Breastfeeding is an option. Women who don’t like it shouldn’t be pressured into it. Actually having children at all is an option (that considering our overpopulation right now should probably be discouraged). The mother has had months (at least five or six except for the extremely rare cases when a woman doesn’t realize she is pregant) to to figure out a schedule. Giving her extra paid vacation while her co-workers have to do her job with no similar compensation in paid time-off is discrimination. It’s a prominant factor in why some people can’t stand new mothers. Getting rid of maternity leave or offering an equal benefit of paid time-off for whatever personal projects other employees might want to pursue would be a step in the right direction.
Norway has a very generous parent leave, which can be shared between the parents. (Some weeks immediately before and after the birth are reserved for the mother.) (Details: http://www.nav.no/English/Stay+in+Norway/Parental+benefit+on+birth.805369034.cms)
Our experience is that most of the leave tend to be used by the mothers, and we also see that women tend to earn less than men after having children. (Mothers earn less than childfree women, while fathers earn more than childfree men. The differences increase with number of children.) So, too generous parent leave can be a disadvantage for women.
Partly to counter this, and partly because we see sharing childcare between genders as a good thing in itself, part of the parent leave is now reserved for the father. If he doesn’t take it, the family loses it. There’s discussion about this – some want to increase the father’s part, some want to remove the reservation so that all can be used by the mother.
Personally, I’m going with the last one. That is, I read the OP as:
Tandem two hook beam that it is in the interests of women’s equality to campaign against maternity leave
Seriously, OP, WTH?
Here in California (and I believe federally as well), there are two type of “maternity leave.” The first is strictly medical and starts before childbirth. The second is bonding time and is available for mothers, fathers, and even adoptive parents. Federally, this time is protected and your job cannot be taken away or downgraded during this time. Your job is frozen for the duration. That has its good side (you can’t be laid off or fired), but also its bad side(you do not accrue seniority and your vested benefits are on hold). The state of California goes beyond that and provides disability pay during both the medical leave and some of the bonding time.
I don’t see a valid equality issue with this for two reasons: 1) medical leave is based on the fact that you have undergone a major medical procedure, possibly including major surgery. It is no more discriminatory than only giving men leave for prostate cancer surgery. 2) The bonding leave is available to both sexes and even those who can not or do not want to have biological children.
You could argue that the state should not be encouraging people to have children at all, but that is not a discrimination argument.
My dictionary disagrees with yours.
[QUOTE=you’re kidding, right]
ri·dic·u·lous
adj \rə-[FONT=lucida sans unicode]ˈdi-kyə-ləs[/FONT]
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Have you raised kids from infancy? From your board handle and your post I feel safe in assuming you have not. I feel equally safe in concluding that you have no idea how overwhelming the whole process is for most people, and how absolutely life-absorbing it can be for many people. Talk to friends or relatives who’ve had kids born with medical issues, including prematurity, and find out what their lives were like in the early days. Hell holds no threat to me, for I have had a child in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.
Talk to family, friends, or colleagues who have had perfectly typical infants. Find out what their lives were like in the early days. Or volunteer to watch the baby for them for a few hours so they can go out to dinner, eat dinner at home, or just fall asleep where they stand.
Maternal leave is not discriminatory - it’s as necessary as time off after a heart attack. (A co-worker of mine did not take advantage of time off, and did not survive his next heart attack.) Parental leave is even less discriminatory, since any parent of whatever gender can take it.
I daresay that ZPG Zealot feels the persons being discriminated against are not men as such, but rather persons who have no biological children.
:smack: I hadn’t thought of that. Although parental leave includes leave time for adopters. We needs people to have kids - where else get the underpaid 20-somethings to care for us in the nursing homes?
Actually, I have probably had more kid raising experience than most people on this board. I was raised in a multi-generationaly extended family (IMHO the best system for raising children) and did my tours of duty in childcare. I am currently the legal guardian of several teenagers. If parenting is so absolutely life-absorbing and overwhelming, the parents are investing too much time and attention into individual children rather than looking at what is good for the entire family. People that selfish probably shouldn’t be having kids.
That may be true on some level but it’s pretty close to the point I was trying to make. People shouldn’t get always get equal treatment because people are not always equal. Sick leave, for example, doesn’t benefit somebody who’s never ill. Maternity leave may be biased towards women but that’s a direct result of pregnancy being biased towards women.
Sure, pregnancy is biased toward women, but being unable to work for medical reasons isn’t. Someone mentioned maternity leave being as necessary as time off after a heart attack- and I agree. But it also works in reverse - time off after a heart attack is as necessary as maternity leave. I once had a government job where as a provisional employee, I was not entitled to unpaid medical leave except if it was pregnancy related. I had to take leave due to complications of pregnancy. When my sick leave ran out , I received a letter stating that was terminated as I was not entitled to unpaid medical leave. Once personnel found out the medical reason was pregnancy related, I was reinstated. But if I had needed unpaid time off for any other medical reason, like a heart attack , I would have been terminated. That’s just as discriminatory as giving time off after a heart attack but not after childbirth.
That’s where the problem comes in a lot of time with pregnancy/childcare issues. It’s not that there’s not a good reason to give time off after childbirth- of course there is. But it’s no better than the reason to provide time off to recover from a heart attack. There’s good reason to allow parents (not just mothers) time off to adjust to a new addition to the family. There’s good reason to allow parents time off to deal with their children’s serious medical needs , but the same reasons apply to a spouse or parent’s serious medical needs. The problem is that sometimes ( not always) those who support them limit their support to pregnancy/childcare and maternal (not parental) issues rather than the wider issues, which in turn causes a backlash against women. I’ll give an example - at my current job, there is restricted duty for work-related injuries only. If you cannot perform the full duties of your job for any other reason, you must go out on leave. There are always women who want the union to negotiate restricted duty for pregnant women. I’ve asked why they don’t propose negotiating for restricted duty for any medical reason and have been told “Pregnancy is different from a broken leg because you can’t help getting pregnant”. That tends to limit your support from the guys who will never be pregnant but who might break a leg.
