Im­ple­ment pa­ter­ni­ty leave for men. That was the call yes­ter­day to Gov­ern­ment from In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Rolph Bal­go­b­in in his con­tri­bu­tion to the Sen­ate's de­bate on the Ma­ter­ni­ty Pro­tec­tion Bill. This ex­tends ma­ter­ni­ty leave from 13 to 14 weeks. Bal­go­b­in said: "We give two days off for peo­ple when some­one close to you dies, so give a day or two off to the fa­thers.

Let them have some time. If you get time to bury the dead you should get time to cel­e­brate birth." Pay­ing trib­ute to for­mer In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Louise Horne, who has turned 100 years old, Bal­go­b­in not­ed Horne, in her book, had writ­ten about a US bases set up in T&T and chil­dren fa­thered with lo­cal women by sol­diers from those base .

He said one could de­duce Horne was say­ing women had had re­la­tion­ships with those men and the men had left. He said he thought that was a very pow­er­ful no­tion Horne had pre­sent­ed. "She ad­vanced it as a pos­si­ble ex­pla­na­tion for why we are so ac­cus­tomed to­day with this phe­nom­e­non of fa­ther­less chil­dren," he said.

Say­ing T&T had a "cri­sis of male­ness," he said the so­ci­ety need­ed to ad­dress that. Rather than lay­ing the bur­den on moth­ers, he said fa­thers should have a day or two off as well to cel­e­brate the birth of a child. He said de­mo­graph­ics showed many T&T women were "mak­ing" chil­dren lat­er and from his ob­ser­va­tions and re­search it ap­peared the lat­er in life a woman had a child the greater her need for a re­cu­per­a­tive pe­ri­od.

He added: "As crass as it may sound, some­one in their teens can have chil­dren and be on their feet the next day. "But when you are in your late 20s and par­tic­u­lar­ly 30s it be­comes hard­er and hard­er to re­cov­er and we are hav­ing chil­dren in a con­text where fam­i­ly bonds are be­ing strained.

He said fa­ther­less­ness had con­tributed to ris­ing crime and if ram­pant crim­i­nal­i­ty, which ap­peared to be close­ly cor­re­lat­ed with fa­ther­less­ness, was to be solved, it had to start with the bill. Not­ing Win­ston "Gyp­sy" Pe­ters' (now min­is­ter) Lit­tle Black Boys ca­lyp­so, Bal­go­b­in said in many cas­es of youths be­ing killed, there were no signs of fa­thers weep­ing at graves but main­ly moth­ers and fe­male rel­a­tives.