Last week was World Suicide Prevention Week. It came and went quietly, as these weeks often do, folded into a news cycle already crowded with louder stories.
One of those louder stories was the death of a British-Nigerian influencer, days after a penis enlargement procedure in Bangkok went catastrophically wrong. It was covered widely — the clinic, the injections, the embolism, the grief of his family, all laid out for public consumption. A cautionary tale, rightly told.
What rarely makes the news, in the same week or any other, is the woman who tried for years to conceive, endured multiple losses along the way, and finally died in childbirth — the pregnancy she had fought so hard for becoming the event that took her life. In much of Africa, this is not breaking news. It is background noise. It is, quietly and devastatingly, treated as the norm.
That asymmetry is worth sitting with. Not to diminish one death in favour of another — both are tragedies, both deserve grief and scrutiny — but to ask why one becomes a headline and the other becomes a statistic nobody reads past.
The labour nobody sees
This is where fertility and family-building intersect with something we rarely name at work: invisible labour.
IVF cycles. Recurrent pregnancy loss. Adoption processes that stretch across years, layered with home visits, paperwork, and waiting. Each of these demands enormous time, emotional bandwidth, and — critically — secrecy management. Employees attend early-morning clinic appointments before slipping into 9am meetings. They manage grief between deliverables. They ration who at work is allowed to know anything at all, because disclosure so often invites judgement dressed up as concern.
Self-determination theory gives us useful language here. Two of its core pillars — autonomy and a coherent life-course — are quietly eroded when people cannot disclose what they’re going through or ask for the accommodation they need. You cannot exercise autonomy over decisions you’re forced to hide. You cannot build a coherent sense of your own life path when a defining chapter of it has to be conducted in the margins, around everyone else’s expectations of your availability.
And underneath all of this sits a harder truth: for many women, particularly across parts of Africa, the physical risk of trying to build a family is not abstract. Maternal mortality remains staggeringly high in places where it should not be. A woman can do everything “right” — seek care, follow medical advice, keep trying after loss — and still not survive the outcome she worked so hard for. That this barely registers as newsworthy is not a comment on the value of her life. It is a comment on what we as a society have collectively decided is ordinary, and therefore invisible.
Two silences, one root
The influencer’s death and the uncounted maternal deaths share a root, even if they look nothing alike on the surface: both involve people privately absorbing enormous risk — physical, emotional, reputational — because the alternative was silence, shame, or the absence of a safer path.
Workplaces sit closer to this than they think. An employee going through IVF is not just managing a medical process; she is managing the terror of a system that, statistically, may not protect her the way it should. An employee grieving a miscarriage between client calls is not just sad; she is carrying a loss that culture has told her to minimise. When we fail to build room for these realities at work, we are not being neutral. We are reinforcing the exact conditions that keep this labour invisible — and keep the losses uncounted.
Human flourishing cannot be selectively distributed. It cannot exist for the stories that trend and vanish for the ones that don’t.
Four calls to action for business leaders
- Build fertility and pregnancy-loss policies that don’t require disclosure to function.
Flexible leave, confidential HR channels, and manager guidelines should exist whether or not an employee ever explains why they’re using them.
- Audit whose health risks your organisation actually discusses.
If cardiovascular health, sports injuries, or elective cosmetic procedures get more open workplace conversation than miscarriage, IVF, or maternal health, that imbalance is a culture signal — and it’s fixable.
- Extend bereavement policies to cover reproductive loss explicitly.
Miscarriage, stillbirth, and failed IVF cycles are too often unnamed in leave policy, forcing employees to borrow language — and time off — meant for other kinds of loss.
- Treat maternal health as an organisational stake, not a distant statistic.
For companies operating across Africa and other high-maternal-mortality regions, this means real investment: health benefits that cover maternal care, paid time for antenatal visits, and partnerships with credible maternal health providers — not just awareness posts in September.
Both deaths deserve to be mourned. Only one currently gets to be remembered. Changing that starts with deciding, deliberately, which silences we are still willing to keep.
If this piece raises difficult feelings — about loss, fertility struggles, or grief — please consider reaching out to a trusted healthcare professional or counsellor. You don’t have to carry it alone.
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Dr. Joshua Awesome is a Coaching Psychologist/Executive and Business Performance Coach who has supported over 100,000 professionals across Africa and the globe. He can be reached via: joshua@africainmind.org
