Glamour

WINNER—PUBLIC INTEREST

“The Time to Pass Paid Leave Is Now” explains what the failure to enact a national paid-leave policy means for millions of Americans. Included here are two “as told to” stories that portray the struggles of new mothers. Readers are also urged to seek out “28 Days” at https://www.glamour.com/. Part of the online package with “The Time to Pass Paid Leave Is Now,” “28 Days” follows the lives of eight women in the four weeks after they gave birth—four weeks that nearly everywhere else in the world is covered by family leave. The National Magazine Award judges lauded Glamour for championing the cause of paid leave and noted the impact this package had on policy makers. Natasha Pearlman is the executive editor of Glamour. Ruhama Wolle, who cowrote parts of the package with Pearlman, is the special projects editor at Glamour.

Natasha Pearlman

The Time to Pass Paid Leave Is Now

331 million people live in the United States.

167.6 million of them are women.

Of those, at least 71.75 million women are employed.

And on average, there are over 3.5 million births a year.

Yet despite these statistics, despite the millions of children being born in the country each year, despite the millions of parents who struggle through those early weeks of sleepless nights 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 afterward, infections, their children needing medical treatment, and more—there is no national paid-leave policy.

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 fifty or more employees, the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 allows you to take twelve 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 good company-based paid-leave policy. Or you’re not lucky. And either you earn enough to put aside money to live off during your maternity leave, 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 impacts women—and disproportionately women of color, women in low-income jobs, and women in service and domestic industries—the most. In 2019 only 19 percent of workers in the United States 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 percent.

It is as depressing as it is unsurprising that one in four women living in the United States returns to work within two weeks of giving birth. She will often be bleeding, swollen, sleep deprived, barely functioning—but in order to provide for her family, she will be working.

And yet if you had a child in almost any other country in the world, including in the most oppressed, you would have access to paid leave. The United States is one of only six countries in the entire world, and the only high-income one of those six, that has no paid-leave policy. The others? The Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Tonga, Nauru, and Papua New Guinea.

This might seem a lot to digest, but it matters. Because in a world where 189 other nations support women and parents in the toughest weeks postpartum, America’s lack of paid leave should be a point of shame. And yet, somehow, it isn’t.

More than one hundred years on from when the International Labor Organization called for twelve weeks of paid maternity leave, free medical care during and after pregnancy, job guarantees upon return to work, and periodic breaks to nurse infant children—and after an influx of women globally to the workforce during World War I—the United States is still no closer to a federal policy. And surprisingly few politicians, on either side of the political divide, seem troubled by this deep social inequity.

Globally, the average paid maternity leave is twenty-nine weeks, and the average paid paternity leave is sixteen weeks, according to 2019 data from the World Policy Analysis Center. Yet after the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Build Back Better Bill in November 2021 that contained a barely adequate four-week paid family leave provision, the Senate failed to pass it. The man who blocked its passage? West Virginia Democratic senator Joe Manchin—proof if it was needed that passing laws that support women lacks support across both parties.

When components of this bill were reintroduced in 2022 as the part of the Inflation Reduction Act, it came without the childcare and leave benefits from Build Back Better and passed without incident in August of this year. It’s hard to look at the course of events and draw any other conclusion than that women don’t matter.

Frustrating though it may be that we need to do so, it’s important to lay out the argument for paid leave. And making this case is exactly why Glamour has followed eight women through the first twenty-eight days postpartum. In the article, the physical, financial, and emotional experiences of women with varying access to paid leave are laid bare—as we call for a national conversation on the passing of paid leave to be reignited.

One of staunchest political advocates of paid leave is New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who in February 2021 introduced the Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act (FAMILY)—a program that would provide up to twelve weeks of national paid family leave, covering childbirth, family illness, and more, for—in her words—“about the cost of a cup of coffee a week.” This is, depressingly, the fourth time it’s been introduced (it failed in 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019), but Gillibrand—who has never given up—and the lobbying organization Paid Leave for All speak in hushed but hopeful whispers of a growing momentum across the political divide to get something done.

Gillibrand names senators Susan Collins, Deb Fischer, Joni Ernst, Mitt Romney, and Bill Cassidy as the Republicans “most interested in paid leave.” But she notes that the road to success is long, because as yet, there is no agreement on a financial model to get it through.

“Senator Manchin has said he only wants to do [paid leave] on a bipartisan basis,” Gillibrand explains. “But the truth is there are no Republicans who want to support the FAMILY Act as written, and so by saying it has to be bipartisan, he’s killing it.”

In the meantime, she is exasperated at the impact of the country’s lack of paid leave on the economy: “Every time a family member needs to stop working because they’ve had a new baby or an ill parent or a sick child—for many people they either have to quit their job and meet that need. Or they have to suffer through not meeting that need and continue to work because they have to put food on the table. That’s a choice people shouldn’t have to make. It’s devastating for many families and many individuals. It’s essential that families have that time together.”

Dawn Huckelbridge, the founding director of Paid Leave for All, is equally passionate: “I’d studied paid leave, and I knew about it at this abstract or intellectual level. But it was when I became pregnant and gave birth that it just became so core to me. It felt like this is one of the root problems that leads to so many other inequities. I was shocked at how badly I felt treated, as a woman with a lot of privilege, with health care, with a supportive family, with a little bit of paid leave, but not enough.

“My son had really bad colic, and he screamed every day, all the time. He wouldn’t sleep; he wouldn’t let me sleep. So for the better part of a year, I barely sat down. I didn’t eat. I barely slept. I nursed around the clock, just trying to keep him from blowing up. And by the end of it, I remember saying, ‘I get why some mothers in this country just snap.’ I was so tired. I was ready to give up, and I felt trapped. And I just kept thinking, If it’s this hard for me, how is it possible that one in four people in this country go back to work within two weeks? It blew my mind. And I felt like this was this whole world of injustice that, until I lived it, I didn’t understand how urgent it was. Now I plan to do whatever I can to achieve paid leave for everyone who works.”

Here’s the thing: The issue of paid leave is deeply and inextricably personal. It is personal to Dawn Huckelbridge, who as a highly successful policy advocate only truly understood its importance when she became a mother.

It is personal to Meghan Markle, the duchess of Sussex, who has been an outspoken supporter of paid leave. It is personal to former supermodel Christy Turlington, founder of Every Mother Counts.

It is personal to actor Freida Pinto, who recently had her first child and tells Glamour, “I feel very fortunate that I was empowered to take as much time as I needed, both by my family and my team. I understand that is not the case for most women, which is why we need to discuss this more. It’s time to empower changes to the systems and standards in place.”

It’s personal to Hillary Clinton, who tells Glamour, “When I had Chelsea I literally had to create the maternity leave policy at my law firm. Even unpaid leave was not a guaranteed right. Four decades later, we’ve made progress, but we still have much to do.”

It is personal to me because after the birth of my first daughter, I was so physically impacted by a challenging vaginal delivery that it hurt to walk or sit for two months. Whatever my complicated emotional feelings were about becoming a mother, physically I needed every single day of the six months I took off—three months fully paid, three months at half pay. (I had both my children in the UK, and had I taken off longer with my first, I would have transitioned to the country’s standard weekly maternity pay.)

It’s personal to Gillibrand, whose own two births and postpartum experiences, no matter that they were nineteen and fourteen years ago, were full of such deep challenges that it shapes her policy today. “I had preeclampsia. I had gestational diabetes. I was really sick after I delivered Theo [her eldest] with an emergency C-section, and I was in the hospital for a whole week. My body shut down. If I didn’t have a husband—which a lot of women don’t have, and are birthing children on their own—the baby wouldn’t have eaten. We had to do formula feeding that first week.

“And my law firm didn’t have a paid-leave program. So I was like, ‘I’m going to write you one, because this is a liability for you.’ And I was able to take three months’ paid leave, and it worked for me, and it got me on my feet again. It got me time to learn how to nurse. It got me time to learn how to be a mom.”

And it’s personal to many millions of families and working women and men in this country who have likely been through the complex swirl of joy and confusion and exhaustion and financial stress that new parenthood brings with it.

But it raises the question: When something can mean so much and can impact women’s lives so detrimentally and has been an issue for successive governments, why for over one hundred years has it been so impossible to pass into law?

Huckelbridge and Gillibrand don’t hold back: Sexism.

Huckelbridge says, “We are not a partisan organization. But what we’ve seen in Washington recently, which is disheartening, is it’s become about which side is getting a win. The opposition [to paid leave] has been pretty irrational, and it is bearing out as clear sexism. It is bearing out as total devaluing of women’s work and women’s lives.”

