Week unclouded. Stopping social media abuse, wellbeing matters, and miscarriage leave first step
News can be overwhelming to follow. Important news bites can get lost amongst all the hard and breaking news. Here are a couple of the headlines from this week and beyond that impact women.
First step towards miscarriage leave
Photo by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash
This week saw the first step in the introduction of miscarriage leave for women who live in Malta - with a conference on the subject.
A miscarriage is the loss of a pregnancy during the first 23 weeks, while a stillbirth is the loss of a baby after that stage. Each year, about 300 miscarriages occur in Malta, but real numbers could be as high as 1,000 due to underreporting. Women who have a miscarriage have to take sick leave.
During the conference, that will now be followed up by technical evaluations and further consultation, various points emerged that included:
Regardless of the pregnancy stage when the loss occurs, losing a baby is deeply painful.
Miscarriage leave is essential to allow women to heal and grieve. The loss is physical and psychological, as it brings with it the loss of the dream of parenthood and fears of never becoming a parent.
Government said it will foot all the costs.
The current practice of placing pregnant women and those going through pregnancy loss in the same ward can be deeply distressing and emotionally overwhelming.
The importance of including fathers or partners in the leave, as they too suffer and need to grieve while supporting their partner.
The importance of helping workplaces understand basic psychology and empathy.
Wellbeing will matter when calculating Malta’s success
Photo by Hennie Stander on Unsplash
The success of Malta’s performance, as a country, will finally not look only at financials - but will factor in how the people of Malta live overall.
This was announced this week as the government unveiled its Vision 2050 - the government’s vision for the country over the next 25 years.
For the first time, Malta will look beyond Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to measure its success. It will focus on tracking wellbeing, disposable income and education to measure its progress in the years to come.
GDP is like a report card for a country's economy. It measures how much money is being made by all the people and businesses in a country over a year.
Plans to regulate social media abuse that often impacts women
Photo by Maxim Tolchinskiy on Unsplash
The government is working on addressing the lack of legislation that caters for growing cases of social media abuse and online violence.
This was announced by Parliamentary Secretary for Equality Rebecca Buttigieg. She said that, while Malta has laws against hate crimes, there’s still no dedicated legislation addressing harmful online content. She spoke during a seminar organised by the University of Malta about Women, Gender and Politics.
“This legislation needs to address emerging technologies like AI, which is now being used to create deepfakes targeting women,” she was reported as saying on Times of Malta. She added that a committee will be appointed to explore and recommend new measures.
Share your news
Do you have some women-related news you want to share? Or perhaps an idea or topic you feel deserves to be spoken about and ‘unclouded’? Or an inspiring story to share?
If so you can comment below or send an email on hello@womanunclouded.com so we can discuss how to get your voice heard.