Skimping on life

Over the last few days, the Government has been debating the issue of cutting the duration of the maternity leave and lowering the allowances for mothers of newborn children. The opposition in the government coalition and cynical political considerations caused the final decision to be postponed several times. The rage of spending cuts is starting to claim its first victims. The sick are sentenced to death, and the birth of new children isn"t being encouraged in any way whatsoever. Even in the most primitive societies, the care for life comes first, and this is would be even more expected for a people which is supposedly predominantly Christian.

Sometimes crimes may be committed due to incompetence or due to fractured logic. No matter how deep the crisis goes and regardless of the economic calculations of the current government, there are some steps that shouldn"t be taken in any way.

More to the point, people with AIDS are being sentenced to death because the state can"t provide them with drugs any longer. In many counties, they were basically forced to interrupt the treatment that was keeping them alive. It has come to this hard to imagine situation because the money for drugs ran out, and the Ministry of Healthcare did not provide additional funds. These disruptions make the treatment more expensive. Things are even more dramatic in the case of those people that got sick while they were in the hospital - the system that sentenced them to death now denies them treatment. People with cancer are facing a similar situation.

The measures which concern the shortening of the paid maternity leave and the cut of the allowance for raising newborns. This amounts to a death knell for Romania"s birthrate. After minister Botiş announced the planned measures for the first time, which caused a hostile reaction even within his own party, heated discussions took place over the past few days on the matter. The proposed measures would further reduce the birthrate, which has been on a constant decline anyway (over the past 15 years, Romania"s population decreased by 1.5 million people).

According to data from the Ministry of Finance, 198,000 people are currently on maternity leave, out of which more than 90,000 have children with ages over 1 year. Had the government approved the measure proposed by the IMF to reduce the duration of the maternity leave by 1 year, 100,000 mothers would have no longer received the maternity allowance starting in 2011. According to labor legislation, only people that paid income taxes on professional activities for 12 months in the year prior to the birth of the child qualify for child allowance. The alternative proposed by Labor Minister Ioan Botiş (mothers on maternity leave would receive 85% of their wage for a year and encouraging them to return to work in the second year while receiving 500 lei each month in the second year), would help the budget save 465 million lei. That may seem like a sizeable amount, but when looking at the moral considerations, it is not. The discussions on this matter are far from over.

Of course, the question arises: if the state can"t take care of the children and of the sick, what purpose does it serve?