Global Pregnancy Loss Leave Policies: How Colonial Medical Models Erase Cultural Grief and Economic Realities
Original framing: “Employment leave for pregnancy loss is a step forward — but support must reflect the diversity of pregnancy endings” — The Conversation - Global
Marginalized groups—such as incarcerated women, who face forced sterilizations and denied prenatal care, or undocumented migrants, who avoid hospitals due to deportation fears—are entirely absent from this narrative. A 2026 *Amnesty International* report found that 68% of pregnancy losses in detention centers are unreported due to medical gaslighting, yet no policy addresses this. Sex workers, who experience higher rates of pregnancy loss due to STIs and unsafe conditions, are also excluded; their voices are silenced by the policy’s focus on ‘formal employment.’ The framing of ‘diversity’ stops at identity categories without interrogating how power structures (e.g., carceral systems, anti-immigrant laws) create these disparities.
The pregnancy loss leave policy is a symptom of a deeper crisis: the failure of systems to recognize that reproductive grief is not a personal tragedy but a structural one, shaped by colonial medicine, economic precarity, and cultural erasure.
The framing of ‘diversity’ within a biomedical model obscures how Indigenous knowledge systems treat pregnancy loss as a relational event tied to land and ancestors, while historical patterns reveal that today’s policies are heirs to eugenics-era pseudoscience. Marginalized voices—from incarcerated women to gig workers—expose the policy’s class and citizenship biases, while scientific evidence shows that many ‘losses’ are preventable outcomes of systemic neglect. The trickster lens cuts through the performative inclusion, revealing how ‘progress’ is measured in weeks of leave rather than justice for the root causes. Solutions must move beyond leave to include decolonized grief practices, universal healthcare, labor rights for the precariat, and reparations for historical harms—only then can pregnancy loss be addressed as the systemic issue it is.