The Time to Pass Paid Leave Is Now

glamour.com:

and sheer exhaustion, despite the many women and birthing people who have often gone through intense physical and emotional trauma during pregnancy and childbirth—tears or cuts around their vagina and in the perineum, long labors, C-sections, bleeding for weeks afterwards, infections, their children needing medical treatment, and more—there is .Whether you give birth, or have a child through adoption, surrogacy, sperm or egg donation, IVF, or more, if you work, you are afforded no federally supported paid time off.Yes, if you are employed by an organization with , the allows you to take 12 weeks off without losing your job, to recover from serious illness, or to care for a newborn, an adoptive child, or a family member with serious health conditions—but it is unpaid.And that’s it.

You have to get lucky, with an employer who happens to have a . Or you’re not lucky. And either you earn enough to put aside money to , or you don’t, and for each day that you are not at work, each day that you are physically recovering from childbirth, or exhausted from raising a newborn, or simply wanting to be at home and bonding with your child, you and your family fall into debt or eat away at savings.This is a problem that threatens the entire construct of the family in this country.

But also, make no mistake, it —and disproportionately women of color, women in low-income jobs, and women in service and domestic industries—the most.

In 2019 only 19% of workers in the US had access to paid family leave via their employers. For the lowest quarter of wage earners, most of whom are women, this fell to 9%.It is as depressing as it is unsurprising that returns to work within two weeks of giving birth.