Ingrid at Crooked Timber has written an excellent post on why men in the Netherlands should receive paid paternity leave. Excellent post and very much worth reading. Totally applicable to our needs here, as well. But what caught my eye (and stirred up old resentments) was her description of health care for women in the Netherlands after they give birth.
… since women are not allowed to stay in hospital after delivering their
babies (except, of course, if there is some medical reason, such as
excessive blood loss or a c-section with complications). Instead, a
professional carer comes to the mother’s home to take care of mother
and child there, paid for (largely) by the national health insurance.
Yet this kind of care has been scaled down considerably – since 2006
the task of these careworkers is limited to checking the health of
mother and child, cleaning the bedroom and the bathroom, doing the
laundry, advising on breastfeeding, and preparing lunch. Until 2005
these care workers would also take care of older children, do grocery
shopping, prepare the evening meals, clean the house, make coffee for
visitors, and do anything else that needed to be done so that the
mother could stay in bed. But how can mothers who just gave birth do
what is medically necessary (that is, try to rest and minimise walking
around for about a week), if they only receive care for 4 to 5 hours a
day, and their partners have no legal right to stay away from work?
How civilized. After my second C-section, I left the hospital after four days, walked up four flights of stairs, and vacuumed the apartment, because my in-laws were already there to inspect the new baby. I had to clean like crazy, because I had sciatica during my last month of pregnancy and couldn’t pick up anything that fell on the floor. Then I made dinner. My husband returned to work three days later, because he had already used up his one week of vacation of time.
Not bitter much.
Apt. 11d 
You didn’t see Sicko, I take it. Caregivers in France do the same as the pre-2005 Dutch caregivers. (Or did–things may have changed in France too.) The final scene of Sicko is Moore heading up the Capitol steps with a basket full of dirty laundry.
The night I got back from the hospital (vaginal delivery, so two days), I lost the ability to walk. After a week or so, we realized I had severely pulled the psoas muscles, which help you lift your legs, when I gave birth to my 10 lb boy. But I had no frickin’ clue what was going on for days, and my midwife’s office was *not* helpful because I didn’t have a fever, and that’s all they cared about. I’m lucky my parents were retired and could stay with me (for a while at least–my sisters started calling after a week and asking when I would release my mother back to them).
Oh wow. I haven’t thought about that clusterf*ck in years. We also moved when my son was 4 weeks old (the landlord had sold the house we were living in, and we had to leave–he also stiffed us on the security deposit, and he still owes us $1800, including punitive damages). It’s no wonder I was diagnosed with PPD when my son was 8 weeks old. I sure could’ve used some nationalized health care.
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Birthleave for Fathers
Ingrid Robeyns over at Crooked Timber posts today on the debate in the Netherlands over granting paid leave to fathers so that they can participate in the care of their new born children. She provides several grounds in defense of
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I cannot think about this one tiny bit, or I will plunge into a funk of remembrance that will take me far too long to shake off.
Seriously, they still clean the bathroom? Swoon.
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I think I’ve heard some version of the ‘vacuuming after C-section’ story from almost all of my friends who have given birth. (me: no C-section, but mega after-pain and slow-mending stitches…) Birth and those first few weeks are just hard – but they really don’t need to be THAT hard.
Here are two random thoughts that I had after reading the interesting excerpt on the carers: (1) Post-birth caregiver actually sounds like a pretty rewarding job. If it were in any way ‘medicalized’, though, wouldn’t there be some serious potential liability baggage to deal with? and if no medical screening or advice is being dispensed, where would the money to pay such workers come from? (2) I wonder how the typical American would deal with having a stranger come into her home to do these rather intimate chores. Whenever I’ve lived in Europe I’ve marveled at how easy and open most people are about having visitors drop by their home at any time. Here in the US it seems a given that one has to call and give real warning if one is planning a visit. I just have the sense that Americans are much more private and closed-off in their homes.
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The French are known for being extremely closed off about their homes.
