Yes, you are allowed to bury a baby after a miscarriage or after birth, and the law provides for this. However, it is important that you notify the hospital as soon as possible—within 96 hours at the latest—that you will be burying the baby. If you do not do so in time, the baby will be cremated and placed in a communal grave (just as is done for adults who have no surviving relatives). However, if you wish to receive the ashes, it will be very complicated—perhaps even impossible.

Whether your baby died before birth, during labor, or at any time after birth, you can have the baby buried. However, you have only 4 days—or, more precisely, 96 hours—from the time the death is reported to arrange the funeral. If you do not arrange the funeral within this time frame, the baby’s body will be cremated and placed in a communal grave. Retrieving the ashes is difficult and often impossible.
Please note that, unfortunately, the law on funerals does not take into account the fact that a baby may die before birth while still in the mother’s womb. The aforementioned 96 hours begin from the moment the baby’s death is reported to one of the parents. However, the birth may still be a long way off; the mother may be under anesthesia at that moment, and the father may be distraught. And contacting a funeral home is probably the last thing the parents would want to do before or during the birth of their stillborn baby. If you are a family member or friend of the parents, offer to help them arrange the funeral—they will likely appreciate it. 

Whether you decide to cremate your baby’s body or bury it, you must contact a funeral home within 96 hours of the death. We recommend that you don’t go with the first one you come across, but instead read reviews of the services you’re considering. Think carefully about whether you’d prefer cremation or burial. As parents, you can also discuss what kind of ceremony you’d like for your baby before contacting a funeral home. You can choose either a traditional Czech ceremony at a crematorium or church, or a more alternative ceremony in nature or at any location you love. 

Then feel free to call a few funeral homes and find out if they have experience with burying babies. Trust your intuition and pay attention to how the funeral home staff treat you. Do they listen to your wishes? Do they try to accommodate you? Do they try to pressure you into anything? Are they empathetic? If you have any doubts and haven’t signed anything yet, you can, of course, back out of the current arrangement and turn to a funeral home that you’re satisfied with.

The government will contribute 5,000 Kč toward your baby’s funeral. You’ll receive this payment even if you arrange a funeral for your baby following a miscarriage or a medical termination of pregnancy. You can apply for it at the Czech Labor Office, which will not examine your income or any debts you may have. If you arrange the funeral with us, Pohřební průvodci, we’ll apply for the funeral allowance on your behalf (if you wish).

After a miscarriage or an induced abortion, you will not receive a birth certificate or death certificate for the baby. In the case of a stillborn baby, only a birth certificate will be issued; you can have a note added stating that the child was stillborn. You will receive both documents in your baby’s name if the baby died shortly after birth. They are issued by the civil registry office in the municipality where the baby was born, and the office has 30 days to process the request.
If you don’t feel comfortable handling these matters at the civil registry office, you can ask a family member or friend for help. The registry office may already have all the necessary documents from the maternity hospital, so they can send you the birth certificate by mail. Since we know from our own experience that not all registry office clerks are empathetic, you can also contact us, Pohřební průvodci, and we can handle these formalities for you. 

After a miscarriage or an induced abortion, you cannot apply for maternity leave or maternity benefits. Mothers of stillborn babies or babies who died shortly after birth are eligible for 14 weeks of maternity leave and may receive maternity benefits. We recommend that you consult with the Czech Social Security Administration and your employer regarding your specific situation. 

After a miscarriage or an induced abortion, the child’s father is not entitled to paternity leave. Fathers of stillborn babies or babies who die within six weeks of birth may apply for 14 days of paternity leave. For more information and eligibility requirements, please contact the Social Security Administration. 

After the birth of a stillborn baby or the death of a baby shortly after birth, the father or another household member may stay home for up to 9 days to care for the mother or other children under the age of 10. The gynecologist or another attending physician determines eligibility for caregiving benefits. 

After a miscarriage, an induced abortion, or the death of a baby, parents are not eligible for parental benefits or parental leave. If the baby died after birth and the mother was not eligible for maternity benefits, she may receive parental benefits for the period during which the baby was alive. If you need more information, please contact the Czech Labor Office directly; they will certainly be able to advise you.

If, as a mother, you don’t feel physically or mentally well enough to return to work, consult your primary care physician, gynecologist, or even a psychiatrist about the possibility of staying home on sick leave.
And if you didn’t find the answer to your question here, you can also check out the website www.perinatalniztrata.cz, where all situations are described in more detail. You can also write to us or call us directly, and we’ll be happy to help you.

