The proposed Family and Medical Leave Inclusion Act would allow an employee to take time off to care for an expanded list of covered relationships, including a same sex partner, a domestic partner, parent-in-law, adult child, sibling, grandchild or grandparent.  The FMLA already allows an eligible employee to take time off to care for a spouse, parent or child, including an adult child under certain circumstances.

The bill was introduced in April 2013 in both the Senate and the House.

While the meaning of most of the Inclusion Act’s new covered relationships is self-evident, the definition of "domestic partner" is not. The Act defines a "domestic partner" as an employee’s same sex domestic partner, partner in a civil union, or, in a state that does not recognize same-sex marriage, an unmarried adult of the same sex as the employee who is in a committed, personal relationship with the employee, who is not a domestic partner to any other person, and whom the employee designates to the employer as the employee’s domestic partner.

Excluded from the Inclusion Act’s list of inclusions is an employee’s opposite sex domestic partner.