Miscarriage bereavement leave: five things the Employment Rights Bill should consider

Professor Jo Brewis (Professor of People and Organisations in the Business School) leads a research team studying early pregnancy endings and the impact on people in the workplace. Her team welcomes the fact that the bill is considering an amendment that would extend the entitlement to bereavement leave beyond parents.

Here Professor Brewis explains what her research team would like to see:

What do you want to be included in the bill?

We want the legislation regarding pregnancy leave to go further and to help those in employment who experience an early pregnancy ending without a live birth that happens before 24 weeks’ gestation. We would like to see the bill offer bereavement leave in such cases.

What’s so important about this, doesn’t the law currently give entitlement for those who experience early pregnancy endings?

Currently, there is bereavement leave entitlement for pregnancy endings, but only when they happen at 24 weeks’ gestation and beyond. Evidence shows pregnancy endings earlier than 24 weeks are a lot more common than people think, a great deal more common in fact than post 24-week pregnancy endings.

The 24-week cut off point is based on the assumption that it is only after this period that the foetus can survive outside the womb. This is referred to as viability. This means earlier pregnancy endings are not seen in law as bereavements, and consequently the grief that might result is not recognised.

Yet early pregnancy endings may well be experienced as bereavements, too. We say that using the 24-week ‘viability threshold’ fails to consider this and places overly strict limitations on the availability of statutory leave for pregnancy endings.

It seems difficult to assess bereavement, what are the findings from your research?

The immediate impact of bereavement in circumstances of earlier pregnancy endings varies and can be hard to define. But, as with later pregnancy endings, it can represent a mourning for the loss of what could have been, hopes of new life and the future. As well as dealing with this mourning, those affected might also experience a sense of powerlessness, trauma or misplaced guilt.

How would you like to see things change?

One thing we think is very important is to establish that not everyone experiences an early pregnancy ending as a bereavement. However, given the proposals around bereavement leave in the bill, we also believe that those who experience pre-24 week pregnancy should have access to statutory bereavement leave.

Would this be for all pregnancy endings?

As we say in our research report, pregnancy endings are lived through differently. As such, miscarriages are not always more traumatic than abortions. Equally, just because people choose to have abortions, this doesn’t mean these pregnancy endings are never experienced as bereavements.

Instead, we feel it is appropriate that any pregnancy ending without a live birth, at any gestational point, is protected in this way, at least when the people involved are willing to tell others at work and where bereavement leave is appropriate for them. Our evidence shows that most people do take some time off work for both physical and emotional recovery, but that this is typically in the form of unprotected sick leave, annual leave or unpaid leave.

Full details of the evidence that Professor Brewis and her team submitted to the Business and Trade Committee about the Employment Rights Bill can be found here (ERB0024).

The bill continues to move through Parliament and will have a third reading in early March, before being debated in the House of Lords.

Main Image: Vika Strawberrika, Unsplash.