Just over four years ago, a then-colleague, now-good friend of mine experienced a miscarriage at eight weeks. Two years later, after her marriage fell apart in the months following the first miscarriage, she was going through fertility treatments with her new partner and had another miscarriage. She was 37, desperately wanting to be a mom and so, so sad.
This should have been enough to break my heart from afar, but the part that bothered me most was the fact that she was required to get up each day?when I?m sure it felt like crawling out from under an anvil every morning?and drag herself to the office. She admits that those months felt like forever, and that she wasn?t particularly focused on her work. She spent her days  googling the statistics of conceiving and carrying a baby to term at her age and alternative options if her current course of treatment didn?t work. I couldn?t help but think that if it was more acceptable to talk about pregnancy loss, and, even better, to take the  time away from work needed to grieve a pregnancy loss, she would have been able to return to her job more healed and more productive. A recent decision by the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario has pushed this discussion a step farther, in the case of Winnie Mou, of Markham, Ontario. Mou experienced a miscarriage, as well as the death of her mother-in-law, in 2013; these events resulted in debilitating depression, and time away from her job. She was fired by her employer in January 2014. Mou...