antenatal - Stockport Birth Services

Pregnancy, Maternity Leave, and Your Employment Rights

Some of you may know that my other professional hat is as an HR Manager (yes, yes, I’ve heard all the jokes). Pregnancy and HR often go hand-in-hand and as there’s been a few different conversations going on between some of my clients recently I thought I’d do a whistle-stop tour of pregnancy rights when at work.

Disclaimer up front – the world of employment legislation is never easy, and never more so when pregnancy is involved so none of this should be used for your own specific situation and you should always get your own advice if you have something you’re concerned about. Blah blah blah, legal, legal, legal.

When to tell work you’re pregnant: You MUST tell your employer you’re pregnant at least 15 weeks before the week the baby is due, so by the end of your 24th week of pregnancy. I’d always suggest informing them sooner rather than later because that way you can be kept safer. You don’t have to immediately announce it to the office as soon as you pee on a stick, but telling a few key people might ease some of the stress. It certainly helps if your colleagues know you’re pregnant if you’re running out of meetings to find the nearest vomitarium, are suddenly and surprisingly refusing cups of tea, or have developed a rather strange allergy to herbs that makes you ill…

Appointments: You have the right to paid time off for antenatal care without taking this from your annual leave allowance. Antenatal care doesn’t just mean your regular scheduled health checks either; it covers all scans and extra appointments as well as any midwife/doctor recommended antenatal/parentcraft classes. Most of these tend not to be in the working day but it gives you a bit of flex for leaving early if you need to. Your partner/the baby’s other parent is allowed time off for 2 antenatal appointments up to 6.5 hours per appt. Many employers will allow time off for all the appts but some don’t (because, y’know, heaven forbid a soon-to-be-parent tries to take an active part in their unborn’s wellbeing )

Health & Safety: Urgh, yeah, that. But it’s important when you’re pregnant that your company takes even better care of you than they normally do – after all, it’s your kid that will be paying the taxes that pay their pension You must be covered by a specific risk assessment in pregnancy that covers off all potential risks to your wellbeing. And even in office jobs there’s a lot! Your body does wonderful things when you’re pregnant but it’s at one of its most vulnerable points too. If there are risks then your employer must remove them for you. If they can’t do that they need to find suitable alternative work for you. If that’s not possible then they must put you on fully paid suspension until the risk is removed or you start maternity leave. I know you don’t want to be that guy causing a fuss but you’re you and your baby’s biggest advocate and you’re responsible for making sure you’re both healthy. Heavy stuff!

Maternity Leave & When To Take It: Maternity leave is a day 1 right, so if you’re pregnant and an employee you’re entitled to take up to 52 weeks leave. The earliest you can start maternity leave is at 29 weeks of pregnancy. You can change your maternity leave start date with 28 days notice although pragmatically this isn’t always possible.If you’re ill with a pregnancy-related illness after 36 weeks of pregnancy and you’re still working this can trigger an automatic start of your maternity leave, even if you intended to work right up to the hilt.

Maternity Leave…How Long: If you work in an office you have to take 2 weeks leave after the birth of your baby (4 weeks if your job is manual). That’s it, the end, it’s the law, no arguments. You can take up to 52 weeks and you also have your annual leave allowance including your accrued Bank Holidays to top up your leave. You can change your maternity leave return date with 8 weeks notice, if you want to (although if you decide to resign only your normal notice period would apply which may be less than 8 weeks).

Maternity Pay: Chances are you’re entitled to 39 weeks maternity pay. To qualify you have to have been an employee for 26 continuous weeks up to the 25th week of pregnancy, earn at least £118 a week and have given correct notice.If you’re not entitled you may receive Maternity Allowance direct from the government. SMP is taxable but you don’t have to pay it back, unlike company maternity pay which you may receive and may have conditions attached, such as returning for a minimum of 6 months after your leave.

Shared Leave: You might want to share your leave with your partner. Essentially you give up some of your maternity leave so they can take it as well as or instead of you. Writing about the ins and outs of the scheme would and does fill up several pages of company handbooks but suffice to say here, it exists so be aware of it while you’re planning.

KIT/SPLIT Days: While you’re on maternity leave you might want or need to get into work for a particular reason, or to keep your hand in. While on maternity leave you have 10 Keeping In Touch days to use, although your employer doesn’t have to agree to them (but likewise, you can’t be pressured into doing them). Payment needs to be agreed with your employer – some pay for the hours done, some pay for the full day regardless of how many hours you’re in but remember that even if you’re only working for half an hour, that’s one full day gone from your entitlement. If you share your leave with your partner you (and they) are also entitled to 20 additional SPLIT days. Same rules apply. (Side note – In Touch days dramatically increased when more men were given the ability to take more time off. Patriarchy, eh?)

Work While You’re On Leave: Being off on maternity leave affords you some additional rights. If changes to the business are happening while you’re off you have the right to be kept abreast of the situation. If you’re at risk of redundancy being on maternity leave can’t stop it happening, but you’re obliged to be offered any suitable alternative as a top priority. As an aside, being off on leave while all your colleagues are still working can sometimes suck big ones so make sure your workplace are supportive and respectful of you.

Discrimination: Unfortunately pregnancy discrimination still exists because sometimes organisations or people within them are dicks. Amirite?! Even more unfortunately when you’re pregnant or have just had a baby is THE worst time to stand up for your rights and a lot of the shitty behaviour never gets called out meaning organisations never have to face their truths. Those of you who have had the strength to stand your ground, I salute you! Those who have suffered but have chosen to concentrate your efforts on you and your families, I see you and I give you an awkward shoulder-pat in solidarity.

If you think something is happening that shouldn’t be these organisations can help:

ACAS – they’re the first port of call and should be ok for basic rights but they’re sometimes a bit…well, basic, in my experience. ACAS.org.uk

Maternity Action – the UK’s leading charity to fight inequality and improve the health of pregnant women, Maternityaction.org.uk

Pregnant Then Screwed – support for women who have suffered discrimination in pregnancy, including a free legal helpline. Pregnantthenscrewed.com

Whew, that pretty much covers some of the basics. Good luck!

pregnancy maternity rights at work discrimination employment

Birth Plans (and Flow Charts)

Crack open your coloured pens, your pretty notebook and your laptop and make a start on your birth plan! Laminating is entirely optional

I’m still pretty furious that one of my clients this week was told she wasn’t allowed to write her birth plan yet. Errrr <— my actual face. Birth plans aren’t something that you write in a 10 minute appointment at 36 weeks.

The POWER of a birth plan comes from the knowledge that you and your support crew get from learning and reflecting. Of finding out what the biological norm is and what circumstances might arise that would throw you off that trajectory. Of what interventions you’d be happy to accept and in what circumstances, and which you will avoid like the plague. The piece of paper at the end is just a tiny part of the process; the really important bit is the work that’s gone into being able to write it.

Birth plans, or birth preferences, or birth flow charts (trademark pending ) come under criticism from some people (yes Adam Kay and other misogynistic folk I’m looking at you). Or rather, they’re another tool to mock and throw scorn down at a woman. As one fabulous OB said on Twitter ‘the longer the birth plan the longer caesarean scar I’ll make’. It’s funny how threatened an empowered woman can make some people feel, isn’t it? Because this is what it’s all about. When you learn and grow in confidence in your body’s abilities you start to question the autocratic policies that you’re told you have to abide by. You start to ask how it relates to you and your own unique situation. You start to ask for evidence and transparency of conversation. You start to demand that you’re treated as a person and not a statistic. And boy, does that throw the system into disarray.

Policies and procedures exist to protect hospitals and staff, and are created (often with little evidence) to give a guideline at population-level. But YOUR birth plan is just for you. It’s for YOUR situation, reflecting YOUR needs, YOUR desires, YOUR experiences, YOUR medical history. It’s the piece of paper that says ‘I am mine and my baby’s biggest advocate and I will make the decisions that I believe will keep us healthiest’. There is NOBODY who has more of a vested interest in you and your baby’s wellbeing than you. Nobody.

The biggest tip I give to pregnant people asking about birth plans – apart from booking my classes – is to read, read and read some more. It’s why my post-class emails are so link heavy! The more you read, the more scenarios you come across, the more different views you hear the more able you are to get a feel for what you’d do if that scenario happens to you in labour. Because with the best will in the world we can’t predict what’s going to happen to you on the day. But we CAN predict your reaction to it.

