Early pregnancy endings and the workplace

Aim

This project seeks to understand how women and other people who have been pregnant navigate the demands of work at the same time as experiencing termination or miscarriage (including ectopic and molar pregnancies) in pregnancy, up to 24 weeks.

These are both very common experiences and yet there is very little academic research in the area. Equally, while there are the beginnings of workplace support for these experiences, including leave for pregnancy endings offered by local government organisations like the City of Portland in the US and national-level miscarriage leave entitlements recently legalised in New Zealand, these are at an extremely early stage. Termination is sometimes included in these initiatives, for example by fashion retailer ASOS, online bank Monzo and Channel 4. 

Description

The project draws together a consortium of academics from the OU (Jo Brewis, Victoria Newton and Katy Schnitzler), UCL (Julie Davies), the University of Plymouth (Aimee Middlemiss) and the University of Essex (Ilaria Boncori). We are generating evidence and sharing findings, towards seeking additional funding, with the ultimate objective of driving change in policy and practice. Our overarching aim is to improve organisational support for women who experience termination and/ or miscarriage via the provision of evidence-based guidance for line managers and HR professionals as well as resources for women themselves.

We have also published a journal article which analyses the way in which legislation on employment leave in England and Wales creates different categories of personhood for parents and the embryo or foetus and what the implications are of each of these categories.   

Please also note that while we refer to ‘women’ as a shorthand to represent the majority group who experience early pregnancy endings, our project is intended to be fully gender-inclusive.

We aim to: 

• Consolidate and expand our network beyond the partner organisations listed above to build a larger consortium of partners.
• Disseminate initial findings from the survey via academic and non-academic publications and pieces, including a practitioner-oriented guidelines/ summary document. 
• Host a one-day consortium-building knowledge exchange event during 2023 to take soundings on our draft guidelines.
• Apply for a large external grant with UK Research and Innovation or the National Institute for Health Research.

Our research questions are: 

• What are the lived experiences of early pregnancy endings in the workplace before 24 weeks gestation? 
• To what extent and how do women disclose early pregnancy endings at work? 
• What are the factors that discourage women from disclosing at work? 
• How do employers respond to early pregnancy endings? 
• What are women’s experiences of workplace support after early pregnancy endings?

Survey

We ran a pilot survey during the first six months of 2022, which recruited women and other people from anywhere in the UK who had experienced an early pregnancy ending whilst in paid employment. This attracted 300+ respondents and will form the basis of our guidelines as outlined above as well as academic publications. We presented some of our preliminary findings from the survey at the Gender, Work and Organization Conference in June 2022.

Research report

We have finalised the research report, which includes our best practice recommendations for HR professionals and line managers, based on our survey and a sister project based on qualitative interviews. You can access the report here. 

External communications

You can find out more about the background to our project In this Open Societal Challenges blog piece. We have also published an OpenLearn piece on the specific issue of abortion stigma as a workplace issue.  

Contact us