This baby's parents should get some paid leave, dammit.
It's no secret that the United States has
horrifyingly bad parental leave policies. As in, no guaranteed paid leave at all, unlike every other developed nation, and despite
widespread popular support among Americans. That failure of policy leads to brutal outcomes for new mothers, their children, and their families. According to a new analysis of a 2012 survey done for the Department of Labor, focusing on
women who took family leave to care for a new baby:
Nearly 12 percent of those women took off only a week or less. Another 11 percent took between one and two weeks off. That means that about 23 percent—nearly 1 in 4—of the women interviewed were back at work within two weeks of having a child.
That doesn't just mean women are losing out on time to bond with their babies. It doesn't just mean they're paying for child care. It means they're returning to work before they are physically recovered from giving birth. Sharon Lerner writes:
Tracy Malloy-Curtis, a fundraiser at a nonprofit in New York City, could have taken more time off, unpaid but with job security, after she had a baby a few years back. (“It’s a civil rights organization,” she explains, though she doesn’t want to name it because she still works in the field.) Instead, Malloy-Curtis, who is 43, married, and the primary breadwinner in her family, went back five and a half weeks after having a son—and a complicated C-section—for fear she otherwise could not afford to pay her mortgage and cover the other basic costs of her life.
“Physically, I was a wreck,” she says. An infection around her C-section wound hadn’t yet healed when she went back to work. “I was still bleeding, my incision wasn’t closed.” Pus dripped down her leg under her work clothes.
The physical hardship is compounded by other effects of going back to work too soon:
One national study of 1,762 mothers found that a one-week increase in maternity leave was associated with a 5 to 6 percent reduction in depressive symptoms from six to 24 months after birth. Another found that women who took less than eight weeks of paid leave experienced more depression than those who had longer leaves and were in worse health overall. Mothers who work more than 40 hours a week, as Long was, were more likely to be depressed than those who worked 40 hours or less, according to a study by Child Trends, a research center.
The lack of a reasonable parental leave policy, predictably, makes inequality that much harsher:
The educational divide between those who took shorter and relatively longer leaves is striking: 80 percent of college graduates took at least six weeks off to care for a new baby, but only 54 percent of women without college degrees did so.
And low-income women often have less predictable work schedules and work on their feet, doubling down on the damage of inequality.
President Obama and
congressional Democrats have pushed for improved policies, but parental leave is on the long, long list of popular, beneficial policies that won't happen as long as Republicans are in a position to block them.