Moo gets bitched out for taking off for miscarriage

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(My birthday is on a state holiday and rapidly approaching. I recently found out I am expecting and am very excited as this was a long time coming. But she says further down that it will become her third loss in two years. That's not a "long time coming." I research my HR options for both during and after the pregnancy and have a firm grasp on the rules. In our office we essentially log our hours and submit them to HR for payroll processing, and notify our team and our managers of absences and doctor’s appointments, etc. Very early on, we have some concerns and my doctor indicates that working from home is my best bet to a healthy pregnancy. A couple of weeks go by and I resume working at the office. At our next appointment, the doctor indicates a strong possibility that our baby won’t make it and may have already passed. We’re devastated and I take the rest of the day off.)

Me: “Team, we just found out our baby may have died. I need the rest of today to try to cope. I may work from home tomorrow.” At the risk of sounding like a bitch, shouldn't she be used to losses by now? Why do serial miscarriers always act surprised when they have their third, fourth, fifth, sixth or so on loss?

Team: *all sends supportive messages and emails and encourage me to take all the time I need*

Me: *essentially the same email to another supervisor* “I know I had an assignment due, but due to the possible death of our baby I won’t make the deadline. I will submit it by tomorrow at four pm at the latest.”

(A supervisor not on my team, but someone I need to work with, chimes in.)

Supervisor: “You’ve been here long enough this should have only taken 20-30 minutes. This is unacceptable.”

(The next day I read all of these messages and work from home. I complete the assignment and submit it.)

Me: “Again, I apologize for the delay. I know this isn’t my best work, but given the circumstances I hope you understand. If you have any questions please let me know.”

Supervisor: “This is simply unacceptable. I expected a lot more from you given your length of employment here. Your personal life is no excuse for poor work performance.” Sounds to me like management is sick of her shit since she's done this "woe is me, my clump is dead" crap for the third time.

(A week passes and we have had two follow-up appointments. Both confirm our worst fears: that things aren’t going well and that our baby has indeed passed. As this is our third loss in two years we’re ripped to pieces and have no answers as to why. Well then quit getting fucking pregnant if you're so prone to miscarrying! You can only have so much sympathy for someone when they sit there and do the same goddamn thing expecting different results each time. I again email my team that I’m not working the rest of the day, but will work from home the next day, unless I’m having surgery.)

Team: “We’re so sorry for your loss. We hope you take the time you need to heal and to get the answers we know you need.”

(After confirming surgery date and time I send a follow-up email and indicate I’ll use our allotted five days of bereavement leave to both grieve and recover.)

Team: “We hope it helps you get answers. Please let us know if you need anything.”

Boss: “I’m sorry for your loss. Please submit a doctor’s note so we can add it to your record and reconcile it with our payroll system.”

(I’ve used bereavement leave, PTO, and car accident leave many times in the past and I’ve never been asked for doctor’s notes or funeral programs at this company. Management is probably skeptical at this point about how legitimate her claims of a dead clump are since she's done it so many times and most likely needed time off work each time. They probably thought she was faking this pignancy because of the big deadline she had and wanted to try and get an extension on it, or have an excuse to be lazy and do a piss-poor job. I'd be suspicious too, given how often this cow has premature clump descents. When I’ve gotten them in the past they usually tell me to keep them or they toss them.)

Me: “I’ll submit whatever you need. Please just indicate the specifics so I can have my doctor prepare what you need.”

Boss: “Just any note that will indicate why you’ve been working from home for a week or so, and why you want to take a week off, immediately following your birthday.”

(I send a request to my doctor’s office.)

Doctor: “So basically they want a note explaining that I’m doing my job, you’re doing yours, that you didn’t make up your baby, the ultrasound images you’ve shown people at work, or your baby’s death, and they want you to prove to them that you need time to recover from surgery and heal emotionally from the death of your baby?!” Like I said, management probably thinks she's lying in order to get out of doing work. Since women don't start showing until around 4-6 months, it'd be very easy for any woman to say she's in the early stages of pregnancy and then "miscarry" all without any change to her waist size. I don't think an employer can outright ask a woman if she's lying about her serial miscarriages without risking a lawsuit, so the next best thing they can do is ask for a doctor's note.

Me: “That pretty well sums up my understanding. Thank you, doctor!”

Doctor: “I’ll give them a list of medical jargon so complicated they won’t understand more than five words. If they have a problem with that, tell them to contact an attorney, I have more important things to do than explain why my 20 years of medical experience trumps their over-reaching tactics to have some documented reason to try to get rid of a great employee after such an awful life experience!” I don't really see why asking for confirmation that Moo wasn't lying through her teeth is an "over-reaching tactic," especially if she's taking off multiple sick days at a time, more than once a year for a completely voluntary condition. Maybe they very well are trying to fire her because they're sick of her pissing and moaning over a dead clump twice a year and wasting company time or dragging down productivity while everyone else on the team feels sorry for her.

Also this doctor is doing this Moo no favors by writing a bullshit note. In fact, I'd say that filling a note full of senseless medical jargon will make it look even more like Moo could be faking it. Like she just went on Google and looked up some ten-dollar words to slap together. It wouldn't be too hard for management to look up any of the jargon in the note, so for Moo's sake, hopefully the bullshit this guy is writing down is relevant to her dead clump. Because if they suspect it's a made-up note, they could very well probably try to fire her.

All the more reason to NEVER hire a breeder.

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Team, we just found out our baby may have died. I need the rest of today to try to cope. I may work from home tomorrow.”

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contemplativeintrovert
It is a fertilized egg, or that lizard looking thing from bio class {I can't remember what they are called, but it looks like a lizard with gills.}

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nightfire

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contemplativeintrovert
It is a fertilized egg, or that lizard looking thing from bio class {I can't remember what they are called, but it looks like a lizard with gills.}

'Embryo' is probably what you might be thinking.

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contemplativeintrovert
Maybe I'm a bitch, but reading this, all I could think was how annoying it is that she keeps calling her sack of cells a "baby." This erroneous idea that anything that MAY AT SOME POINT become a baby IS a baby is why abortions are condemned. The thing in her uterus is not a baby. It is a fertilized egg, or that lizard looking thing from bio class {I can't remember what they are called, but it looks like a lizard with gills.}

If anything that MAY AT SOME POINT become a baby IS a baby, then every post pubescent girl / woman alive is a murderer everytime she has a period and doesn't get knocked up.