I will advocate the extension of the maternity leave from three to six months or more because women have seriously been underserved by medical systems that are supposed to give them both equity and confidence in their healthcare.

I think equal maternity and paternity leave are hugely important. How are we going to teach men to be equals if the average woman takes three months and the average man takes two weeks?

Well, I think the six-week (ban) is too short. It has to be more time. So…and I’ve told them that, I want more weeks. I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks…. I believe in exceptions for life of the mother, —if you look— incest, rape.

We should also make sure that parents have ample time to spend with their children. Our lack of family leave for new parents is barbaric, antifamily, sexist, regressive, economically irrational, and just plain stupid. Studies have shown that robust family leave policies improve children’s health and heighten women’s employment rates because they don’t feel they need to leave work entirely in order to be successful. The United States is one of only four out of 196 countries in the world — and the only industrialized country — that does not have federally mandated time off from work for new mothers.

Parliament is very unfriendly for a woman with a child. We are talking about it and we would like to see more women with children getting into parliament and then performing their parental duties without hindrance, without neglecting the children."

I went to the labor office to submit my maternity leave papers, "Two men there told me to wait outside while they handled it for me.

One way in which feminists try to remedy the disparity is to legally mandate paid leave for female employees who give birth, even if a company is struggling to stay afloat. Such laws provide powerful incentives for bosses-male or female-not to hire women to begin with. Of course, it's easy to support such legislation until you end up getting laid off because your boss was losing too much money by paying absent employees.

I wanted to increase the work requirement. I said, for instance, that even if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, "Well, that's heartless." And I said, "No, no, I'm willing to spend more giving day care to allow those parents to go back to work. It'll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work."

Women should be given more space to exercise their rights in the country.

We must — we must — we must increase our bust!

It is important that women’s needs, aspirations and realities become central drivers of policies and programmes to increase maternal health care access and utilisation.

It is tempting to linger over some of the confusions and contradictions in the various pronouncements at the conference. We need to reduce immigration because immigrants place too great a pressure on public services and housing. But we also need women to give birth to more children. Presumably, these will not be children who will be born in hospitals, attend schools and live in houses.
We need more British people to work so we need fewer immigrants. But we certainly should not be funding childcare support to help mothers enter the labour market. In fact, we are not that keen on mothers entering the labour market at all.

(Television) If women want time off to bear children, they can't expect to be treated as equals. (Sylvia) Okay, give men time off to bear children.

We want to defend the very many gains made by trade unions across Europe that have brought us better working conditions - longer holidays, less discrimination and maternity and paternity leave