Maternity Leave Equivalent (Wild Speculation)

[NeonSoda]

So I was wildly speculating with a friend last night, and I said that I thought it would be wonderful if child-free people could have the same 52 week x £172 benefit given as maternity leave, but without having to have a child.

If that was something you could opt to receive, as a childfree person, what would you do with your 52 weeks of subsidised break from full-time employment?

(NB - the condition here is that you cannot do your job for those 52 weeks and also receive the money, just like a person on maternity leave can't.)

Literally nobody has said that.

One person has pointed out that pregnancy doesn’t just happen to people - if they really don’t want to do it, abortion exists.

How the fuck you got from that to where you are is your own concern.

Imagine a world where there is a deadly virus that means you cannot work for 52 weeks of the year but the government still pays you at least 75% of your wage.

What would you do with that time?

Stay inside and try to survive. That would stop so much stuff like travel, learning a new skill, education, volunteering etc it's definitely not a good fantasy scenario for me.

Not sure what point you're trying to make. Are you comparing mat leave to covid/lockdown..?

If you are a key worker - carry on as usual and take your chances!

(relevance to thread score - nil)

I agree it can probably never be eliminated, but I said 'go some way towards' this rather than solve it completely.

If you take a year out of the workplace you will be disadvantaged, whether you are 25 or 55 or 65, male or female. Mat leavers have to take this hit. Childfree people might be willing and able to - as is often mentioned, the equation child-free = career-obsessed = false. I don't agree that everyone would wait until mid-life, there are things people might want to do while they are still young and fit, before menopause comes along and starts a health decline.

So it sounds like the alternative is that people are forcing you to have a child?
Society would indeed collapse, look at the ageing population of Japan and the problems they are facing over there... But don't tell me that the government is pinning women to the floor and stuffing a turkey baster up their vagina to solve it.

Now there's a mental picture I didn't need.

If the 'thought experiment' had been 'what would you do if you could take a year of your state pension any time in life and defer retirement a year', I doubt the retired would have marched onto the thread to say 'It's not a holiday you know! It's for us to rest and recuperate our many ailments, we get no pleasure from it! Why do you hate the elderly so much!'. This thread isn't about mothers and their maternity stories or anyone else but the childfree it was intended for.

Some massive over reactions and offensiveness from parents on this thread, though thank you Colleen for at least trying to be reasonable.

I mean I didn’t get any money, my mental health crashed, I had a breakdown, and then had to abandon my PhD shortly after Covid because of it.

sounds like yours went better than mine.

Well I worked 109 hour weeks without a day off and zero holiday for the entire time. Zero thanks or ‘clapping’ for my sector as seen as being totally expendable - zero ppe as well.
I did get to hear the moans of boredom of people who got oif to stay at home. Funnily enough they didn’t want to swap places!!
The joys of being a key worker.

Yes, thank you to those on the thread who disagreed but did it politely and called out others who weren't quite so polite.

IN MY FANTASY THOUGHT EXPERIMENT WORLD

Just to totally lower the tone. In my fantasy thought experiment world, after watching the covid enquiry this week, Id quite like to spend a funded year on a desert island with Chris Whitty 🤣😍

single person's leave'

Why are you assuming that only single people have no children?

Personally I spent it head to toe in PPE for over 12 hours a day in an ITU watching people die.

@daliesque Greg. Davies.

@Alphabet1spaghetti2 I get that.

Only with his glasses on. Don’t fancy him at all with them off.

I endorse this message. And he clearly knows the effect the glasses have. Naughty monkey.

He certainly does!

I'm going admit I prefer him sans spectacles.

He was my drama teach at school. Scared the bejesus out of me.

I prefer with glasses, but will happily accept either.

Space travel?!

I was really hoping that @SoRainbowRhythms was going to tell us that she did three terms of Space Mission! Was there a Dennis in her class?