After losing their son Toby at three weeks old in November, Laura Hicklin and Dale Barker have been on a journey to change the current law surrounding parental bereavement leave.
Miss Hicklin said, “There are no words to explain the loss of a child. It’s just truly heart-breaking and feels very surreal like you’re in a bad dream, it should be your children burying you and not the other way around.”
The current UK law states that if a child is stillborn after 24 weeks of pregnancy, the birth mother can get up to 52 weeks of statutory maternity leave or pay whereas the birth father can only get up to 2 weeks.
Mr Barker was due to go back to work a day before his son’s funeral because his leave was coming to an end. He described a mixture of both anger at not being able to fully grieve the loss of his child alongside feelings of stress that his job was potentially on the line.
Unfortunately, Mr Barker was terminated from his position on the 8th January because he had not returned to work since his bereavement leave had ended.
Miss Hicklin said, “there is no time to process a loss, bury a child or even begin to grieve within two weeks, I think it should be at the very least six months to be able to actually grieve and mourn and process it all.”
Since then, the Chesterfield based couple have been spreading awareness about how “unfair” the current law is and on April 3rd the couple created a petition in hopes of extending bereavement leave for fathers, so far they have garnered over 500 signatures.
Alongside their petition, the couple are also in the process of trying to set up a fundraiser as well creating T-shirts that can be worn as they go out to get written signatures in support of their petition.
Credit to: Laura Hicklin and Dale Barker
For the government to respond to the petition they need 10,000 signatures and for it to be debated in Parliament they need 100,000 signatures.
If you would like to sign their petition in support of the law change, click the link here.