The conversation around abortion leave in the workplace has been largely absent from mainstream employer policy, and Farryn Stock knows exactly what that absence costs. At 24, she had an incomplete abortion that left her bleeding and in pain for weeks. When she eventually returned to work, she found not sympathy but reproach: colleagues and management had taken issue with her absence. Nobody, it seemed, had considered that recovering from a termination might require time.
Stock’s account, which she has set out in her own words, begins in August 2023. Her boyfriend came home with a pregnancy test, a bottle of wine and some flowers. Neither of them anticipated a positive result. She was living with her parents, in a relatively new relationship, and had plans to move to Australia. Motherhood, as she puts it, was not in the picture.
What an incomplete abortion actually involves
The decision to terminate was, by her account, straightforward. The physical reality that followed was not. An incomplete abortion (where not all of the pregnancy tissue passes from the body) is a recognised medical complication. It can mean days or weeks of pain, bleeding and ongoing clinical management. Stock describes precisely this: a prolonged and physically demanding recovery that did not resolve quickly, and that had no neat boundary with the working week.
This is the part of the abortion conversation that rarely surfaces. Public debate focuses, rightly, on access and on gestational limits. What tends to be left out is the aftermath: the physical recovery, the emotional weight, and the practical question of how a woman is supposed to return to a desk, a shift, or a client call while her body is still in the process of recovering from a medical procedure. For some women, that process takes days. For others, as Stock’s experience shows, it takes considerably longer.
The case for abortion leave in the workplace
When Stock did go back to work, she encountered something she had not prepared for. She had been, in her own telling, harangued for not having returned to the office immediately. There was no framework within which her employer appeared to understand what she had been through, and no policy that recognised a termination as something requiring recovery time in the same way another procedure might.
This is the gap she is now arguing should be closed. The case for formalised abortion leave in the workplace rests on a fairly simple premise: that termination is a medical event, that medical events affect the body, and that the body needs time. Whether the procedure is surgical or medical, complete or incomplete, straightforward or complicated, the person who has undergone it is a patient before they are an employee. Workplace policy, in most cases, does not yet reflect that.
Miscarriage leave has begun to enter the conversation in recent years, with some employers introducing dedicated bereavement provisions following pregnancy loss. Abortion sits in a more contested space, partly because it involves a choice, and partly because the cultural discomfort around termination has historically made it easier to say nothing at all. Stock’s argument is that discomfort is not a policy. Silence is not support.
She was 24, unready for parenthood, clear in her decision, and then left to manage weeks of physical recovery with no professional framework around her. The decision, she says, was the easy part. It was the workplace that let her down. Her case is not complicated: if an employee has had a medical procedure, they may need time to recover from it. The only question is whether employers are willing to say so plainly, and to build that recognition into the structures that govern working life.
