Whose Denial? Gimme a Break

Who is responsible when a woman makes the decision to have a child, but also decides she wants to be a part of the workforce? Aside from those women who have little choice because they haven't adequate financial support to help raise children. We're talking professional class woman here. A woman, who as a lawyer, has taken umbrage because when she adopted her two children she was not given equal benefits the Government of Canada legislated on behalf of biological mothers.

A woman in British Columbia has gone to the Supreme Court of Canada to hear her appeal after a lower court ruled she wasn't entitled to maternity benefits because of her status as an adopter of children, not a biological mother. The ruling brought down last week was not in her favour. Patti Tomasson, the Federal Court of Appeal ruled, was not entitled to 15 weeks of additional employment insurance benefits in the wake of the adoption process.

Current provisions for biological parents grant 35 weeks of paid leave. Mothers have the option of combining parental and maternity benefits for a total of up to 50 weeks of paid leave. I'd have thought I'd died and gone to heaven if, forty years ago when I had my children, anything remotely similar to these benefits were offered. Somehow, we managed.

But Ms. Tomasson, the mother of an 8 and a 3-year old feels this ruling to be acutely unfair. She claims the ruling 'challenges her to explain to her daughters why they were not allowed to spend as much time with their mother at birth' compared with non-adopted children. The mind boggles. This woman feels she has to explain to her daughters why she wasn't paid out of employment benefits to enable her to spend more time with her children?

This was not her decision? She opted to return to the workplace rather than stay at home longer with her daughters. This was a value judgement. She quite obviously felt it was more important for her to be at her office, pursuing her career, than spending time with her children. Yet she is placing responsibility for her own shortcomings as a value-oriented mother anywhere but with herself.

"I am disappointed [with the decision]. I started this action because I couldn't tell my first daughter about how adoption was perceived in Canada without saying that I had been discriminated against because I was an adoptive mother." How disingenuous can you get, how utterly without social conscience, how self-servingly, cloyingly hypocritical!

These children came to her as newborns. She had a generous amount of employment insurance time with them. Then it was her decision to return to work for whatever her reasons. But they were her reasons. It was her decision. Just as it was her decision to adopt children. The State is not, cannot be, responsible for all aspects of peoples' lives. People must assume responsibility for their choices, for their values, and not ascribe responsibility where it does not lie.

I don't want my tax dollars to support the vain and irresponsible decisions of other people, who see more value in leaving their children to pursue a career than in remaining with them for the 15 additional weeks they claim were owing them."What's most critical is that there is a special thing occurring between the mother and the child at that time - that is, the attachment and the bonding process.

"That is happening between mother and child regardless of whether or not the mother is recovering from pregnancy", stated Ms. Tomasson's lawyer. No one contests that argument. But bonding with one's children and the time taken to achieve that state is in the decision-making hands of the mother. The mother, in this particular instance, whose professional life made claims that appeared to supersede the needs of her children.

Bloody cheek.