A word on that pregnancy discrimination

Soon your child will be disabled. Something along those lines is what Bert Huisjes would have said to Roos Moggre. Only after her delivery would the nature of her contract be examined. Because suppose she had a disabled child, then she would have to take care of it at home and then he would have ‘another problem’.

Roos Moggre says today on her Instagram that she reported all of this to KPMG, who conducted an investigation into the situation at WNL, but that she was not allowed to read the contents of the report. And then Bert Huisjes' pawn was placed in another prominent spot.

Something like empathy
I would like to say a lot. That there is such a thing as insurance in the Netherlands. That first. And something like empathy, which perhaps should come first. And then I would maybe want to tell Bert Huisjes about my pregnancy announcements, which went like this.

A long time ago I worked at the magazine Beau Monde. John Lukken was the editor-in-chief and I was his deputy. John and I formed a stable tandem. He could wonderfully hang around the lamps in Reguliersdwarsstraat while coming up with and arranging the most amazing reports. I, still childless and in a stable relationship, was the yin of his yang. Usually around eight o'clock at the office, I worked out his ideas and together we ensured that it took shape.
Because we worked so closely together, I felt I had to tell him that I had stopped taking the pill. Just so he could prepare a bit for the idea that I would be out for a while. Or maybe even forever. Because you never know how someone comes back from maternity leave. That has nothing to do with the state of the child. A primal urge to parent can also take over you. You don't know how life goes, and that makes it, in my opinion, so fascinating. After all, slavery has been abolished.

“But May, how nice!”
But still I felt a restless little itch to share it with him. It felt a bit like betrayal. I found my love and our future child more important than my work. So I shuffled the cardboard coffee cups a bit and flattened the bulging edge when I told him that the pill strip had ended up in the proverbial toilet. I believe I closed my eyes for a moment to avoid seeing his reaction. When I opened them, he was standing in front of me. With his arms wide, ready to hug me. “But May, how nice!” When I asked if he really didn't mind, he replied: “I've been taking this into account since the moment I hired you. You're a young woman in a healthy relationship, what did I expect?” And so I slipped into a lovely maternity leave that could start a month earlier and during which we found a shape for the period afterwards together.

“I canceled Paris and your leave starts NOW.”
My third pregnancy was a bit more complicated. I had just found out that our oldest daughter has an intellectual disability and autism was. Whether our third daughter would be “damage-free”, I did not know. I worked full-time, had two daughters already, and was quite pregnant. When I heard during one of my last visits to the midwife that my blood pressure was exceptionally low, I texted my manager. Whether I perhaps didn't to Paris need to attend that meeting. The midwife didn't think it was responsible. She asked how low my blood pressure was. That initially felt like distrust. But before I had even answered, she texted: “I canceled Paris and your leave starts now.”
Expanding life is a terrifying, big step. You don't know what you're getting, you don't know how it will be. I hope that you can someday be like my managers back then. Who knows, Bert. Who knows.