If you give birth via C-Section, doctors advise a 6 week recovery period, yet statutory paternity leave is just two weeks.

This brutal disconnect provides the spark for a powerful new campaign from Pregnant Then Screwed and The Dad Shift. 

The hard hitting nationwide out of home campaign labels UK paternity leave a ‘motherf*cker' that leaves mums recovering from major surgery, a C-section, alone and in pain, with no partner there to help in their 6 week recovery.

The campaign concept, art direction and copywriting was developed by the Creative Director Gemma Phillips. She has previously led successful campaigns such as Cry For Help and Career Shredder for Pregnant Then Screwed. 

The work successfully shines a light on the invisible struggle facing mothers who have had a major surgery in the midst of a mainstream media narrative which still shames women for not immediately ‘bouncing back’ after a bath. A barbaric narrative. 

Gemma Phillips, Creative Director, explained: “Lack of paternity leave doesn’t just screw over dads, it screws over mums too. We wanted to bring to life both the physical and mental scars that can be left when a mother isn’t supported in the early days post birth”. 

The out of home campaign is supported by impactful portraits of women who’ve recently had c-sections shot by Sane Seven, a leading portrait photographer and gender-equality artist. Seven has built a powerful creative legacy of images which have successfully challenged how women are represented today. Sane has shot high-profile women such as Angela Merkel, Helena Bonham Carter and Dame Donna Langley. 

Sane Seven, Photographer, explains: “Photography is most powerful when it makes people uncomfortable enough to start talking. That’s exactly what these images are designed to do."

The campaign is also boosted by social media activism, with hundreds of parents up and down the country placing ‘Mother F**ker’ stickers above c-section scars and on other symbols of how the country’s system let them down - on the cars they couldn’t drive, the car seats they couldn’t lift and the stairs they couldn’t climb.

Rachel Grocott, CEO of Pregnant Then Screwed, explained, “Women have been paying the price of rubbish paternity leave for decades. For many women, physical recovery alone can take months - especially those who’ve had a complex delivery or required surgery - and so a system that forces partners back to work too soon is devastating. You then add on top the mental load of caring for a newborn, the sleepless nights, and this really is a perfect storm. And all that’s without even mentioning the long-term impacts on things like careers, where the international evidence proves again and again that rebalancing care is the best way to support women to thrive in the workplace.

She continues: “We need to make parental leave make sense. We need to give dads and partners decent leave, to match that of mums, and we need to pay it properly too. Asking parents to survive on parental pay that is significantly below the national living wage is inhumane - you’d think the government has too many babies, not that we have a birth rate crisis, given how little support there is to help people to become parents today.” 

The campaign underlines how important it is to ensure that dads can support mothers in their recovery. 

George Gabriel, Co-Founder of The Dad Shift, explained:  “It’s hard to put into words just how shit it feels as a dad, knowing you can’t be there for your partner as they care for your baby while recovering from major surgery.”

He continued: “The UK’s rubbish paternity offer means over 230,000 mothers are left every year to fend for themselves and their babies during their post-operative recovery because their partners are forced back to work. Imagine an entire city the size of Peterborough or Portsmouth, that’s the scale of the failure in public policy we’re talking about.”

The campaign successfully shines a light on an issue which has remained in the shadows for far too long. Far from being a source of shame, a C-Section is the reality for many women, a fact that policy has been all too slow to catch up with.