Stillborn child and parents’ right to social benefits

Abstract

The aim of the article is to analyze the issues related to social benefits due to parents in the event of stillbirth and to synthesize legal solutions regarding the rights of women after stillbirth. An attempt was also made to organize the current legal status and resolve possible conflicts between the provisions. Parents of a stillborn child whose gender cannot be determined should be entitled to a funeral allowance in the event of incurring the funeral costs of a stillborn child for whom a death certificate has been drawn up, but no birth certificate has been drawn up, and the right to other social benefits. Under the current legal status, parents of children who died in the early stages of pregnancy, which include stillborn children, in many cases cannot receive the aforementioned benefits. The reason for this is the obligatory determination of the sex of the child in the so-called stillbirth card. However, the lack of such a record makes it impossible for the head of the Registry Office to draw up a birth certificate with the appropriate annotation about stillbirth. Hence the need to change the regulation on the dependence of issuing a birth certificate of a child with an annotation that it was stillborn, on determining the sex of the child.