What employers can do
There are facilities and policies that employers can put in place to support women who breastfeed at work. These include on-site child care and policies that allow mothers to leave work to go to the child, or to breastfeed in the office.
But employers should be doing more to encourage working mothers who wish to continue breastfeeding after returning to work to do so. One 2006 survey of 46 public sector employees in England investigated the support breastfeeding mothers experienced at work. It found that 90% of those surveyed were not aware of any support that their employer had put in place to encourage breastfeeding mothers returning to work.
Another 2007 study found that the longer a mother delayed her return to work after having a baby, the more likely she was to breastfeed for at least four months. The researchers argued that government policies to encourage mothers to return to work early after childbirth would not affect breastfeeding if the government also provided employers with increased financial support and incentives to support breastfeeding mothers in the workplace.
The importance of breastfeeding and the lack of adequate support at work for breastfeeding mothers pose a challenge to the effectiveness of the legislation on shared parental leave. There is currently no law which says that a mother has a right to breastfeed, or that employers must provide the relevant facilities at work. This means that for those couples who want to take shared parental leave, breastfeeding up to the recommended age of six months can be quite a challenge.
The UK has one of the lowest rates of breastfeeding in the world, and the numbers could further decline if more working mothers give up breastfeeding to return to work within six months. If mothers who want to breastfeed choose not to return to work soon after giving birth, this sadly renders legislation on shared parental leave ineffective.
Ernestine Gheyoh Ndzi, Lecturer & Cohort Tutor, School of Law, Criminology & Political Science, University of Hertfordshire
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
