EDITORIAL - Expanded maternity leave bill counterproductive

Manny Pacquiao, wearing one of his many hats, wants Congress to pass his bill seeking to give working women six months of paid maternity leave. If the bill is approved and signed into law by the president, a woman working in a factory will become a factory within a factory -- she can get pregnant again within the first month of her paid maternity leave and give birth again just four months after her leave expires, earning for her a new six months paid leave.

In other words, a woman will have to actually work for only four months in a year while getting paid for eight months that she is on maternity leave -- partly for a previous pregnancy, and partly for a new one that occurs within the previous leave. If a company only has four employees and all of them are women and each one gets pregnant a month apart of one another, there will only be one woman working for that company in the four months that there will be anyone working at all.

Now that may not be a very accurate computation of possible consequences. But it does serve the purpose of underscoring the fact that such a bill seems to be a very pretty skewed up proposal, or at least is one that promises to screw up many corporate settings and systems. It is not hard to imagine many of the country's top corporate executives holding their breaths in horror at how the Pacquiao bill turns out.

Already, these executives must have nearly died when the Senate passed its own bill expanding paid maternity leaves to women from the present 60 days to 100 days. Now Pacquiao wants to up the ante by expanding the paid leaves even more to 180 days. These proposals are not only counterproductive to the economic well-being of the country, it sabotages all efforts to slow down a rapidly increasing population.

To be sure, modern Filipino women have become quite conscious about the number of children they want. It is pretty certain that many of them would space their children in accordance with what is practical and what is desirable. But not all Filipino women have embraced the modern concepts of life and family, not because they do not want to, but because the opportunities available to them have simply remained out of reach even in this modern age.

One of the biggest contributors to this stagnation is poverty. The vast majority of the population still wallow in poverty. Many people have hardly moved and progressed beyond the hand to mouth existence to which they were born. In the environment in which they live, there is little concept of modern spaced out families. There are only outdated concepts that govern life as they know it.

And, sad though it may seem, one of such concepts is that women are primarily for child-bearing. Even in the event that women manage to rise above such concepts and manage to find employment, they still hark back to that concept the moment they get home. It is more likely than not for them to get pregnant more often that they should. And when they do, and the Pacquiao bill finds legislative favor, there will be impacts somewhere that we can only regret later.