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Some of this could be fixed by changing expectations. My midwife told my husband I should stay in bed for a week, and he took that responsibility seriously. He probably wouldn’t have if I had told him the same thing. If doctors, nurses, and midwives made it clear that a new mother should be in bed, then most mom’s support systems would probably jump in to make that happen. The difficulty, of course, is the moms who don’t have a support system.
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I think I partly blame new mommy hormones for the near universal tendency of women to wear themselves out with housekeeping after coming home from the hospital with a baby. I know that when I came home from the hospital both times I was all revved up and went immediately to work shoveling domestic debris, a very poor use of my energy as it turned out. (If we have any more kids, I’ll tell my husband I’m not coming home from the hospital until the house is all picked up. Also, hospital visits with an older child should be kept short and infrequent, since that child is likely to pick the best bits out of mommy’s hospital dinner and keep her from taking a nap.)
Another issue is visitor quality. Bad postpartum visitors need to be fed, amused, and taken care of; good visitors take care of you, dinner, and the baby and you will weep to see them go. Also, 6 long-distance visitors at the same time are not three times as much fun as 2 long-distance visitors. With my first baby (who was fortunately 3 months old already at the time), I once wound up catering a multi-day business meeting between my parents and my sister and her husband, who were getting a river tour business off the ground and spent 95% of the time their visits overlapped hammering out the details. My husband had the baby and I spent 95% of my time in the kitchen making squash bisque, serving meals, and loading and unloading the dishwasher, occasionally creeping off to pump milk. This is never going to happen again. I am happy to report that when my parents visited after my second baby was born, they did a fine job just hanging out and holding the baby, which was exactly what we needed.
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Wow, Laura, you have my full sympathy. I’ve never had a c-section, but I’m a mess after my babies are born anyway. My husband has been fortunate to have at least five days off after each kid so far, and with mothers and sisters and meals from friends we’ve muddled through. A guaranteed two weeks off for dad sounds great to me–what mother wouldn’t like that?–although I doubt that childless or one-kid families will want to fund serial paternity leave for a family like mine, with lots of kids. And I hate the idea of a stranger coming into my house, dispensing dubious infant-care advice and an icky lunch. No thanks!
I doubt that the paternity policy would do the social engineering that Ingrid would like it to, however. I believe that men’s parenting behavior is more plastic—more socially constructed–than women’s, though not infinitely so and broadly constrained by evolutionary factors. So while government social policies may well succeed in getting men to invest more in their children, I don’t think they will succeed in getting women to invest less—which is what Ingrid is after, to achieve absolute parity. Thus, over an entire population I predict that despite liberal paternity leave one would still see women in less demanding and thus less lucrative jobs—and thus the opportunity cost for staying home with the child will still be less for the mother than for the father, and the social mores will remain substantially the same.
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It turns out though that genes are fairly plastic and over historic time too. According to that study that came out last month (John Hawks, Recent Acceleration of Human Adaptive Evolution), something like two new genes are fixed in the population per year. I don’t think we should assume that gender roles are genetically fixed; we are messing with them, even genetically, and more power to us.
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Given the high degree of selectiveness of contemporary childbearing and the huge pool of possible mates that we choose from, I think I can buy the idea that human evolution is accelerating. However, which genes are those, anyway, and wouldn’t that evolution progress work fairly slowly at the rate of 2.00 kids (or less) per upper-middle class American couple? Isn’t it fairly possible that society might become genetically split, maybe with a sliver of absurdly successful pirates at the top who don’t need to be nice, a big group of bright upper-middle class “nice guys,” and then an even bigger pool of Kevin Federlines (at best) at the bottom. (The local paper has lots of stories of the sort of a guy applying a hot iron to a girlfriend’s face or a guy pouring lighter fluid on a girlfriend for not answering her cell phone, etc. At least in that demographic, I’m not expecting that further evolution will be in a particularly nice direction.)
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thats pretty harsh…i agree with husbands getting paternity leave.
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