Let's support leave etension to six months for preterm mothers

No child can often love a mother the way a mother loves her child. Yes, a mother’s love to her children is always exceptional and unconditional. Yes, children love their parents, but more often than not, their love is conditional.

A mother gives her love to the children without any conditions, especially when they are very young. That unconditional love creates a great foundation of emotional intimacy, a vital component of the whole essence of humanity.

Being a responsible mother is not an easy task. It comes with doses of laughter, tears, fulfilment and diverse emotions.

When a mother goes to the maternity ward to give birth, it is always a matter of life and death. The danger is real. Sometimes either the mother can leave the world, or it can be the baby or sometimes both. Yet, for the continuity of humankind, a mother has to do the needful, no matter how painful the process is.

After the greatest pain, the joy for most women comes after seeing one has brought to the universe a healthy baby! Yes she forgets all the pain, and starts having a new purpose in life. The bouncing baby needs the mother to bring him/her up!!

For mothers with preterm and low-birth-weight infants, it’s a long walk of fighting for their baby’s life and doing everything possible to have the baby be able to lead a normal life. As soon as a baby is born prematurely, s/he is at the risk of multiple complications like breathing, heart, brain, blood problems, and the list goes on and on.

You can imagine a mother has just given birth to a preterm baby, and the baby is breathing with a supporting machine. Yet, the mother has to be strong, keep praying, and all that. Thanks to modern medicine and super great doctors in some hospitals, such babies often survive and become great citizens.

In the past, in Africa’s settings, such infants most of the time did not survive.

And some communities had false beliefs that they brought bad luck to the family. So it used to be double pain for preterm mothers, who would be stigmatized and often mocked as not real women.

Sometimes back it was reported that a young mother in Arusha committed suicide after giving birth to a preterm baby. Why? Among other reasons probably it could be because of the misinformation and superstition which still rule part of our world. No wonder few people around us will openly admit they were born premature.

In the other world outside Africa, some of the most enduring geniuses like Albert Einstein, Sir Winston Churchill and even Charles Darwin, among so many others, are documented that they were born prematurely.

Recently, The Citizen Newspaper reported a new campaign seeking an extension of maternity leave to six months for mothers of preterm babies. At the moment, we have the Employment and Labour Relations Act of 2019, which categorically states a female worker should get 84 days of fully paid maternity leave.

Ms Doris Mollel, one of the ladies advocating for extension of maternity leave for preterm mothers, stated that “premature babies require extra care from both mothers and health workers.”

It’s reported that in Tanzania; out of 336,000 babies who are born prematurely, over 11,500 of them die each year.

It should be noted that, those premature babies that survive need special care, right from the hospital. Some of the premature babies take long to recover, and thus they might need the fully presence of their mothers in the first six months of their lives.

It’s prudent for policy makers to consider the six-month maternity leave for preterm mothers as basic for the wellbeing of those babies.