Let everyone take paid leave without losing their job when a family member is dying or after a miscarriage or stillbirth
In short
- People can take a set number of paid days off to be with a family member who is close to death.
- People who have had a miscarriage or stillbirth, and their partners, can also take paid leave.
- Everyone who works is covered, whether or not they are a regular full-time employee.
- Social insurance, not the employer, pays for the income during the leave.
If this comes true
A long-haul truck driver, whose father was told he had little time left, decides to care for him at home, and spends the last three weeks at his bedside with no worry about work, shaving his father's beard every morning.
Perhaps
In a small diner where one of the staff has been away for a long time, the owner might not be able to run the kitchen alone and may stop serving lunch.
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The proposal in detail
This proposal protects the time people spend at the beginning and end of life as a right of working people, backed by social insurance. The first part is leave for end-of-life care: when a doctor judges that a family member or a person in a similar close relationship has limited time left, a set number of days can be taken as paid leave to be with them. The family covered is not limited to blood relatives or spouses, and includes a person the worker names as someone they want at their side at the end. The second part is leave for losing a child during pregnancy: a person who has had a miscarriage or stillbirth, and their partner, can take paid leave. This includes cases where a pregnancy did not continue during fertility treatment. Coverage does not depend on how a person works, and includes regular employees, people hired for a fixed period, day laborers, and people who make a living from contract work or one-off jobs found online. Income during the leave is paid not by the employer but by public social insurance, covering most of the person's usual income, and the premiums are shared among workers, employers, and public funds. A simple note from a doctor is enough as proof, and there is no need to tell the workplace the details of a miscarriage or stillbirth. Firing or unfair treatment because someone took leave is banned, and small businesses receive support for the cost of hiring a replacement.
BenefitsAt life's turning points, people can choose to be with someone over work
If this proposal comes true, people can spend the moments of life that can never be regained without trading them for worries about money or work. People who were able to spend the final time with their family tend to recover from grief more gently afterward, which helps prevent long periods of being unable to work because of mental health problems. For the person who is dying, not spending the last days alone is a support that no medicine can replace. When family can be at their side, the wish to die at home is easier to grant, and this can help change the shape of end-of-life care that relies entirely on hospitals. For people who have had a miscarriage or stillbirth, being openly allowed to rest is a statement from society that it will not treat their grief as if it never happened, and it helps the body and mind recover. Because social insurance pays and not the employer, people at small businesses and in non-regular jobs can take the same leave, and differences caused by how people work grow smaller. Employers also benefit, since experienced workers are less likely to quit because they could not take time off.
DrawbacksSociety keeps carrying the cost of premiums and covering for absent workers
A society that chooses this proposal takes on the burden of a new social insurance, carried every year by workers, employers, and taxes. In a society with more older people, more people will use end-of-life leave, and raising premiums cannot be avoided. Even if the money comes from insurance, someone still has to cover the work of the person who is away, and in small shops, workshops, and clinics with no spare hands, the people who remain will push themselves too hard or cut back on opening hours. Judging how long someone has left is hard even for doctors, and when a family member does not die within the expected period, society is forced to draw a painful line: extend the leave or end it. If coverage extends to people the worker names, it is hard to check whether the relationship is real, which leaves room for abuse. Asking for proof of a miscarriage or stillbirth also means having an experience people may not want known recorded by a medical institution, and some people will hesitate to apply for that reason. For day laborers and people in one-off jobs, the next job may go to someone else while they are away, so even if the insurance makes up their income, they might lose the work itself.
Learn the background
Medicine that deals with the moments when people are born and die, such as reproductive medicine, end-of-life care, and organ transplants, has grown more complex as technology has advanced. In every one of these areas, the debate has centered on how far to treat and who should decide. But the lives of the families and people who go through these moments have been almost entirely left behind. Some people want to be beside a dying family member but cannot get time off, fear losing their jobs, cannot get to the hospital, and miss the end. Miscarriage and stillbirth are by no means rare, yet at many workplaces they are treated like any other illness, and some people are expected to go back to work the next day as if nothing had happened. Some workplaces do offer this kind of leave, but mostly only to regular employees of large companies, and it does not reach people in non-regular or one-off work. A system in which the employer pays for everything is too heavy for small businesses, and every time people have called for expanding it, they have met opposition. The idea that death and miscarriage are private matters of the home has also made people hesitate to talk about them as something society should support.
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This proposal was written in Japanese by AI (claude-opus-5-5, policy version 2026-10-23a) and translated by AI (claude-sonnet-5-5). Nobody has checked the facts. Read the original (日本語) How the AI writes