On July 1, additional birth leave comes into force. Each parent will be able to add one or two months to their maternity, paternity or adoption leave, compensated at 70% of net salary the first month, 60% the second.
The intention is correct: to offer parents the time to build a bond with the child in these first weeks of care, nights and learning. But this leave, like all the architecture that it completes, is based on a condition that no one states: that there is a child to welcome.
For most families, this condition is self-evident. For others, it slips away. Every year in France, tens of thousands of pregnancies end before or around birth. Late miscarriages, medical terminations of pregnancy, in utero deaths: behind the same term, perinatal mourning, lie very different situations, which have in common that an expected pregnancy ends without a child to bring back.
Unrecognized mourning
These parents leave the maternity ward empty-handed, and the law, if it does not completely ignore them, only recognizes them beyond a threshold. When the child is born lifeless after twenty-two weeks of amenorrhea, or weighs at least five hundred grams, the viability threshold set by the World Health Organization, the mother retains all of her maternity leave and bereavement leave begins.
Below that, the same loss only entitles you to sick leave. However, this threshold has nothing to do with what families experience: designed for medicine and statistics, to distinguish a death from a miscarriage, it was never intended to measure a sentence.
A woman who gives birth to a dead child at twenty-one weeks suffers no less than one who gives birth at twenty-three; it only falls, in the eyes of social law, into another box. The body does not know this threshold: after a late loss, the flow of milk occurs as after any childbirth.
Organized joy, unframed unhappiness
The civil status does not know it any more. Since 2008, without conditions of duration or weight, parents can establish a dead child certificate which gives the child a first name, since 2021 a last name, and a place in the family record book. The same institution therefore recognizes the child on the one hand at the town hall, and refuses it to him on the other at work, where his loss provides no time to mourn him. Depending on the counter you contact, the same event is a child or a non-birth.
Sick leave is not just one less line on a pay slip. It obliges us to classify mourning under the name of an illness that we do not have, to have rest prescribed for a pain that is not a symptom. Where maternity or bereavement leave says “You have lost a child”, sick leave says “You are unwell”, and this nuance of vocabulary, innocuous for the administration, adds to the loss the feeling that it has not really happened.
This contradiction is not a procedural detail, nor is it the fault of anyone. No one decided on this asymmetry: it was created alone, by juxtaposition.
Birth leave was designed on the model of reception, and the right to mourning inherited a threshold borrowed from medicine. Each of these decisions, taken in isolation, had its logic; it is their addition which produces what no one wanted: a society which meticulously organizes joy and leaves unhappiness without a framework.
Shy progress
However, this mechanism is not inevitable, and the proof is that it has already started to give way. In 2020, after strong public emotion, the legislator extended the rights of parents who lose a child, increasing death leave from five to seven days and adding bereavement leave of eight days.
Since 2024, work stoppage following a miscarriage is no longer subject to the waiting period, and the 2023 law entrusted regional health agencies (ARS) with the organization of support for couples. The law knows how to recognize loss when it is helped, and it has done so without taking anything away from anyone, because recognizing these bereavements takes nothing away from happy births, of which they are the other side.
On July 1, France will have taken a further step for those who welcome a child. What remains is the symmetrical gesture, for those who leave without it. The same impulse that allows two months to discover a face could offer, to those who have not had the opportunity, the recognized time to say goodbye.
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