The second tip is to make sure your support crew know what you want. Don’t keep it secret. Get your birth partners on board, make sure they understand. Because in labour they’ll be advocating on your behalf.

A nice way of creating the final piece is a visual reminder for you and your team is the Positive Birth Movement pictures, available for free download here: http://www.pinterandmartin.com/vbp

Birth Plan Stockport Antenatal Preferences

The System Is Broken…And It’s Breaking Women

Now, I preface this with the fact I love the NHS. I really, really do. It’s a hundred times better than any privatised, corporate system could ever be and it has some of the most dedicated people working for it I’ve ever come across.

So why am I so angry with it?

Because it’s failing women.

Just some examples, from one single class yesterday.

One woman told me her midwife had told her she wasn’t allowed to write her birth plan until she’d been to her NHS antenatal class.

Not ‘you’ll know more after you’ve been to class’. Not ‘the appointment is scheduled for X weeks and you’ll have been to your class then so we’ll discuss it together after’. Not ‘get started now and we’ll go through it together after class in case there’s anything else you want to add to it’.

Not. Allowed.

Not allowed to have an opinion about HER birth at the time of HER choosing. Not allowed to exercise her absolute right to think, plan, decision-make over one of the biggest events of her life. Not allowed to create a tool that connects her to her baby, to her birth.

Language. Fucking. Matters.

And then, a conversation about augmentation of labour. A second-time mom asked why the NHS hadn’t given her this information, the information she needed to make her decisions. This is a mother who HAD BEEN THROUGH THIS PROCESS. She’d HAD the drip and ARM. And she hadn’t known why or what might happen. She asked me why she hadn’t been told this.

She actually wanted an answer.

What could I say?

I spend 9 hours officially (12 hours realistically) talking about it and many many many hours guiding them on top of that, and I barely scratch the surface. The new NHS parentcraft programme has a 2 hour session on labour. Two hours to learn how your body works, what medical assistance there is, to learn what might help you birth your baby.

‘Why don’t they tell us that accepting things has consequences?’

I don’t know. I know they SHOULD. I know I WANT them to. I know I’m glad for each and every woman who comes to me because they get those 12 (18…20…22….24…) hours of me repeating it’s your choice, you have the control, what are the benefits, what are the risks, what might it lead to, what if you say no, it’s your choice, IT’S YOUR CHOICE over and over and over and over and sometimes some of them believe it.

Our bodies are designed to do this but we’ve created these wonderful intervention techniques that help when our bodies don’t work perfectly or our babies need help and then we hold it secret so nobody knows what it’s really about. But then nobody trusts their bodies either because if they worked we wouldn’t have all these interventions would we and so these women, these poor, poor women are left with TWO HOURS of information and then they come out the other end lost and broken and feeling like they’ve failed because how could they possibly win if they’re not even in the same race?

I’m sure the new NHS programme has merit. It sounds like it’s a huge step forward, weaving in attachment and mental health and other vitally important things. But it’s not enough. And that needs to be recognised and if there’s no money to invest in preparing women for something that can impact the rest of their lives, their attachment with their baby, their relationships with their partners, family and friends, their own wellbeing (don’t forget that maternal suicide is THE most common cause of death after childbirth), their future family plans…if there’s no money to protect all of that then why the hell are we not making it commonplace for women to get this information from alternative sources? Why are we giving out fucking Bounty bags instead of educational resources? Why are we allowing Emma’s Diary to fill the screens of antenatal clinics instead of using them to signpost women to information that could save their mental and physical health? Why are we letting down some of the most vulnerable people we have in society?

I’m so angry about it. And so sad for them. It’s a horrendous, stupid broken mess of a system and it doesn’t get any better.

I’m an antenatal teacher because of this shit. Because I desperately don’t want people to go through what I went through. Because I want to stop women being too scared to have more babies, too scared to go back into the hospital that traumatised them, too scared to even THINK about their pregnancy because after pregnancy comes birth and I’ve done my very best to block out any thought about that because of the panic attacks it makes me have. I volunteer with the NHS in two different capacities to try and work within the system, to make it better, to stop breaking women, to stop failing them. I’m not a big corporation. I’m not a profit-making business or well-known monopolising charity. God (well, HMRC) knows I don’t do this for the money, I give away too many free places to women for that! I do it because you deserve better.

