Get thee to a Lesbian Seperatist Commune, err, Nunnery?

[commodorified]

Oh, Benny The Rat.

Pope Says American Nuns Too Focused On Poor, Not Enough On Gay Bashing.

Also, Commenters Not To Be, from this story

Hey in the US no one is entitles to any maternity leave - count your self lucky.

Thanks, I won't.

Comments

[nineveh_uk]

The story raises it as a simple question with a simple answer, but even to my limited knowledge (person who knows the rules around existing provision pretty well, because she has to explain them to very clever people with zero common sense) it's obviously a huge can of worms.

I agree that the core of the matter at present is the legal status of surrogacy. The complications around "surrogate parent leave" could all* be cut through at a stroke by creating legally enforceable surrogacy agreements, by which parental responsibility is transferred from the birth mother at birth (if not before). It you do this, then you can simply make it a subset of adoption leave. Assuming the birth mother retains her maternity leave rights then there's an additional cost to the state/employer, but at current numbers this is negligible.

Of course, there are a few downsides to this idea.

*Late thought: no, I've just thought of a way to game this system financially, too.

[legionseagle]

Ah, yes BUT (and I was awake for this part of the debates) there's a really strong argument against legally enforceable pre-birth adoption agreements, not just because of the more lurid "baby-farming" scenarios brought up by the Mail but because there have been well-documented cases of the mother deciding she couldn't go through with the surrogacy agreement once she saw the baby and I think you walk slap into several sections of the Human Rights Act straight away if you try to set up a contractual claim - which is what a surrogacy agreement is - against the 'welfare of the child' principle.

[nineveh_uk]

I'm anti- enforced adoption agreements myself, but I would be unsurprised to see people who do want such agreements using lack of leave to back them up, because if you leave out the perspective of the surrogate mother, and there are people happy to do this, the arguments reinforce each other. Though it doesn't actually solve the possibility of fraud because you're still having two sets of leave for one baby. Which no doubt some people would address with "fine, then the surrogate mother only gets the compulsary two/four weeks", given that there are already voices who think mothers who give up a baby for adoption shouldn't get SMP.

Hmm. I'm feeling myself retract the desire to act on sympathy.

[legionseagle]

I'm rubbed up the wrong way by the way Care2Causes framed this one:

"The War on Women is alive and well in the UK as well as the US."

How is a story which essentially reads "Unfortunate lacuna found in legal protection for maternity rights; woman's MP seeks to rectify same" supposed to be evidence of a "War on Women"?

Especially since parental leave is the aim and NOT seeing it as a "women's issue".

[starcat]

I'd like to join in your discussion.

I really see no reason why maternity leave should care if it was a surrogacy agreement or not.

In simple terms, you have one lady who has had pregnancy and delivered a baby and the baby has now been adopted. She needs a maternity leave for recovery, same as anyone who had a baby who is not in her ongoing care. (This could be a short leave, such as six weeks, and is probably on the books already.)
The other family, man and woman, have not had the medical experience of a pregnancy and delivery so don't get that portion of the leave, but they have just adopted a baby and are entitled to the same maternity benefits that anyone is entitled to, for the caring for a newborn infant.

(I'm not familiar with all the legalities, as my experience of it is being midwife to women who gestate, deliver, and raise their babies and I don't know how much the dad can get, if he gets his own or can take more if the mom takes less. But I think it's six weeks for delivering and 10 months for raising.)

So the fact the jobs are split between two people means the benefits are also split between two people (or three if the dad takes time too) and there is no cost to the system that it was a planned adoption and not a spontaneous one.

[legionseagle]

(I'm not familiar with all the legalities, as my experience of it is being midwife to women who gestate, deliver, and raise their babies and I don't know how much the dad can get, if he gets his own or can take more if the mom takes less. But I think it's six weeks for delivering and 10 months for raising.)

Legalities are really the point, though (and those applying in the UK, specifically); the discussion between nineveh_uk and me (and I'm obviously aware that commodorified can, if she thinks we're taking over or derailing, kick us out of her yard) is talking about a specific legal situation which is being (in my view, I can't talk for nineveh_uk here) misrepresented for what appears to be an unhelpful political purpose by the people reporting the case.

Neither of us are saying that it shouldn't be tackled - I'd go so far as to say that it ought to be tackled, but what we are talking about are the details of how it's tackled within the UK and - crucially - EU framework, and one of the factors there is the one which you may think of as a "legality" but it's an important one for these purposes, namely that the child is not, at the point of birth, an adopted child of the parents in question. And there are reasons of policy why it can't be, at least at the outset.

[commodorified]

I am entirely fine with this, it's interesting and I think important. I am about to encourage my friend horsetraveller to pop over this side and join in.

I don't know offhand what the legalities are around surrogacy in Canada at the moment, beyond the fact that Maternity leave is specifically for late pregnancy/recovery from birth whereas Parental Leave exists for and can be split amongst the people of whatever sex parenting the baby. I don't know what happens about adoption paperwork; I suspect practically it vanishes into it taking 6 weeks for EI to start paying your leave regardless.

I suspect that the same problem exists wrt surrogacy, as you do have to be a legal parent to take parental leave: the fact that you can almost certainly take unpaid leave for any situation involving 'sudden infant in household' and then when the paperwork does go through you can take the paid leave as if it were adoption, because parental leave doesn't apply only to infants, it applies per kid, almost certainly helps.

I find the hypothetical knickertwisting of Disgusted in Toryville somewhat hard to account for as 'omg too many people involved in one child's beginnings' just makes me blink as a form of fraud,but perhaps adopters and parents who used surrogates could have unpaid leave with the understanding that it converts to paid the day the papers go through?

[legionseagle]

This is the Government leaflet dealing with the UK position. Note the differences, incidentally, between maternity leave, paternity leave and maternity pay; it's all rather hideously complicated and here are the details on pay.

[legionseagle]

Oh, and this is the Hansard transcript of the woman in question's MP putting the request for an amendment bill to deal with the question to Parliament on 17 April 2012 - that is, three days before Care2Causes put the story up - without mentioning this - as evidence of a 'War on Women'. Note Healey's explanation for the background of the lacuna.

[nineveh_uk]

Oh dear. I've just read the MPs' question. I shall take the charitable view that he hasn't thought through what he is saying, but it does confirm my feeling that the soft issue of [maternity] leave was potentially being used as a means to push for legalisation of surrogacy.

[nineveh_uk]

I mean by legalisation "pre-birth agreements enforcable through criminal law".

[legionseagle]

Yes, I saw that, but I think he may have been just handwaving a bit.

[legionseagle]

I think that's probably true, but it's certainly clear that the MPs don't seem to have any objection to giving some form of maternity rights to parents in these circumstances.

Care2Causes still misrepresenting it, I see, but though they're able to send me a reset password and agree I've reset it they won't let me comment using the same, so I can't comment over there/

[nineveh_uk]

I think that hypothetical fraud has to be considered. If it is easy for me to think of ways of making money out of parental leave associated with surrogacy including in circumstances in which there isn’t even a surrogate pregnancy, then other people can too, both people prepared to commit fraud (you could get a lot of money from an employer with a good scheme), and people prepared to use the spectre of it to deprive women of their existing rights.

Where there is actually a formal adoption then the unpaid parental leave followed by adoption leave does work, I think, but this doesn't cover all surrogacy situations, for some of which adoption is not a legal possibility.