Kathmandu. KATHMANDU: The government has prepared a draft proposal to provide six months of maternity leave by amending the ‘Safe Motherhood and Reproductive Health Rights Act-2075 BS’. The draft of the new bill prepared by the Ministry of Health and Food Hygiene also proposes strict action against abortion. <\/p>\n
According to the amendment to Section 13, a pregnant woman will be entitled to maternity leave for six months and 180 days. As per the existing Act, there was a provision for at least 98 days of maternity leave. Also, as per sub-section 4, there is a clarification on 98 days of full paid maternity leave. <\/p>\n
The proposed amendment bill proposes extension of maternity leave, criminalizing violence against pregnant women, prioritizing reproductive health services during disasters and severe penalties for forced abortions. <\/p>\n
Clause 12 (a) has been added to the bill to completely prohibit the use of physical or mental torture or inciting violence on women from pregnant to postpartum periods. This issue was not explicitly included in the previous Act. The new bill defines it as a punishable offence. <\/p>\n
Clause 29 (a) has been made mandatory for health institutions to provide services such as safe motherhood, emergency delivery, emergency newborn services and family planning with priority during natural and non-natural disasters. For this, telemedicine and modern technology can be used. There was no legal provision in the previous Act regarding prioritizing reproductive health services during disasters. <\/p>\n
Clause (c) (1) of Section 25 is added to the clause (c) 1 and if it is not sent to another health institution knowing that treatment is not possible in one’s own health institution, it will be considered a legal offense. <\/p>\n
Earlier, there was a lack of provision to hold health institutions or health workers responsible for not referring them on time. <\/p>\n
If an abortion occurs as a result of coercion, intimidation, inducement, or anger, it will be considered a forced abortion. \u00a0If the child is born alive during an abortion and dies immediately, it will be considered an abortion. \u00a0Attempts to kill a pregnant woman will be punished with imprisonment up to 15 years or a fine of up to Rs 100,000 for miscarriage of 25 weeks or more. Penalties range from 12 weeks to 12 weeks, 12 to 25 weeks, and 1 year to 5 years for gestation over 25 weeks. <\/p>\n
According to the amendment to Sections 6 and 18, both health institutions and health workers providing abortion services must be listed for safe maternity services. In addition, health institutions should provide dignified maternity services.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kathmandu. KATHMANDU: The government has prepared a draft proposal to provide six months of maternity leave by amending the ‘Safe Motherhood and Reproductive Health Rights Act-2075 BS’. The draft of the new bill prepared by the Ministry of Health and Food Hygiene also proposes strict action against abortion. According to the amendment to Section 13, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":229921,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45031,45195,45159],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-banner-news-en","category-health-insurance-en","category-news-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.insurancekhabar.com\/ikbrapi\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.insurancekhabar.com\/ikbrapi\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.insurancekhabar.com\/ikbrapi\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.insurancekhabar.com\/ikbrapi\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.insurancekhabar.com\/ikbrapi\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309042"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/english.insurancekhabar.com\/ikbrapi\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309043,"href":"https:\/\/english.insurancekhabar.com\/ikbrapi\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309042\/revisions\/309043"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.insurancekhabar.com\/ikbrapi\/wp\/v2\/media\/229921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.insurancekhabar.com\/ikbrapi\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.insurancekhabar.com\/ikbrapi\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.insurancekhabar.com\/ikbrapi\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}