I have to debate this issue tomorrow: Motion: TTHB that it is in the interests of women’s equality to campaign against maternity leave
And I have most of my arguments prepared (I don’t know which side I’m on until just before), but I thought it was an interesting question (and I was wondering if I’d missed anything )
My first reaction on reading the debate was that it is a rediculous idea, but I’m beginning to see the merits.
Women aren’t delicate flowers that need months and months of time off - most can go home from hospital the same day. Instead it might be better to have the option of extended sick leave if it is medically necessary.
But I can’t help feeling that if it becomes in anyway optional, women will be pressured to go back to work before they are ready.
I always liked versions where both men and women get leave to bond with their new baby, but if the mother takes her leave, the father is required to take some as well.
This encourages good bonding and parenting by both mothers and fathers, as well as balancing out the career hit from having a baby- something women in the US generally bear the full brunt of.
Parental leave is not only for the Mom and the Dad, but for the baby. Newborns are a lot of work. They must be fed every couple of hours, they should nap often, they must be changed frequently. Each of these activities takes time. In addition there’s all the housework for the family (now larger by one person), and because of frequent diaper failures and throw-ups much extra laundry and cleaning needs to be done. Infants at best do not sleep on a schedule that is good for adults. Working an office job while sleep deprived is unproductive. Working a factory job could be dangerous. Infants often get sick, necessitating even more care from the already stressed parents, plus doctor visits. Minimizing the number of people the newborn is exposed to reduces the opportunity for the kid getting sick. IOW, if the newborn only sees their immediate family at first, rather than a host of day care providers, the kid’s less likely to get sick in the first place.
As important as it is to supply the newborn’s physical needs, it may be even more important for the family that the newborn and parents form emotional bonds. Concentrated family time supports that. Who will be the workers of tomorrow if nobody raises good kids today?
IMNAAHO, the anti parental leave position is pure Scrooge. Whether “women are delicate flowers” or not, pregnancy and childbirth are each as medically significant biological changes as puberty - concentrated in a few months or hours. It takes time to recover from that kind of shock to the system. It takes more time to recover when you also have to do all that 24x7 infant care.
Though the OP’s misspelling grates on me as well, I feel constrained to observe that the vowel in the first syllable of ridiculous is the schwa, not the short i. (That’s in the second syllable.) Thus the letters a, e, i, o, and u can all be reasonably used to spell it. It’s not like he spelled a long A with a ou.
Biological necessity trumps equality – i.e. *someone *has to care for the newborn.
Either the mother or father is going to have to take time off from work to do so, and if employers aren’t forced by law to grant maternity/paternity leave, a substantial number won’t. That means one of the parents is going to have to quit. And since the woman is the one capable of nursing and the one who may be convalescing, it’s likely the burden of abandoning a career will fall disproportionally on her shoulders. Even if, in the long run, the couple would have preferred that the father be the primary care-giver, the immediate physical realities of childbirth have a tendency to force the woman into that role. Not providing maternity leave amplifies that pressure.
That was my guess, probably a formal phrase used in framing the questions in whatever forum the OP is debating in. Probably derived from debates in The House at Oxford.
Assuming that the leave in question is called “maternity leave”, what is its purpose? It doesn’t seem very equal to provide leave to women to care for a baby while not providing the same leave to men. If the leave is available to both men and women, then it is “parental leave”, not “maternity leave.” If the “maternity leave” is to allow leave for time she is medically unable to work due to pregnancy/childbirth ,there is again no reason to treat it differently than any condition rendering a person temporarily unable to work. If employers are not required to provide leave for other medical conditions, women would be better served by campaigning for a requirement that employers provide leave for any medical condition causing a temporary inability to work- it doesn’t make much sense to require my employer to provide 6 weeks leave for childbirth, and none for a hysterectomy or heart attack.
I think the argument is that one can’t say that on the one hand, the birth of a child does not affect the ability of a woman to work as hard as her colleagues, but on the other hand the demands of a newborn child require time off so that a woman can fulfill her requirements as a mother.
In other words, mandatory maternity leave would be OK, but if it is voluntary then it shows that it is either not needed or if not taken will have a negative impact on a mother’s ability to work.
Sweden has started reserving 2 months of the 13 months of parental leave they offer exclusively for fathers. They first replaced “maternity leave” with “parental leave” back in 1974, allowing either parent to use much of the allotted time. In 1995, they started reserving 1 month for fathers. This article provides a history, although it’s a little out-of-date. I have no idea if the proposed plan to go up to four months of nontransferable leave for each parent has gone into effect since then.
Yes, in an isolated phonetic sense, though the word “ridicule” definitely starts with an /I/ and could only reasonably be spelt with an ‘i’ (by current spelling conventions), and the norm is to spell etymologically related words similarly, despite divergent pronunciations.
Not that I think it is terribly significant in any way.
[Also, if one wanted to stress the first syllable of “ridiculous”, one would definitely say /i/ rather than anything else (unless my intuition about my own speech is drastically mistaken or non-generalizable…). Which supports using either <i> or <e>, but not any other letter. (One might describe first syllable’s reduced vowel as “schwi” rather than “schwa”…)]
I checked before posting that snippet of information, knowing that someone would call me out if I was wrong. But I am not wrong.
ri-dik-yuh-luhs
rɪˈdɪkjʊləs
I’m not a master of reading pronunciation guidelines, but in both of those cases, it’s showing that the vowel sound is the same for the first two syllables and there’s no confusion on how to pronounce the second one.
It’s upsetting to me how little regard people have for mothers, and especially new mothers, in this country. Six weeks off to have a baby is too damn short now, and I think it’s crazy that anyone would suggest shortening it. We’re not talking some simple outpatient surgery, having a baby takes A LOT out of a woman, and we damn well need to rest after it. Not to mention getting used to breastfeeding, trying to figure out a schedule, and trying to reconcile your new life as a mom with who you were prior. All of these things require time.
If the rate of post-partum depression is high now, it would skyrocket if women had less time off of work. Again, I don’t think a lot of people realize how difficult it really is to cope with having your world turned upside down (in a good way, mostly, but still hard). The hormonal shifts alone take a while to resolve, not to mention the sore breasts, the exhaustion of caring for a newborn, and a million other things. Are we really so greedy that work work work should come before a new baby? That a mama should have to leave her baby way before she’s ready (during essential bonding time)?
Ftr, I think paternity leave is also a great idea. I don’t see it as essential like I do with mama’s maternity leave, but it’s still important.
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