How Do We Calculate Dues Dates In Pregnancy

Pretty much as soon as you find out you’re pregnant you’re on google trying to work out when your baby will arrive (no judgement, been there ), this will be confirmed at your booking in appointment based on your last menstrual period date (it might be changed again if you have a dating scan but we’ll come to that another day).

But how do we get to the due date? Here in the UK the way we calculate the estimated due date (EDD) using the principles of Naegele’s formula where we add 7 days to the LMP, take off 3 months, then add a year. Or, add 280 days to the LMP. Simple

This formula was first published in the 1700s and was based on the biblical reference of pregnancy lasting 10 lunar months. So y’know, accurate and evidence-based. OH WAIT. Boerhaave, who FIRST came up with this, helpfully published his calculations with the description ‘count one week from the last period’ without specifying whether this was the beginning or the end of the period. Thanks for the help, Boerhaave, didn’t your teacher ever tell you to show your workings?

Naegele came along in the 1800s and ballsed up the calculation again by not clarifying what conception period he was talking about so someone else finally came along and actually laid out the workings – and added 7 days to the end of the period in the formula. Thank you Professor Bedford.

This probably explains why France’s EDDs are 41 weeks not 40 weeks. Not that French uteruses are intrinsically different to British ones.

Aside from the lack of clarity from the authors of the formula, what it also doesn’t do is take into account the length of your cycle – we know women don’t always ovulate on day 14 and we know not everyone has 28 day cycles. Eek, another flaw in the plan.

But why does it matter? Well, in theory it doesn’t because in the wise words of Call The Midwife (see image), babies will be in utero until they’re ready to not be.

And yet.

Yet when you start nearing your 40 week date the world and his wife plus every Tom, Dick and till operator will start quizzing you on “isn’t your baby here YET?!” (Yes Janet, I just have a cushion shoved up my jumper so I can be harassed by people like you every day) and your mom will start texting irritatingly often.

Not to mention that you’ll start getting pressure from your medical team to induce rather than wait for spontaneous labour.

And because you’ve had that arbitrary date in your head for 40 weeks you’ll be REALLY PISSED OFF when it comes and goes without a baby. I’ve had a +19 baby, believe.

If you’re nearing that 40 week date take a breath, book yourself some nice treats, go to the cinema alone a few times (and if you spill your bucket sized Sprite you could always try saying your waters broke for free tickets?) and enjoy those last few precious moments before your world changes beyond compare.

For the technical stuff: https://obgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/…/j.1471-0528.2000.tb…

Dates in Labour

When you’re pregnant you (hopefully!) get given loads of information about things you can do or things that might be offered to you to help the baby on their way earthside.

But rarely do people get told about the humble date.

As well as being utterly yum, dates have special qualities which can help labour progress. Eating around 7 dates a day from around 36 weeks pregnancy until after the placenta is birthed can…

– Help ripen and dilate the cervix: higher Bishop score and entering hospital at 4cm dilated rather than 3cm.

– Help shorten the early phase of labour: 510 minutes compared to 906 minutes.

– Help you achieve a vaginal birth rather than caesarean after induction: 47% of the sample had a vaginal birth compared to 28% of the control.

– Reduce your need for induction: 20% of date eaters had an induction compared to 45% of the control.

– Reduce the frequency of augmentation of labour (speeding things up once you’re in labour): 37% compared to 50%

– Reduce postpartum blood loss significantly even compared to those who receive artificial oxytocin: total average loss 163ml to 221ml.

Be careful if you’re diabetic!

Now these studies have their limitations; they’re small and other factors weren’t controlled or looked at but (unless you’re diabetic) then eating dates are unlikely to hurt and they might do some good. Even if not in labour, they’re bound to help with that first postpartum poo.

The studies also took place outside of the UK, where the birth system may be significantly different and with women who may have had strong opinions about their care anyway – for example they may be women who would refuse induction or augmentation at all costs regardless of the date eating.

Just to help you on your way…have a date recipe! https://www.superhealthykids.com/recipes/healthy-no-bake-snack-bars/