In contrast to women in paid employment, self-employed women are not entitled to maternity benefits under the Maternity Protection Act. Dr Rosemarie Kay reported at the Federal-Länder Committee on Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in Berlin that around 27,000 self-employed women give birth to a child every year. Only around a quarter of them voluntarily in-sured their own loss of income during the maternity protection periods in 2022 through their statutory (GKV) or private (PKV) health insurance.