“O cuidado paterno é oneroso para o país”: a resistência legislativa à regulamentação e ampliação da licença paternidade no Brasil

Abstract

This work investigates the slowness of the State in the face of the lack of regulation in law of paternity leave in Brazil. Paternity Leave, a demand from feminist and women's movements, was recognized as a social right through the 1988 Constitution, which deals in its Article 7, paragraph XIX, with its determination and the need for regulation in law that stipulates the time to be granted. In the year following the approval of the Magna Carta, the Transitory Constitutional Provisional Acts determine in their article 10, item 1, that until the law comes to discipline such right, 5 days must be granted to the father. However, in 33 years of the Constitution, the law that would regulate such a right, possibly also dealing with its expansion, never came. Based on this observation, the question arises: what obstacles are there to the delay in dealing with the issue by the Brazilian legislature? For this, mixed research methods were used, through a first phase of quantitative studies and a second phase of qualitative studies. In the quantitative phase, the analysis takes place longitudinally, in order to identify which are the projects forwarded on the subject, their characteristics, quantity and obstacles faced, in order to draw a general panorama. In the qualitative phase, the applied technique consists of content analysis by statement, using as a sample, the documents referring to the processing of bill 3539/2008, and the Laws that institute the Citizen Company Program and the Legal Framework for Early Childhood. It is concluded that although the debate has gained strength and constancy in Congress in the last decade, the paths for the approval of the agenda are complex, and there are mainly bureaucratic obstacles to its advancement. The theme has raised important debates and, after the approval of the Citizenship Company and the Legal Framework for Early Childhood, it seems to have gained capillarity in civil society, pointing to changes, albeit timid, in family configurations and recognition of the role of the father in care work.