I was aware that some places allowed fathers to take leave for newborn children. I am still unaware of any that require men to take leave if the mother does.
Color me pleasantly surprised! Good for you - and the kids, and society at large.
A warning - I’m warming up my time machine and when you wake up you will find it’s 1997 and on your doorstep for your care are my Autistic son (then almost 3), and my newborn daughter (who later developed ADHD and Emotional Disabilities). Have fun! The boy won’t be fully toilet trained for 5 or 6 years - hope you have a good washer and dryer. The girl will break down in tears at the slightest provocation, like asking her how she is. Oh the times you’ll have! Retroactively dumping them on you makes me doubly selfish - once for having them, and twice for not raising the results of my messed up genome. Oh, and the kids didn’t sleep - is that OK? Seriously, they didn’t sleep well for years. But it’s totally selfish of me despite the fact that there are - to this day - no genetic tests for these problems so I could not have aborted the kids even if I were so inclined.
If your teenagers are like my two are as teenagers (which is pretty darned good, luckily), then I would rather deal with several dozen than with my two as infants. “It take a village to raise a child” - well it took a large village just to raise my two kids.
Parental leave is not just for the “selfish”, it’s for parents of typical kids who are not in multi-generational homes with a team of built-in babysiters. Most people here in the US are not in multi-generational homes - you were lucky in that regard. Then there are all the special circumstances - hard delivery, c-section, pregnancy complications, sick newborns, sick older kids, post-partum issues, single parents dealing with any or all of the above, etc., ad nauseam. We need parental leave, we need more of it.
No, we need people taking responsibility for their reproductive choices. Having kids you can’t afford, single parenting, etc., should be discouraged as much as possible. There is no reason people isolated from their biological families could not create a cooperative group that works roughly the same way. There is also no reason large scale institutional care couldn’t be increased to take up the slack for the rest.
Ignoring the wonderfully self-referential debate on ridiculous, the best tactic I can think of is that maternity leave, as currently structured, tends to isolate the father from the newborn. In order to support the goal of families with two active parents, not just one, maternity and paternity leave should be given equal status. Perhaps we could double it and require that the time be shared equally in some way between parents - one day on, one day off, one week on, one week off, or whatever.
I don’t necessarily agree, but it might be a tactic not anticipated by the other side, which is always useful.
That doesn’t really work out so well in cases where the child is born out of wedlock. When I used to do child support for the State, it was not uncommon for a woman to name multiple potential fathers.
I took responsibility for my reproductive choices! I was married, established in my career, with good income and health insurance. We did pre-natal testing, went to doctors, ate vegetables and vitamins. We have exactly two kids. Two train-wrecks due to circumstances utterly beyond our control. Having these kids has taken years off my life, and would have outright killed me had my employer not been very understanding. I know a family with a kid who had profound physical difficulties his first years. The husband literally worked himself to death. Married family with a good income and only the one kid. Responsible by your standards above. Geographicly isolated from her parents, isolated from his by their prior deaths. Sometimes family members can’t help, or won’t even when they are close. Crises like these are when you really learn who you can depend on, a lesson often disappointing but sometines surprising.
In such circumstances, all too common circumstances, the parents need help. A few weeks leave is just about the least society can offer.
I debated this motion at a tournament a week ago, running “This house would make employers pay for paid parental leave” from opening opposition (the jargon is there for any British Parliamentary debaters who may be out there).
I don’t have time to go into detail, but the crux of our argumentation (note that in this style preparation is only 15 minutes, so the arguments might not be completely sound) is that paid parental leave increases the downside risk to businesses of hiring women (even if the state pays they still lose the woman during the period, and even if they are compensated that woman still loses some degree of workplace effectiveness by being out of it for a while) and so businesses will naturally compensate by slowing wage growth of all women.
Basically this means an increase in the gender pay gap that is difficult to police, and penalises all women for the choice of some to have kids.
Another argument is that it sends a message to women who, for personal career reasons, choose to stay in the workforce, that they are bad parents, even though with appropriate decisions (spending time with the kid at night) the kid might not actually be particularly disadvantaged. This detriments the woman psychologically and could contribute to post-natal depression.
A further argument if it is only paid maternal leave is that it entrenches the notion that the “proper” role of a woman is to raise children, rather than being a breadwinner.
Same here. 1 year maternity/paternity leave. Naturally taking months out will have an effect on your working life. Of course it is only a disadvantage if you rate career over spending time with your newborn babies. Since most regular people don’t really have a career as such, just work, this is not an issue for the majority of mothers.
Very bad idea. The state should not try to micromanage people and parents should decide among themselves to whom the leave should fall.
In my mind - maternity leave = medical leave. Childbirth is a medical condition/procedure that requires recovery time, regardless if the delivery is vaginal or c-section. If an employer has some sort of paid medical leave/disability plan available to employees, they are legally obligated to cover recovery from childbirth as any other illness. Though this doesn’t apply to the father.
Beyond that… I don’t know. FMLA allows a total of 12 weeks per year, but is not paid, and is available to both the mother and the father.
I understand why one would want paid leave to adjust to the whole situation. I have 2 kids myself. But should the employer be on the hook for that? What about the other major life changes? I recall hearing somewhere that the 5 most stressful things in life are marriage/divorce, having kids, losing your job, moving, and the death of a close family member. Should the employer be on the hook for any/all of the above (except losing you job, of course)?