Whose Equality Is It Anyway?

I had better warn that this post may contain opinions that some people consider misogynistic or homophobic.  I am not good at being tactful (this morning I had an email from a friend who had been avoiding returning my calls for the past month, explaining that the email I sent him last month had hurt him and he would rather I didn’t call him again), so, if this hurts anyone, I apologise in advance.

I have been trying to make the world a better place by signing petitions on everything from suspending patent rights on vaccines to better education for disabled children to campaigning against compulsory photo ID for voters and against restricting people with mental illnesses from calling emergency services.

But today, I’ve had a couple of petitions that I really didn’t feel like signing.  You may feel the opposite, so I enclose links for you to sign them if you wish.

The first was Give MPs Six Months Parental Leave.  The email I received was an update complaining that Stella Creasy, the Labour MP for Walthomstow, is not being provided with a locum while she takes maternity leave, and therefore has to choose between being at home caring for her baby or representing her constituents.

My first thought was: how does having a locum MP work?  In most jobs, such as when a stand-in teacher or doctor covers for a regular, they are qualified by having passed the relevant exams, even if they aren’t familiar with the pupils or patients whom they are now taking responsibility for. 

As someone who has worked as a temp in care homes, I know how difficult and risky this can be.  In one case, an old man I was supposed to be helping to get dressed suffered a fall because, while I had been trained in moving and handling, I did not know this particular man and his level of mobility.  Mercifully, he wasn’t badly hurt, but both he and I were very shaken, and the care home sent me home.

Being an MP, however, differs from most jobs because an MP is someone who is elected by their constituents.  This means a stand-in would simply not be qualified to represent constituents who had not elected them.

However, there is another question here, and that is: what do we mean by equality, when it comes to parental leave? 

As far as physical health is concerned, obviously a woman who has just given birth needs time to recover from the exertion.  But when we are discussing the need for parent and child to bond, historically most fathers didn't expect six months' paid paternity leave.  They accepted that, if they continued working as usual, they wouldn't have as close a bond with their infant as the child's primary caregiver would.

In Britain today, a father (or the mother’s partner) is entitled to two weeks of statutory paternity leave, compared to six months for new mothers.  This takes into account that new fathers don't suffer the physical effects of childbirth, and allows them a short time to look after a partner who is recovering from this.  What it doesn’t allow for is the possibility that fathers might want or need more than two weeks to bond with their new baby, or that their partner might need them to share the responsibility of childcare. 

In Finland, Iceland, Norway, Spain, and Sweden, both father and mother are entitled to a fair-sized chunk (between 11 and 18 weeks) of paid maternal/paternal leave.  If we want to work for equality, should we be organising something more like this?  And should we be campaigning for more workplaces to have crêches, so that when a parent does go back to work, this doesn't have to mean being separated from their baby, toddler or preschooler all day?

The second petition that I didn’t sign was Funded IVF for Same-Sex Couples in England.  Many people have complained how unfair it is that same-sex couples do not have the right to receive NHS-funded IVF until they have gone through six rounds of IVF which they are expected to pay for themselves.  The comments are mainly along the lines of ‘everyone has the right to family life’ and ‘everyone has the right to treatment regardless of their sexuality’.

But does anyone actually have the ‘right’ to fertility treatment?  This isn’t as if the NHS was turning gay men away from an HIV clinic on the grounds that they had ‘brought disease on themselves’ and didn’t deserve life-saving medicine.  It isn’t as if social services were forcibly taking children into care because their parents came out as gay (preventing the disruption of families is what the principle of ‘the right to family life’ was originally intended for), or banning gay couples from adopting.

This is a question of what treatments the NHS should pay for.  In my opinion, its primary responsibility is to protect the lives and health of people who already exist (including unborn children), rather than engendering fertility.

In the past year and a half, the NHS has struggled to balance treating or preventing coronavirus, treating increased mental health problems related to coronavirus or lockdown, and treating all the other illnesses like cancer that haven’t gone away.  Nurses have worked hard and been underpaid, which is why I signed a petition calling for a pay rise for NHS workers.  With many people disabled by long Covid, health services would still be suffering additional strain even if everyone in the world was fully vaccinated by tomorrow.

So, if I were in charge of the NHS, I would stop providing fertility treatment to anyone, whether gay or heterosexual.  Being unable to have children (whether because you are gay or because you are infertile) is frustrating, but it is not an illness.  It isn’t as if the world’s population is in any danger of declining, after all.

Admittedly, this just replaces one form of inequality (heterosexuals compared with gay people) with another (those who can afford private treatment compared with those who can’t).  And admittedly, as I’m not a parent and have never had fertility treatment, I may not be the best person to pronounce on either topic.  But if you are infuriated by this post, why not write in and comment?  That’s why there’s a comment box, after all.