Women's Rights?

Have recently been reading an interesting article in the guardian about women’s rights not to be questioned about their childcare arrangements or plans for future pregnancies when applying for a job (It has been illegal since 1975 to ask this question of women).
Whilst I wholeheartedly support this, I do think that the whole question of ‘Family Friendly Hours’ and the rights of pregnant women have totally made the world of nurse midwifery and maternity a crazy place to work in. A busy maternity unit has to supply safe, effective midwifery care 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every week of the year without break in any shape or form. The work force is traditionally predominately female and the age of the work force is mainly of child-bearing age.

Where I work at the moment there is always at least 10 midwives pregnant or on maternity leave at any given period in time. These midwives always return from maternity leave on very reduced hours and usually demand to work set hours. There is never any cover available for them whilst they are on maternity leave so you can imagine this leaves a very depleted work force.

This impacts very heavily on the work-force left to keep the place going and it usually falls very heavily on the shoulders of the older, senior full time midwives who have their own set of problems at home i.e. looking after elderly parents/husbands/partners etc. These midwives never ask for leave or time off to fulfil these demands and often leave at the end of a busy shift to start another shift at home.

Is this equitable? If women really want to have equal rights then surely the men should be involved more in the care of the babies and have time off from work as well to enable the woman to come back to work earlier than a year. And, are the women who are having a year off from a ‘with woman environment’ really being supportive of the profession that they profess to belong to and what about their colleagues? Are they being fair and equitable to them by insisting on having as much time off as possible and then coming back on reduced hours? I don’t think so and trying to manage a service that provides care for a 24 hour period is a total nightmare with continually reduced dwindling resources.

I never thought I would find myself thinking this but I wish sometimes that we could just employ midwives that had completed their families or had no intention of having one in the interest of providing a truly first class maternity service for women.