When Parental Leave Does Not Connect: A Claimant-Level Audit for Comparative Neonatal-Care Policy

International leave indicators can describe weeks of entitlement without establishing whether the same worker can obtain protected absence, income replacement and job continuity during a newborn’s hospitalization. This Policy Analysis operationalizes a Same-Claimant Protection Test as a reproducible comparative legal-policy audit that traces claimant eligibility, clinical trigger, protected time, payment, employment continuity and administrative access as distinct but interacting gateways. It applies the method to three purposively selected mechanism tests—Great Britain, France and Illinois—using operative legal texts as of October 2026. The cases expose different forms of institutional fragmentation: separate leave and pay conditions; a narrowly triggered hospitalization extension embedded in paternity leave; and employer-size-conditioned unpaid neonatal intensive-care leave. They do not estimate global prevalence or real-world benefit take-up. The paper links administrative-burden theory to observable legal information and compliance requirements and proposes a transferable rights-pathway schedule for legislators, statistical agencies and international data producers. The central policy implication is that entitlement duration should be accompanied by dated, claimant-specific metadata and explicit uncertainty codes rather than treated as a sufficient proxy for usable protection.