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Shared parental leave: the boobs don't come off.

3/27/2015

9 Comments

 
The government has commissioned a nifty graphic to help us understand shared parental leave. Pink and blue to represent male and female? I suppose it’s an easy shorthand. Levitating blue milk defying gravity? We’ll let that one go. Anything else? What’s happened to breastfeeding? That’s a question we could ask about shared parental leave legislation as a whole.

Picture
Perhaps just as well it uses bottles as the image because what are the chances that a woman returning to work at just two weeks is going to be able to continue to breastfeed?  Is the government assuming that 'these' mums just won’t care about breastfeeding so what does it matter? There are certainly many women around the world who make breastfeeding and employment outside the home work. The UK isn’t likely to be her home.

In the UK , it’s down to pure luck whether a woman’s employer will be supportive of her aim to express milk at work and retain her milk supply and breastfeeding relationship. There are employers finding little offices, sourcing mini-fridges, letting teachers off doing playground duty – quietly and without fanfare. And there are employers who don’t understand the point, can’t envisage how facilitating a mother to pump milk might work and see no need to bother. Women are feeling vulnerable and unable to fight fights they don’t feel entitled to fight. A woman could try and make her case citing health and safety legislation and by mentioning the equality act but her employer can politely ignore her. As ACAS says in its document ‘accommodating breastfeeding in the workplace’, “The law doesn’t require an employer to grant paid breaks from a job in order to breastfeed or to express milk for storage and later use. Neither does it require an employer to provide facilities to breastfeed or express milk.” This toothless document then goes on to explain what nice employers might choose to do. This isn’t helping the women phoning the national breastfeeding helplines in tears and in pain at their desks. It was produced at the request of the government when charities like Maternity Action and the breastfeeding groups pressured government into acknowledging that breastfeeding protection was missing in this legislation. It doesn't help. National laws provide for breastfeeding breaks in more than 90 countries worldwide. We are not one of them.

In the UK, a breastfeeding mother has the legal right to ‘rest’ but not to express and store her milk. Health and safety guidance might suggest that an employer could provide a room and a time for a mother to pump but they are only required to allow her to rest. We don’t want to rest. Give us ten minutes to use our double electric breast pump perhaps three times in a working day and most of us will be able to continue to give our baby’s breastmilk for as long as we want to.

The USA, the land of the free and the spectacularly rubbish maternity leave has 16% of babies exclusively breastfeeding at 6 months (Source: CDC Breastfeeding Report Card 2012). Terrible. Awful. Embarrassing.

The UK manages 1%.

The USA has 47% of babies getting any breastmilk at 6 months. We have 34%.

America has women regularly returning to work at 6 weeks. Yet they return to a workplace where their president has a declared them to have the legal right to ‘reasonable break time’ for expression up to 1 year after birth.

Allowing a ‘reasonable break’ means both mothers and employers are encouraged to have a sensible and fair dialogue. It’s a good place to start. In a letter on this subject, minister Jo Swinson claimed legislation was not possible as expression was so individual (yet for some reason the right to ‘rest’ is not?!). The law doesn’t need to be prescriptive. It just needs to empower women to start conversations. It will make continuing to breastfeed while working normal and manageable. Remember this isn’t just about the rights of mums and dads, this is about the rights of babies. We need never assume that a woman returning early to work would OF COURSE be ending breastfeeding.




Reading: 

http://www.acas.org.uk/media/pdf/2/i/Acas-guide-on-accommodating-breastfeeding-in-the-workplace.pdf


http://www.maternityaction.org.uk/wp/advice-2/advice/accommodating-breastfeeding/