Yes, if you have only a small amount of ashes left after your baby’s cremation, that’s correct. Today’s cremation furnaces are set to a temperature of around 1,000°C, and only 2–3 tablespoons of ashes remain from a baby. Currently, there’s no other way to do it in the Czech Republic—all crematoriums operate similarly. A solution would be a small electric furnace designed exclusively for babies, one that wouldn’t reach such high temperatures—we’re working on it, but it will take some time.

After a baby’s cremation, very little ash remains, so the crematorium staff, often with the best of intentions to “provide ash,” scrape out what’s left over from other cremations… That’s why some mothers tell us that the ashes were heavier than the baby itself.
If we’re organizing the funeral, we can communicate with the crematorium and make arrangements with them to ensure this doesn’t happen, so that you receive only your baby’s ashes.

Babies have very delicate skin. It decomposes more quickly than that of adults. This doesn’t deter the mother—and often not even the father—because they simply love their child unconditionally, but it may take others by surprise. That’s why we recommend saying goodbye to the baby’s body in person as soon as possible and then holding the funeral service using only the ashes from the cremation.

Babies are usually sent for an autopsy. While you can refuse an autopsy, the doctors will try to convince you to have one—and they may be right to do so. Without an autopsy, you may never find out the causes of any health complications. Knowing these causes could be valuable in the event of a future pregnancy.

Doctors sometimes perform a type of autopsy that makes it virtually impossible to say goodbye to the baby’s body afterward. Therefore, if we know that you’ll want to say goodbye to the baby’s body, we immediately call the doctors in the pathology department to request that they perform an anatomical autopsy—and under no circumstances a biopsy. Don’t worry about anatomical autopsies: the baby will look just the same as before the procedure...

According to the Health Services Act, a case is considered an abortion if the baby “shows no signs of life and, at the same time, has a birth weight of less than 500 g; or, if the birth weight cannot be determined, if the pregnancy is less than 22 weeks.” In all other cases, it is considered a stillbirth. However, you may, are permitted to, and have the right to bury either one.

At our services, we often meet 30-year-olds who have never been to a funeral before—let alone seen the deceased. Perhaps that’s why this will be your first such experience.
If we may offer some advice, don’t be afraid to look at the baby, to touch it… Death bestows a special, almost sacred peace upon the body. We know that parents who haven’t said goodbye to their baby’s body often call the funeral home months, even years, after the baby’s death, looking for at least a photo. On the other hand, we don’t want to distress or traumatize anyone, so we recommend holding a funeral for a wider circle of mourners at a later date.

So try calling or emailing us, and we'll see if we can at least take care of something for you…

In Bohemia, it was customary to baptize children immediately after birth, at the slightest sign of life—sometimes even a feigned one—so that the child would go to heaven, but also so that the midwife would not be accused of mishandling the birth.
Today, parents who wish to have their child baptized refer to what is known as “baptism of desire.” However, this form of baptism is, at the very least, questionable—and more likely impossible—for stillborn children.
A stillborn child goes to heaven even without baptism.
Thomas Aquinas defined the concept of limbo: a place for the souls of people who committed no personal sins but from whom original sin had not been removed through baptism. Typically, this is a temporary state for the souls of good people who died before the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Likewise, according to this concept, children who died before they could be baptized were sent to a second limbo, known as “limbus infantium” or “limbus puerorum.” However, theologians had long criticized this as discriminatory, and so in 1984, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) proposed the hypothesis that limbus had never been part of Catholic theological doctrine, and in 2007, the Vatican effectively abolished the concept of limbus. Limbus was also never a dogma. Those who died unbaptized in early childhood will therefore automatically go to heaven.

Starting in April 2026, we recommend that clients apply for the funeral allowance themselves, without an intermediary, for the following reasons:

Employees at the employment office repeatedly ask us—since we’re a “nonprofit”—whether “the woman is Roma” or, for example, why “she doesn’t have a Czech name.”

Employment office staff tend to be reluctant to approve applications from intermediaries; for example, a client writes to us: “…an employment office employee contacted me directly and explained that the approval was delayed because, from their perspective, it wasn’t clear whether the benefit would actually be paid to me in the end, since your account number was listed on the application. Apparently, there have been an increasing number of cases lately where intermediaries keep this benefit for themselves and enrich themselves unlawfully. That’s why they’re supposedly being more cautious.”

Employees at the employment office often do not communicate with us; they call clients directly (even if their phone number was not included in the application), and when we later inquire about the status of the application, they tell us, for example, that “everything has been resolved,” or that they called us (they called the client) and no one answered, so they rejected the application.