The super-short maternity leave of French Justice Minister Rachida Dati is stirring debate over how to juggle a high-powered political career with the demands of motherhood.
The 43-year-old minister has been a hot topic of discussion since she returned to work last week only five days after the caesarian birth of her daughter Zohra.
After stepping out of a Paris maternity clinic, Dati arrived smiling and spruced up for a Cabinet meeting at the Elysee presidential palace.
While women’s groups say Dati set a bad example, many of her fellow female politicians admit they too would have opted for a quick return to work: Politics, they say, requires 100-percent commitment.
“Being back on the job only five days after a caesarian is too soon, there’s no doubt about that,” said former presidential candidate Segolene Royal, who in 1992 became France’s first pregnant minister.
“But this exceptional duty requires exceptional behavior,” she said.
A prominent Socialist, Royal took a swipe at French President Nicolas Sarkozy for choosing to announce a major justice reform on the day Dati left the maternity clinic and said he was trying to steal her thunder.
“I understand that Rachida Dati felt that she had to be at the president’s side” when he announced justice reforms, Royal said.
She also said she sought to hide her pregnancy when she was environment minister.
France prides itself for progressive social policies that give women 16 weeks of paid maternity leave, but these laws do not apply to ministers and elected officials.
Higher Education Minister Valerie Pecresse, a mother of three, won broad approval from the left and right when she suggested extending those legal provisions to women in politics.
“In the current system, Rachida Dati did not have choice and I think I would have done the same thing,” said Pecresse, who called for new legislation to give mayors, deputies and ministers the right to the same maternity leave.
But family affairs minister Nadine Morano countered that there was no need for new legislation and that a minister could ask the president to grant her maternity leave by decree.
“There is no need to be a slave to politics,” commented Roger Karoutchi, a senior member of the governing UMP party.
But he said 16 weeks of maternity leave “is nevertheless a very, very long time.”
Amid the brouhaha, some voices have argued that Dati’s choices as a new mother are nobody’s business but her own.
“Leave Rachida alone,” fired former first lady Bernadette Chirac. “She just had a beautiful baby and this is her private life.”
The new leader of the Workers’ Struggle party, Nathalie Arthaud, said the debate over Dati’s maternity leave was bourgeois chatter, telling politicians to focus instead on the plight of “cashiers, office staff and workers.”
Dati shot to prominence in 2007, when she became the first politician of north African origin named to a senior French government post.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
TIT-FOR-TAT: The arrest of Filipinos that Manila said were in China as part of a scholarship program follows the Philippines’ detention of at least a dozen Chinese The Philippines yesterday expressed alarm over the arrest of three Filipinos in China on suspicion of espionage, saying they were ordinary citizens and the arrests could be retaliation for Manila’s crackdown against alleged Chinese spies. Chinese authorities arrested the Filipinos and accused them of working for the Philippine National Security Council to gather classified information on its military, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this week, citing state security officials. It said the three had confessed to the crime. The National Security Council disputed Beijing’s accusations, saying the three were former recipients of a government scholarship program created under an agreement between the
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate