Being With Your Newborn Isn’t "Progressive." It’s Normal.
Being With Your Newborn Isn’t "Progressive." It’s Normal.
It's time to stop politicizing basic humanity.
This week’s post is by contributor Timothy Wood.
Paid parental leave is normal. And we’re not just talking about “enlightened” Europe. Uruguay gives 14 weeks of paid maternity leave. In fact, over 120 countries provide paid maternity leave, including Algeria, Barbados, Belize, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Laos, Mozambique, Nepal, Nicaragua, and Sudan. Not exactly a list of world-beaters. Hell, Morocco provides 15 days of paid paternity leave. The US, by contrast, provides no paid parental leave nationally — one of only six countries in the world that doesn't. Here, it’s something that you might get if you can negotiate it with your employer, or if you win the lottery of living in the handful of states that have passed their own laws. Chances are, you’ll be among the three quarters of Americans without it. This isn’t normal, but neither is our definition of normal. Paid parental leave should be a broadly popular centrist position with resounding bipartisan support, but for some reason, when I talk about it I get called a leftist. I’m not on the left. I’m just normal. The only difference between you and me is that I shook off the dust of this nonsense, had a fresh cup of coffee, and took an honest lay of the land.
When my niece was born, my sister had to burn all of her accrued time off and was left to rely on unpaid leave. My sister isn’t some so-called slacker barista; she’s a doctor. Not a doctor of philosophy, but a medical doctor, who incidentally by that point had already spent time in developing nations delivering babies. So this isn’t just a blue-collar issue. The person who may have delivered your child has to struggle to take time off work for her own.
Having a baby is hard even if it goes smoothly. We had to have a C-section for ours. It took a while for my wife to do things like reliably walk. If you’re lucky, you have a partner to help you suffer through the details, like changing the bear-sized maxi pad you have to wear until your guts stop trying to bleed out. Is that uncomfortable and embarrassing to talk about? Hell yeah it is, but that’s the uncomfortable and embarrassing reality. Buckle up for the ride.
Once you get home, your little bundle of joy is going to take weeks or even months to learn how to sleep, which you would think should be the easiest thing in the world, and yet it’s not. It’s learning to be unconscious. But if you’re like most Americans, you still get to punch the clock on the three separate periods of two-hour sleep you had last night.
If you breastfeed and work, you get to do more fun stuff like wake up extra early to pump milk — not only so your kid doesn’t starve, but also so that you don’t have to suffer the indignity of leaking through your shirt in front of your coworkers. Obama amended the Fair Labor Standards Act in 2010, requiring workplaces to provide a room for breastfeeding mothers that isn’t a bathroom. That’s nice. The last thing you want is the droning ker-cher ker-cher of the pump drowned out by the person in the next stall taking an explosive shit. Pumping itself is already an embarrassing exercise. Pay no mind. I’m just going to sod off for a while so a machine can pull food out of me.
We celebrated Obama’s change as a victory for women. Don’t get me wrong, better is better, but it starts to come off like a domestic violence victim who’s happy they didn’t get beaten tonight. We’re so many dogs salivating at scraps, while scores of other countries are eating the full meal. “Don’t have to pump in the shitter” isn’t progressive. Take a map and throw a dart at it. The mothers in that country are probably doing this in the privacy of their home, with pay. No having to take unpaid time in the “lactation room.” No having to work late to make up for that time. No having to quietly cart off a small cooler of milk at the end of your shift.
What most people in the US have to fall back on is the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act. This says you can take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave and your boss isn’t allowed to fire you. But raise your hand if you’re in a position where you can afford to take three months off work. 61 percent of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck. Just don’t splurge too much on the new nursery, I guess.
As a mom, you may qualify for short-term disability, which probably pays around half your regular wages. Let’s not gloss over that part too quickly. You’re not engaged in a difficult, beautiful, pivotal stage of the human experience. You’re disabled, as if you were in a car accident. You suffer from an affliction called becoming a parent. Thoughts and prayers for a swift recovery from your normal participation in the human reproductive cycle.
If you’re a dad, then you’re probably just screwed. They’re not going to give you disability for someone else’s “condition”, because it doesn’t cover care for “sick” family members. It’s not as if your partner could use any help with this life-defining event. If you’re both dads? You can probably guess how that works out. If you’re the other mom? Doesn’t matter. You’re still not legally the “injured” party. If you’re trans? It’s anybody’s guess.
This really should be something the left and right can agree on. Children are important. We should care for and protect them. Generally, the best people to do that are parents. The most crucial time to do that is when they’re a newborn. You can’t have “family values” without the “family” part. The store, the office, the restaurant, they can get by while you work on this little thing that cries every few hours and poops itself for a spell before it can start becoming a productive member of society. But in the US, the abnormal has become normalized.
This takes us back to where we started. The global average is 29 weeks paid maternity and 16 weeks paid paternity leave. Yet in the US it’s labeled as part of a “progressive agenda” and we just roll with it, when the appropriate response is to shake that person and remind them how babies work. Having a baby is normal. Caring for a baby is normal. We have laws to remove children from people who don’t consider this normal. Clocking back into work several days after having a baby isn’t normal. It’s fucking batshit.
When we finally pulled out of the hospital after a week in the NICU, my wife played “Little Bird” by Elizabeth Mitchell. It was an exuberant moment of triumph. We did it. We’re going home. We’re a team. We made a person. I read a draft of this to my wife and the memory of this exact passage nearly brought her to tears. We’re in the same boat.
It’s not especially righteous or progressive to give people their Little Bird moment. This is the low-hanging fruit on the caring-about-humans-tree. Stop aggressively putting me on the left for what we all ought to damn well know already. Wake up. Stop begging for scraps. Be here with me. Be here with your baby. Be here. It’s not gonna be a baby for very long, and if you’re not careful, you’ll miss it.
See also: “The Right to Remain Silent About Your Right to Remain Silent”
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I just want to issue a small correction here. After reading this, my sister reminds me that because she needed fertility treatments, her job treated her pregnancy as an elective procedure, and she wasn't even eligible for disability.
A powerful article, thank you!
It's the most inhumane and unnatural thing to force parents away from their newborn baby by making the economic circumstances so difficult that there is no other way. It's shocking how America treats its mothers and fathers (and newborns therefore) and a reform is nowhere in sight. While millions of dollars are spent on social non-issues that make society even worse (CRT, gender pronouns, DEI), *this* would actually be a topic worth spending millions of dollars for: enabling families to flourish and care for their newborn.