Mothers rights

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 This article or section needs to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article with relevant internal links. (September 2007)

Mothers' Rights concern the rights of mothers including both Women's Rights and Parental Rights. Some issues of concern to mothers today are:

  • The Right to Paid Maternity Leave and Parental Leave
  • The Right to Flexible Working Hours
  • The Right to Affordable Quality Childcare
  • The Right to Work and to Earn a Fair Wage
  • The Right to Affordable Quality Prenatal Care
  • The Right to Follow Her Birth Plan in Labor
  • The Right to Breastfeed in Public
  • The Right to Take Additional Leave to Breastfeed

[edit] In the United States

In the United States, family leave for 12 weeks is guaranteed for most employees of major companies by the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 but this FMLA leave is unpaid. Flexible working hours are arranged by individuals with no assistance from the government. Childcare can cost more than tuition at a public university [1]. In some states (notably Pennsylvania) woman can be turned down for a job because she is a mother [2]. There is currently a movement towards improving this situation which is focusing on improving the situation state by state.

The United States has poor prenatal care, and poor maternity care. The U.S. has the highest rates of c-sections, epidurals, inductions. In addition, the U.S. has high numbers of formula-fed infants (and thus lower numbers of breastfed children). The combination of these statistics have unfortunately resulted in high infant and maternal mortality rates. The United States is currently rated below 35 other countries in the world in terms of infant mortality. The U.S. has a higher infant mortality rate than the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Portugal, Cuba, Taiwan, Aruba, and many others, including most of Europe.

Many organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), and United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), are looking to improve mothers rights and lower maternal (and infant) mortality around the world. The World Bank loans money to women around the world, including many mothers, to help them start their own businesses. The National Partnership for Women & Families and other organizations have advocated for longer maternity leave and fairness in the workplace for mothers. The United States is far behind most of Europe and other nations in granting paid maternity leave. Most countries guarantee paid leave with many offering more than 3 months paid leave, the U.S. doesn't guarantee a single day of paid leave.

The WHO and UNICEF produced the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes (Marketing Code), the Baby-friendly Hospital Initiative, and the Innocenti Declaration (of 1990). These three actions are the international standards that many countries (over 65% of the 192 WHO member states) have enacted into their national laws. There are only nine countries in the WHO that have not taken action on the <Marketing Code to give it effect. The U.S. is one of those nine. The Marketing Code is used to combat false and aggressive advertising tactics infant formula companies use to sell formula, including giving away just enough free formula that the breastmilk of new mothers dry up, falsely, telling mothers they will not be able to produce enough breast milk to breastfeed their children, and falsely advertising that formula-fed children are smarter than breastfed children. The WHO has compared the current tactics by these companies, mostly U.S. based, to the tactics that led to the Nestlé boycott in 1977.

The year 2007 marks the 30th anniversary of the Nestlé boycott and the 20th anniversary of the Global Safe Motherhood Conference. In October 2007, the third decennial (occurring every ten years) conference will be held, entitled "Women Deliver."

[edit] Organizations

[edit] Publications and External Links

  • The Motherhood Manifesto: What America's Moms Want and What to do About It, by Joan Blades and Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, National Books, NY 2006.
  • "Getting a Job: is there a motherhood penalty" by Shelley Correll [3]
  • "Expecting Better: A State by State Analysis of Parental Leave Programs" by Jodi Grant et al [4]
  • "The Work, Family and Equity Index: Where does the United States Stand Globally?" by Jody Heymann et.al. [www.mcgill.ca/files/ihsp/WFEI2007FEB.pdf] [Global Working Families http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/globalworkingfamilies/]
  • "Family Friendly Work Schedules" AFL-CIO [5]
  • "The High Cost of Childcare puts Quality Care Out of Reach for Many Families" by Karen Schulman (Washington DC, Children's Defence Fund, 2000) [6]
v • d • e
Rights within the Family
Elements
Movements