This week I became somewhat of a vigilante keyboard warrior, trawling posts about the passing of baby Priya’s bill to correct every commenter that wilfully misunderstood the bill or used it as an excuse to pick a fight about women’s rights. No, the bill will not put small business owners out of business by forcing them to offer unlimited paid leave. No, the bill won’t mean women’s employment numbers go down. And very importantly, no, the bill does not incentivise late-term terminations.
The Australian federal parliament passed baby Priya’s bill – an amendment to the Fair Work Act – to ensure employers cannot cancel paid parental leave in the event of stillbirth or because a baby dies after birth. The change brings employer paid parental leave in line with government-funded parental leave and unpaid parental leave.
The bill is named for baby Priya, who died at 42 days old, and whose parents unwaveringly led the charge for change.
Priya’s mum’s parental leave was cancelled when Priya died – even though she had already been on leave for six weeks. Rather than being given the grace and the time to recover and grieve, she was expected to return to work or take unpaid leave. She had worked for her employer for 11 years.
On an average day in Australia, eight babies die in the perinatal period: six are stillborn and two die within 28 days of birth. This means that every year, thousands of Australian families have to deal with the sad - that accompanies a baby’s death: cancelling appointments, letting friends and family know, applying for income support, organising funerals and taking time away from work.
I was nearing the end of a fixed-term contract at a major university when my son, Jin, was stillborn at the end of 2020. My contract ended quietly sometime between planning his funeral and frantically Googling ways to stop my breastmilk from coming in.
My employer counted the last few weeks of my contract as annual leave; I applied for government leave and hoped it would be enough to cover the time I needed to recover physically, if not the lifetime I might need to recover emotionally.
Baby Priya’s bill would not have helped me, but it would have helped my partner, Yen. In the weeks before Jin’s death, Yen had six months of parental leave approved. In the days after his death, the leave was cancelled. A good friend scoured the Fair Work legislation and the university’s enterprise agreement to see if there was any way they could still access the leave.
HR remained firm: the only option was to take a year’s worth of sick, carer’s and annual leave at once.
Three months after his birth, Yen returned to work full-time, with no option to take a sick day or a mental health day. When I went to follow-up appointments at the hospital or with our IVF doctor, Yen took unpaid leave to come with me.
Three months after Jin’s death, I found a new job that was gracious enough to allow me a staggered start. For a month, I worked only two days a week, but at the end of each of those days I was exhausted. Most days, I cried for the length of my commute and through my lunch break, sitting in the park behind my office.
I can hardly imagine how hard it would have been to return to a workplace that had definitively declared that I was not a parent and that my baby didn’t really count – despite his birth certificate on my wall and his ashes in a small urn on my mantle.
Baby Priya’s mother is my hero. And the four conservative men that used her courage to start a fight about terminations are anything but.
Parents who have to make the decision to terminate their precious and much-wanted pregnancies do so with love and bravery in their hearts. What could make someone more of a parent than protecting their baby from pain and suffering?
If the politicians that suggested the bill would incentivise terminations really cared about reducing the number of babies who die in the perinatal period, they would be on the frontline, fundraising for stillbirth prevention research. They would make speeches about how the rate of stillbirth in Australia has not decreased in several decades and in fact increased in 2022. They would investigate the racism and inaccessibility in the maternity and medical systems that mean Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander mothers are more likely to experience stillbirth.
Jin would have turned five this month. My mum will make a cake (a digger, of course), and we will all go to the lake where we held his memorial to remember him and who he might have become.
I will light a candle for my baby, and for Baby Priya, and hope she knows how many lives she has changed for the better.
Gemma is the director of the National Women’s Equality Portfolio at the Working with Women Alliance
In Australia, support for people who are grieving is available from Griefline on 1300 845 745
