Paid family leave must be available to all
Sixteen years ago, I went into early labor, was prescribed hospital bed rest and then gave birth to my son three months early. He stayed in the neonatal intensive care unit for two months, and it was one of the hardest times of my and my husband’s lives.
I visited the hospital twice a day and pumped breast milk frequently at home while trying to recover mentally and physically from a very difficult birth. My husband worked and visited our son in the evenings.
When our baby came home, we didn’t want to send him to day care for the first year because he was at high risk for infections like RSV (respiratory syncytial virus). My parental leave ran out by the time my son reached 40 weeks gestational age, and I was lucky and grateful to have managers who worked with me to figure out how to give me the time I needed to care for my family, allowed me to work part time for nearly a year and let me come back to work full time when I was ready.
I’m not alone
Two and a half years later, the same employer accommodated me again when my daughter was born nearly two months early.
Without their understanding, I could have been out of a job, twice – in the same shoes as Marissa Hughes, the employee who recently accused the trendy Texas bamboo-baby clothing company Kyte Baby of letting her go after she requested to work remotely while her adopted baby was treated in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).
After outraged former customers filmed themselves throwing out Kyte Baby outfits and vowing to boycott the company, the CEO apologized twice and the company has said it is reviewing and updating its policies.
The TikTok-fueled controversy showed that consumer pressure can work to make companies create better policies, and perhaps other companies will follow suit. But boycotting Kyte Baby or any other employer won’t change the problem at the crux of this story:
Individual employers and families shouldn’t have to figure out how to work around America’s shoddy systems and policies.
And in a country where 1 in 10 babies is born prematurely, parents shouldn’t have to go back to work if their child is in the NICU or needs care in the first months because they’re worried about running out of leave.
We all want to support parents through pregnancy and birth, but in the United States we don’t have the systems to adequately do that. We’re the only high-income nation that does not have nationwide, mandatory, paid leave for parents after a child’s birth or adoption.
That’s a problem for all new families, but especially when pregnancy and birth don’t go as planned, which is unfortunately the case for too many parents in our nation.
We have the highest maternal death rate among affluent countries, and our premature birth rate is also high. On its annual infant and maternal health report card, the March of Dimes last year gave the nation a D+. If my child came home with that grade, I’d tell them to work harder.
Unequal short-term disability
As a nation, we’re not working hard enough to care for women and babies either before or after birth. And we’re not offering leave to everyone equally.
Our Family and Medical Leave Act means that some employees get up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave with job protection. And according to the Center for American Progress, only 11states and Washington, D.C., have passed paid family and medical leave laws.
More than half of Americans lack access to short-term disability insurance often used to pay for maternity leave, and those who make less money or work part time have the least access.
In other words, our policies are an inequitable patchwork. And families like Hughes’ and mine that face birth complications have needs that are not well addressed by government and company policies.
Paid family leave has been found to have many benefits for child and maternal health and child development, including reducing the likelihood of preterm and low-weight births.
We need paid, long-term family leave policies that ensure families can take the time they need to care for and bond with their infants.
Vulnerable babies and families
If we don’t put the right systems in place, we lose the opportunity to nurture families at a crucial time and enable them to thrive.
Last month, the House bipartisan working group on paid leave released a draft framework that aims to make leave available to more people through a combination of policies, including tax incentives for small businesses.
That’s a start, but of course a draft plan is a long way from passing a bill through a divided Congress.
In its news release announcing that it would be revisiting its policies, Kyte Baby said that it “needs to stand by their values of being a woman owned, family company.”
Like people everywhere, Americans love our families. Let’s show our values by putting pressure on policymakers to make paid family leave a reality for everyone who needs it, including the most vulnerable babies and their families.