In response to the article regarding GO plc’s recent announcement that they will be introducing four weeks of paid leave for pregnancy loss, it’s worryingly clear that there are still employers who view this kind of initiative as an excessive perk or ‘thoughtful gesture’.

For those who aren’t familiar with the realities of losing a pregnancy, here is why this initiative should not be an optional benefit for employers to sandwich between office beanbags and free fruit.

I had no idea that there were different types of miscarriages until, teary-eyed and devastated, I listened to my doctor explain that, at seven weeks pregnant, I’d had a silent miscarriage. A silent or ‘missed’ miscarriage means that, despite there being no heartbeat, your pregnancy doesn’t immediately terminate itself and there’s a very real chance you can get a pretty serious infection as a result.

Up until the grand old age of 38, I thought that if you had a miscarriage, the embryo was instantly expelled and that’s how you knew the pregnancy was no more. With a silent miscarriage, however, some internal miscommunication means that your gestational sac didn’t get the memo; it still thinks it’s doing a fabulous job of growing this potential baby. It’s fluffing up throw-cushions and everything in there.

In a cruel twist, as I was technically still pregnant, I continued to experience all the usual symptoms; the sore boobs, moodiness, crippling fatigue and the rest, it’s just that I now knew that no baby would be making an appearance at the end of it.

Thanks, body.

Now here’s where things got interesting. Since dedicated miscarriage leave does not exist, I was only able to take a few days out of my universal sick leave allowance to come to terms with what had happened. However, when you have a silent miscarriage, there is around a three-week wait between being told you’ve lost the pregnancy and being admitted to hospital to have the cheerfully named ‘product of conception’ removed.

Let’s just think about that for a second.

That’s three weeks of going into the office knowing that, at any moment, you could start haemorrhaging your pregnancy from your cervix. Three weeks of covertly checking your desk chair for blood every 10 minutes. Three weeks of pretending that you are not inconsolably devastated as you sit distracted in every meeting.

Exhausted, distraught, heartbroken, paranoid about infection and on the verge of completely losing my mind, I was finally admitted to hospital to be given abortion pills.

I bled heavily over three days. My uterus was contracting painfully, trying desperately to evacuate the cells. Between doses, the doctors would scrape around inside me with a clinical pick ’n’ mix of pointy, steel contraptions, their wide-eyed students taking careful notes as they stared inquisitively at my crowbarred cervix.

The whole thing was a veritable smorgasbord of trauma, which I guess shouldn’t really be a surprise considering the circumstances I was in. But that’s the thing, I was surprised. I hadn’t known about any of this stuff and I certainly wasn’t prepared for it.

… give us the freedom to rest, grieve, cry, bleed, cramp, phone our mums, visit our doctors, talk to our therapists, hold our partners- Jillian Dingwall

But, still, I dipped in and out of work from my hospital bed, not because anyone was necessarily forcing me to but because there were no measures in place to protect me from doing so.

There were ‘critical’ tasks that had to be completed and no one else who could do them, so if I’d had a choice in the matter, it really didn’t feel like it at the time.

You see, when you have a miscarriage, you don’t necessarily feel ill; you don’t have a fever or any physical symptoms that are preventing you from working.

So, if you work for an exploitative employer like I did, one that consistently gaslights you into overworking under the guise of being a ‘team player’, then you’re not going to take a lot of sick leave if you can avoid it. You’re too scared to.

In addition to this, I was not in any state to be making decisions for myself. In hindsight, I was not thinking clearly at all, I was in physical and emotional shock. I might have thought I was fine but the chunks of missing memory I have from that time suggests otherwise.

Women who are in the midst of a pregnancy loss should not be the ones making decisions about whether or not they are fit for work.

Four weeks of dedicated leave would take this guilt-ridden decision out of our hands and give us the freedom to rest, grieve, cry, bleed, cramp, phone our mums, visit our doctors, talk to our therapists, hold our partners. It would give us the time that we should not feel ashamed to need as we undergo one of the most traumatising experiences of our lives.

In the end, the pills didn’t work, they only aborted what seemed like everything except what they were supposed to and so I ended up having surgery to remove my poor little product.

I was allowed to work from home for a few days to physically recover and then I went back to the office where I did my express grieving as quietly as I could in the toilet cubicle; the only private place I could go to think about how I had left those cells alone in a cold, steel tray in a lab somewhere destined for the medical waste bin, wrestling with the guilt of having abandoned them. Then, I would fix my make-up in time for the next bullshit meeting and hope no one would notice my puffy eyes.

I couldn’t even use the pitiful three-day bereavement leave to claw back more recovery time because a miscarriage doesn’t count as a death; an astoundingly hypocritical move in a country that has a blanket ban on abortion.

As no one once famously said: “I may not have been afforded the time I needed to recover from my pregnancy loss but boy was I happy to have the beanbags and free fruit to take the edge off.”

Four weeks of dedicated leave for women who have suffered pregnancy loss in any shape or form should not be viewed as a perk. The fact that it’s not a universally standard policy is shocking.

I sincerely hope that employers in Malta and around the world follow GO’s lead and put themselves on the right side of history. There are ships ripe for the jumping and no amount of free gym memberships will be strong enough to hold back that tide when it inevitably hits our rocky shores.

Jillian Dingwall is a freelance writer who first moved to Malta from her native Scotland in 1994. A mother-of-one, she is passionate about words, work culture and women’s well-being.