On a live French sports broadcast last week, a presenter named France Pierron looked into the camera and asked, with genuine contempt, whether Belgian footballer Jeremy Doku was really going to leave the FIFA World Cup 2026 to attend the birth of his first child. "You're leaving just to cut an umbilical cord?" she said. Calling childbirth disgusting, she called fathers useless during delivery.
Of course, for a statement so crass, the presenter was suspended from her show within days and L'Equipe issued an apology. But the outrage on the internet is hardly lasted a few hours. The problem was located in one woman but people like Pierron did not invent those opinions, its generationally and systemically inherited. What she said on television is what employment contracts say in fine print and what policy frameworks encode in the gap between maternity leaves and paternity leaves.
While many criticised Doku's decision as letting his country down, asking what exactly is he going to do as a father there, that military men go to war and don't get to say goodbye to their loved ones, Doku did temporarily left the tournament to be with his wife who gave birth and has received overwhelming support from fans and fellow athletes around the world.
But paternity leaves should not be controversial. But the fact that it became an uproar tells you everything about the implicit cultural belief around the role of fathers. The popular image of the father in the delivery room culturally is comic- the man who faints, fumbles, gets in the way, doesn't know what to do. So, obviously why are they needed in the delivery room?
The scientific image of the father is rather different. Research on the paternal brain shows it undergoes measurable structural changes in response to engaged time with a newborn. The same rewiring we associate with maternal instinct happens in fathers too, despite their having none of the physical experiences of pregnancy or birth. Contrary to the popular views, parenting is neurological and is triggered by presence. It means that a father who is not in the room at the beginning does not simply miss a sentimental moment. He misses the biological window that makes instinctive caregiving possible.
Multiple longitudinal studies in the United States, Singapore, Germany and Norway show that fathers who take two or more weeks of leave at birth are measurably more involved in caregiving and development tasks through the first several years of child's life. Children of more present fathers show fewer behavioural problems, strong executive functioning, higher academic achievement.
India's Maternity Benefit Act mandates 26 weeks of paid leave for working mothers. This is among the more generous provisions in the region, and it is right that it exists. Central government male employees are entitled to 15 days of paternity leave, a figure established in 1972 and remains unchanged since. However, in the private sector, workers are entitled to nothing. There is no national law. Whether a father in Indian private sector, where overwhelming majority of the workforce is employed, receives any time off when his child is born depends entirely on what his employer chooses to offer. According to a data statistics, only 14 percent of Indian private companies have a formal paternity leave policy. The rest leave it to chance, goodwill, or the negotiation a man conducts with himself about whether asking will cost him something he cannot afford to lose.
Moreover, The Paternity and Parental Benefit Bill, 205, introduced by MP Supriya Sule, proposes eight week of paid paternity leave. It is a private member's bill and has not been taken up for serious parliamentary discussion. Beyond the provisions and existing paternity leaves on paper, data suggests men largely do not take it. Research consistently shows that a significant proportion of Indian male employees fear that taking paternity leave will be read by their managers as a signal of diminished professional commitment. It is bases itself of the notion that men who get ahead are the ones that are always available. Researchers call this the Fatherhood Penalty.
But this is not only an Indian men issue. As per a World Economic Forum report, despite generous paid paternity leave on paper, less than 2 percent of men in Japan and Korea actually use it as compared to 90 per cent of men in Sweden. In India, a Deloitte survey highlighted, 57 percent of male employees fear managers will view them negatively for taking leaves. In that sense, paternity leave functions as a test of whether or not men are serious enough not to use it.
Which brings us back to the idea why men wanting to be present during childbirth is undervalued by many in the society. It is based on the foundational assumption on which the role of the father is downplayed. We have built everything on the assumption that fathers are peripheral-- at least in the process of pregnancy. So when fathers like Doku prioritise personal commitment over professional and reject the age old notion of man as a just provider, it not only questions the hypocrisy of everyone who has been nodding along to the absent father narrative but also how we have hardly accepted that fatherhood is a professional modern man's legitimate priority.