Single parents should get as much paid leave as couples, Spanish court rules
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Solo parents in Spain can request the same total amount of paid parental leave that couples are entitled to.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Jose Bautista, Amelia Nierenberg
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MADRID – Single parents in Spain can request the same total amount of paid parental leave that couples are entitled to, a regional court has ruled, in a case that could be a game changer for the large number of one-parent families in the country.
The decision, by a court in the south-eastern region of Murcia in January, is the first to stem from a November ruling by Spain’s constitutional court that barred discrimination against children born into single-parent families.
“The duration and intensity of the need for care and attention of a newborn is the same regardless of the family model into which they were born,” the constitutional court wrote in its decision, which the regional court cited.
In practice, it means that solo parents can request the full amount of paid leave that Spanish couples are entitled to – six weeks of mandatory leave that must be taken together, plus an additional 10 for each parent, a total of 16 weeks per parent. For a single person serving as both parents, that adds up to 32 weeks of paid leave, according to the regional court’s ruling.
Ms Carla Vall, a Barcelona-based lawyer who is an expert on gender, said that new parents in other parts of Spain could cite the Murcia court’s decision in applying for the benefit. “Now this doctrine means that the rest of the courts are going to adopt this reading of rights,” she said in a telephone interview.
Spain, which has one of the lowest fertility rates in the European Union, has for decades tried to encourage more births, including offering incentives such as tax deductions and a child bonus – with little success. Spain also recently increased the leave available to fathers.
The court case was brought by Ms Silvia Pardo Moreno, 44, who joined the ranks of single mothers in January 2022, when she gave birth to a daughter in Murcia. Ms Pardo, a part-time worker in an emergency services company, requested 32 weeks of leave from social security, arguing that her daughter should get the same amount of care as her peers.
Ms Pardo’s request was denied. So she left her 4-month-old daughter in day care to go back to work after 16 weeks.
“There were no children in day care at that age, because the others had the right to have their parents look after them for longer,” she said in an interview after the ruling.