http://mprp.itcilo.org/allegati/en/m10.pdf

9 Comments
Clara
3/27/2015 06:13:28 am

Great points regarding expressing milk in the workplace and the relationship to SPL, surely on of the most peculiar laws to have been passed by this government. But how about women who want to continue feeding from the breast whilst working? Everything here (and in all BF in the workplace literature from the likes of Maternity Action etc) focuses on expressing milk, which, if you don't mind me saying, is bottle feeding, not breastfeeding. It seems that everybody, even those in the know about breastfeeding, have ruled out the possibility that you can work AND continue to breastfeed (i.e. continue to feed your child from the breast, rather than the bottle). It can be done. I did it. It took a very long and tough negotiation, but I did it. It involved a phased return to work split between home and office from 8 months and flexible working hours which gradually increased over time. My employer (a very large global company) was extremely reluctant to support me at first, but we made it work. I kept my job and continued to breastfeed until my child was 20 months old. I am the only person I know who has done this and please trust me when I say I couldn't find and single leaflet, blog post or piece of advice to support me in this choice. I worry that SPL really might be the nail in the coffin for working, breastfeeding mothers in a cultural landscape that already fails to acknowledge our existence! That informative bottle graphic says it all...

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Caroline
4/4/2015 01:55:13 am

I work a 45 minute drive away from home and from my childminder, so this wouldn't have worked for me. I went back to work after 6 months so negotiated with my employer to be able to express, but it was a battle. Recently I have been struggling to express enough milk and then suffered from a stomach bug resulting in too much weight loss. I and still breastfeeding but now instead of expressing at work the childminder gives my daughter formula. I still breastfeed mornings, evenings and weekends. My daughter is currently 10 and a half months old and I don't plan to give up breastfeeding any time soon.

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Emma Pickett
3/27/2015 07:49:47 am

Clara - thank you very much for making this important point. I couldn't agree with you more and it's really valuable that you say this here. It's part of the conversation that many of us don't even bother having which is obviously very wrong and it's good to be reminded of that.

Reply
Striking Mum link
3/29/2015 03:07:00 pm

Employers need to be forced to be more family-friendly - sadly there needs to be huge cultural shift before they will all do it willingly. I could not breastfeed and felt unsupported to do so but I admire anyone who can and does.

Reply
Amy
4/3/2015 01:21:33 pm

I returned to work when my daughter was 6 months old and was feeding 8-10 times per day. I had to express in the toilet and was allowed to store my milk in the fridge providing I labelled it clearly because (and I quote) "we don't want anyone mistaking it for actual milk and drinking it dear".
Despite being made to feel very uncomfortable and not being supported, I had courage in my convictions and knew I wanted to continue breastfeedin, which is did for a further two years after returning to work. I agree there needs to be a huge cultural shift for things to change, I suspect that someone who was less adamant than I would have just given up when faced with what I came across.

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Mark Kuramoto-Headey
4/4/2015 08:27:02 am

While I'm all for women breastfeeding and would wholeheartedly support any action that would make employers accommodate this practice. However, have I missed something? I thought the change in the law was to allow (note, NOT force) men to take a more equitable role in the care of their offspring. Surely, if a woman wants to continue breastfeeding, any such change in the law would not prevent this (though it may not help either).

However, if the woman didn't want, or couldn't breastfeed, and her partner was more prepared to stay at home to care for his child than she was, then this would have been more difficult under the old law than the new. Why would any sane person oppose such a change?

Reply
Emma Pickett
4/4/2015 09:35:57 am

I think you might have missed my key point, yes. There are many women who would want to return to the workplace, are thrilled that their partners can take the role of primary carer BUT would also like their baby to receive breastmilk. This is hard to achieve for many UK women due to their lack of rights in UK law. In the US, women have a right to a 'reasonable break' to express breastmilk. There is nothing laid down here. I have spoken to women who feel they are being forced to choose between breastfeeding or a return to work. Their partners are losing a choice too. This article is not suggesting that shared parental leave is not a worthy piece of legislation, just that breastfeeding is being ignored. Despite ACAS guidance and recommendations for 'good practice', women don't feel confident in having conversations with their employers about breastfeeding and employers don't appreciate that giving the option to express milk benefits them too. Research shows improved employee retention, recruitment, motivation and reduced absence.

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Alice Wood
8/12/2021 09:03:03 pm

Yes I think this article has a confusing title! It's basically about support for breastfeeding at work, not about shared parental leave. The title implies that you are opposed to shared parental leave which I hope is not the case. (as a side note in Norway they have shared parental leave which is essentially mandatory, and also good breastfeeding rates I believe)

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    Emma Pickett IBCLC

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