that further IVF was not recommended for us. We looked into adoption, but the prospect of taking on that completely different challenge was beyond our reach at the time. That Christmas we adopted our dog, Sybil, and gave her one of the Terry Pratchett character names we had hoped to give to our child.
There is an excellent term: ‘unwarranted grief”, coined by Kenneth Doka, to refer to sadness that is not recognized by society. And mine was staggering – a whirlwind of chaotic pain that I transformed into makeovers, shopping and panic. After enduring the better part of four years of enduring my monthly periods in miserable silence, I finally got that recognition, that kindness, by tweeting after our second cycle failed: “I just found out that our second round IVF didn’t work’ It didn’t work, for reasons that mean I will probably never be able to have a baby. If you have time to send some good thoughts, I would greatly appreciate it. I never knew I could feel so sick or so sad.”
That people saw and recognized that pain was so helpful. It didn’t take it away, but it felt like someone was helping to carry it – thousands of people, as it turned out. And that was pain before I even got to the starting point of pregnancy: when people have to go through that further loss, a loss that is physical, mental and spiritual, and then immediately have to go back to work as if nothing happened, that’s a shame. completely inhuman.
Women have now been working in the workplace long enough for maternity leave to count towards a company’s benefits, and some larger companies, such as John Lewis and Santander, already do so. According to one Report 2022Just over a third of employers have a pregnancy loss policy – but only 21% offer paid leave for pregnancy loss before 24 weeks for the mother. The fact that NHS England’s policy is newsworthy speaks volumes. People can take sick or care leave at the discretion of their employer, but this is not a given, and asking can feel like an insurmountable obstacle at a time when just getting out of bed can be a challenge.
Grief manifests itself in so many ways for each of us. I might also point out that employers benefit from this policy: after a hospital in Birmingham trialled this new policy, it found that staff twice as likely to continue working there. Giving people time to grieve, grieve and physically recover can often mean that further problems are averted over time, rather than an individual bottling them up and then exploding when it just becomes too much.
This was my experience. Again, I hadn’t physically lost a child, but simply losing the tangibility of the idea I had loved, cherished, and hoped for for so long was important enough. I had three weeks off after that second cycle failed, and I ended up leaving my job, reasoning that I no longer needed the maternity leave and could explore new avenues. I wasn’t really reasoning – I had gone mad with grief, and my future suddenly changed into a new timeline. That’s why I collected stories from people with and without children to create a book that acted as a kind of support group for anyone dealing with loss.
This recognition from work, where we spend most of our time, is so valuable, kind and helpful. And it’s already far too late.