Almotamar.net - Yemen's parliament on Monday reviewed a report submitted by the parliament's Public Health and Population Committee on a draft law on safe motherhood and contains a text stipulating to give the working woman a childbirth leave with full salary for 60 days after birth giving. It also allows the woman permission of a two-hour rest at work daily to feed her child extending for two years.

The draft law banned the woman from desisting from breastfeeding her child without a medical reason along with instructing concerned authorities to issue a decision providing suitable rooms for children at government and private sector work places where suckling mothers work.

The law also prohibited any deformation of the female genitals, punishing who practices that for utmost six months imprisonment or a fine defined in the executive bill of the law.

According to the proposed motherhood law those who write marriage contracts must be certain of the man and the woman obtaining a medical certificate from specialised medical authorities showing their being subject to necessary checking. The draft law also gives the woman the right to postpone the first pregnancy in accord with the husband and to leave a period of two and three years between one pregnancy and the next beside granting her and her child the right to receive free of charge health care during pregnancy and birth giving and afterward from any public health institution, the ministry of health is obliged to provide vaccines, vitamins and salts.

Meanwhile, a number of MPs from the Yemeni Congregation for Reform (Islah) party parliamentary bloc rejected the draft law, demanding to return it to the health and carrying out the religious law committees for redrafting it and cancel some phrases bruising modesty, in an indication to phrases mentioning about deformation of the female genitals (circumcision).