Giving birth and caring for a newborn baby is challenging enough without worrying about how you’re going to pay your bills. Yet this is the situation many (working) women find themselves in after they become mothers.
Now, a new study has made an even stronger case for paid maternity leave to be made a priority, particularly in the US, one of very few countries where there is no maternity leave mandate: for every month a new mother gets paid to stay at home with her baby, the chance of that baby dying falls by 13 per cent.
When researchers at McGill University and UCLA Fielding school of Public Health studied data from 300,000 children in 20 middle income or low income countries. They discovered that a system that allows a new mother to stay with her baby instead of going out to work right away amounted to saving the lives of eight babies in every thousand.
The study, published in the journal PLoS Medicine, suggests that mums who are allowed the time to care for their baby in those early months are less stressed and more likely to seek and access medical care for their infant if something is wrong.
Lead author Professor Arjit Nandi said:
‘A significant number of countries where the vast majority of maternal and child deaths occur provide less than 12 weeks of paid leave to new mothers.
‘Our findings suggest that paid maternity leave policies are a potential instrument for reducing preventable child deaths,”
According to the working mothers section of the Growing Up in Ireland study, relatively few mothers in Ireland return to work before the infant was six months old.
However, early returns to work (before six months) are more likely to be by self-employed mothers, young mothers or lone mothers. Those who returned in the eight to nine month period were more likely to be highly educated, older, Irish and mothers living in a couple.
How much maternity leave did you take? Would you have liked to have taken more? Let us know on Twitter @HerFamilydotie.
