When my son Owen died, I was one week from my due date. He was a full-grown baby. I had been expecting to bring him home.
Instead, I was recovering from childbirth, grieving him, and trying to work out what time away from work would look like now.
I do not think anyone should need to become a leave-policy specialist at that particular moment in their life.
There are practical questions, though, and they arrive whether you have room for them or not. Which leave applies? What will be paid? Who needs to know? What do you have to explain, and to whom?
I wanted a clearer answer to those questions. Eventually, I wrote a proposal for paid pregnancy loss leave and brought it to HR leadership. I called it Owen’s Plan.
What I was asking for
The original proposal asked for four weeks of dedicated paid pregnancy loss leave, alongside support for physical recovery. It also asked for a confidential point of contact, guidance for managers, and a flexible return to work.
The time mattered. So did everything a person might have to do to get it.
A manager can care about someone and still be unsure which policy applies or what they are allowed to offer. An employee can have several possible benefits available and very little capacity to figure out how they fit together. Everyone may be trying, and the experience can still be much harder than it needs to be.
I wanted more of that work to happen before someone needed the help.
Making it something other people can use
I have thought for years about turning the proposal into a toolkit. I wanted someone in another organization to be able to pick it up and say, “Could we do this here?”
That someone might be an employee, a manager, an HR partner, a union representative, or the owner of a very small business. They might have experienced a loss themselves. They might simply want to make things better.
They should not need to share a personal story to make the proposal worth considering.
The first edition is now available. It includes a proposal to adapt, a model policy, short leave requests, manager conversation guides, an implementation checklist, and a cost worksheet. There are also fictional scenarios to help an organization spot the awkward bits before a grieving employee has to find them.
If someone needs leave right now, there is a short request they can use. They do not have to read the entire toolkit or launch a policy campaign first. I feel fairly strongly about that.
The small details are part of the support
One person to contact, with a backup if they are away.
A manager who takes responsibility for covering the work.
A clear explanation of pay and dates, with help coordinating the next steps.
A choice about what colleagues are told. Permission before a team message or a gift. A return-to-work conversation that does not assume being back means being fine.
These are details an organization can decide in advance. They can make a difficult conversation a little less demanding.
The expanded model proposes four normal working weeks at full pay, with coverage at any pregnancy stage and explicit provisions for partners, intended parents, and gestational carriers. It treats medical recovery separately and includes broader reproductive and neonatal loss provisions for organizations to review.
Four weeks is a proposed benefit. It is not a legal minimum or a prediction about when someone will feel ready to work again.
Keeping the legal detail useful
The practical toolkit has one shared core, with separate companions for Illinois, California, and Oregon. Those are the first three editions. The laws differ, and I want that information to stay clearly dated and separate from the benefit the model proposes.
The guides link to official sources and identify the need for local employment-law and benefits review before adoption. An employer still needs to work through its own circumstances. The toolkit gives that work somewhere to start.
Explore Owen’s Plan and download the toolkits →
I would like to hear what people find useful and what needs changing. I am not claiming this first edition has solved the problem. I hope it makes it easier for someone to begin the conversation.
Owen’s name belongs to my son. I would love for this thing bearing his name to make another person’s life a little less difficult.
