A new bill seeks paid time off for people who suffer pregnancy loss
When Damaris HerronWatkins had a miscarriage in November 2013, she was in the office at a finance job in New York, she said.
After it happened, Ms. Herron-Watkins went home early. She didn’t want to tell her employers that she lost her pregnancy, so — per company policy — she got a doctor’s note saying she needed totake a few sick days.
During those three or four days off, which were paid, Ms. Herron-Watkins processed her loss in peace, she said. Now, she couldn’t have imagined focusing on doing her job in the immediate aftermath of her miscarriage.
“Being able to not have to go to work was helpful for me to just process what had happened,”said Ms. Herron-Watkins, 35. “I was sad, and I didn’t have to explain to people why I was sad or why I wascrying.”
Ms. Herron-Watkins’ experience of losing a pregnancy is not uncommon in the United States, where between 10% and 20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriages, according to the nonprofit medical organization Mayo Clinic, which notes that the number is likely to be higher because many miscarriages occur before a person realizes she is pregnant.
But workers often have to return to work following a pregnancy loss or rely on their employers to grant themtime off to grieve. If they don’t have paid sick or vacation time saved up, that time could be uncompensated: The Family and Medical Leave Act grants eligible workers who experience miscarriages and other “serious health conditions” up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave, accordingto A Better Balance, a national workers’ advocacy organization. But it only applies to people working at companies with at least 50 employees and who have beenthere for at least a year.
A new bill introduced in Congress in July seeks to change that: The Support Through Loss Act, introduced by Rep. Ayanna Pressley, DMass.,and Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., would mandate at least three days of paid leave for people who experience pregnancy loss. (In the legislation, this includes unsuccessful fertility treatments and failed adoption or surrogacy arrangements.) Paid time off would also apply to partnersof pregnant people.
The bill would also allocate $45 million in annual funding to the National Institutes of Health to research pregnancy loss and mandate that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services collect data on pregnancy loss and distribute information to the public and to perinatal health care workers about the prevalence of pregnancy loss and treatment options.
If the bill becomes law, the United States would not be the first country to offer paid time off for pregnancy loss. In March, New Zealand became the most recent country to do so when its Parliament unanimously approved legislation offering three days of paid leave to pregnant people and their partners following a loss. Taiwan, Mauritius and the Philippines also offer paid leave for miscarriages ranging from five days to four weeks. India has offered six weeks of paid leave for miscarriages since 1961, though the law only applies to people working at companies with at least 10 employees, meaning few benefit from it, according to Quartz.
Destigmatizing miscarriages
Not everyone may feel comfortable with their employers knowing they had a miscarriage, preferring instead to take sick time without having to explain why.
But advocates say the bill’s earmarking of paid time off for pregnancy loss is a crucial first step toward destigmatizing it.
“It’s really important both from a policy standpoint and also a symbolic standpoint that lawmakers and people in positions of power are talking about this,” said Dana Sussman, deputy executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, an advocacy organization that works with pregnant people in the criminal legal system. “Society has deemed certain things to be private in ways that can be really harmful.”
That stigma often stems from false assumptions about the causes of pregnancy loss that can lead pregnant people to be blamed for miscarriages, Ms. Sussman said, when in fact most miscarriages occur due to abnormal genes or chromosomes in the fetus rather than from problems passed on from the parent, accordingto the Mayo Clinic.
“Particularly for poor people and people of color, immediately there’s suspicion around, ‘ What did she do or not do?’” Ms. Sussman said. “What we see is blame being placed on the parent, or the mom, for where there is a true lack of science around causation.”
The funding the bill proposes to allocate toward researching the causes of pregnancyloss could go a long way toward filling that gap, and would facilitate finding “the social and political solutions to the impacts of racism, classism and gender oppression that impact the higher rates of miscarriage and stillbirth,” accordingto Joia Crear-Perry, a physician and founder and president of the National Birth Equity Collaborative, an advocacy organization focused on Black maternal and infanthealth.
Losses can followed by post-traumatic stress disorder and/or postpartum depression, as well as postpartum physical effects — such as lactating — that many people aren’t prepared for, according to Erica McAfee, a doula and founder of Sisters in Loss, a doula training company and virtualcommunityfocusedon supportingBlack women who lose pregnancies. Sisters in Loss has more than 7,000 members in its online community.
After New Zealand legalized paid leave for miscarriages in March, Ms. McAfee asked members in the Sisters in Loss Facebook group if they had paid time off work following their losses. The response was “a resounding no” among about 80% of about150 respondents.
“We need to make our employers more aware that this is happening,” Ms. McAfee said. “Having that extra time, these three days that they propose in this bill, is what’s going to save people’s mental health.”
For Ms. McAfee, those three days are only a steppingstone toward what she hopes is eventually a longer paid grieving period. “Ultimately, I would like to see it moved up to a week or two weeks off, no matter where the gestational age is,” she said.
But in the meantime, she’s happy with what the bill would offer: “Three days is a start.”