When asked if the reason we can’t get paid leave into law is that there are so many men in Congress, Gillibrand answers without hesitation: “Yes. There’s not enough caregivers in Congress, which tend to be women. We only have 25 percent women in Congress.”

Their goals are clear: to urgently change the minds of the men blocking paid leave or find a way to work around it—in Gillibrand’s case, a compromise bipartisan deal. “I think this year the only thing we can get done is a minimal bipartisan optional paid-leave program, unless Joe Manchin changes his mind, which I don’t think he will.” And to activate voters—all voters—to demand paid leave and to only cast their vote for candidates who back it. Candidates across the political spectrum should take note—according to a new survey, four in every five Americans support paid family leave.

Chelsea Clinton, vice chair of the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Health Access Initiative, is deeply frustrated by the increasingly partisan nature of this topic: “Supporting children and families should be a nonpolitical issue that has sadly, and wrongly, been politicized. This is not an issue of party or politics. We need policies that ensure all parents are afforded the time to be the parents they hope to be, starting with paid parental leave throughout the country.”

Some critics might argue that it is not for the federal government to provide this leave and that it’s on individual states to create their own paid-leave programs. But Lauren Smith-Brody, author of the seminal working-parents handbook The Fifth Trimester and cofounder of the advocacy organization Chamber of Mothers, argues: “The challenge with that is that the policies vary so widely state by state that there’s no consistency. [Only eight states have policies enacted right now, with four more becoming effective in the coming years.] Particularly now that people are working remotely, your business may be domiciled in a different state than you’re living, and the insurance that your business has that you’re covered by may be domiciled in a different state. So are you covered by that state? Or by the state you’re living in?”

This confusion is, in fact, precisely what faced Tiffany Mrotek, one of the women Glamour followed for twenty-eight days. Only after giving birth did she discover she was ineligible for the state paid leave she had been counting on—because while she worked for a Washington, DC, company, she lives and now works remotely just across the border in Virginia.

Had she had access to federal paid leave, the pay she had been counting on would have been guaranteed, rather than—as it turned out—inaccessible.

The irony is that for all the difficulty facing lobbyists and policy makers in passing a national paid-leave policy funded by employers and employees, in 2019, during Trump’s presidency, one of the most significant breakthroughs was actually made with the passing of the Federal Employee Paid Leave Act. This granted certain federal employees twelve weeks of parental leave to care for a newborn or adopted child and is fully funded by the government. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was able to use this when he took four weeks off after the birth of his twins in August 2021.

This likely contributed to the momentum that got paid leave into the Build Back Better bill, despite its ultimate failure. And now with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, rather than cast paid leave aside for another day in the fight to protect abortion, the most powerful women’s organizations have taken up the battle once more.

Reshma Saujani, activist and founder of Marshall Plan for Moms, says, “With the Supreme Court’s decision this summer overturning Roe, it feels like every day we are fighting for our right to live freely and thrive.

“We have to meet this urgent moment by fighting for paid leave. This policy is critical for families, especially for working mothers, who for too long have been expected to return to work too soon after giving birth, without adequate time to recover or bond with their newborns. Paid leave is incredibly popular across partisan lines, as a study that we did at Marshall Plan for Moms in 2021 demonstrated that over three quarters of all female voters supported policies like paid leave.”

Similarly, a new poll for Paid Leave for All found that more than eight in ten voters in battleground states support a paid-leave policy ahead of midterm elections.

There is a huge amount of vital work being done to encourage individual businesses to take greater responsibility for, be transparent about, and provide their own competitive company paid-leave policies for employees—TheSkimm’s viral #showusyourleave initiative has resulted in the launch of database of paid-leave policies for over 480 companies.

But the question at the heart of it all is this: How can we finally get a federal paid-leave bill passed that benefits all workers in the country? Without question, politicians need to take note that this is a vote winner, as well as simply just good policy.

As is often the case, politicians need to be reminded of the popularity and importance of paid leave. And this is where you come in. Glamour urges you to call or write to your senators and demand that they take up the fight for all of our futures.

But that alone may not be enough. Your lives and your stories matter. We are asking you to join the women in our piece by sharing your own unique experiences or your hopes for change with those you know and in your communities. Let’s use this moment to ignite a national conversation and a demand that those elected to power cannot ignore. It’s time. It’s way past time—one hundred years is too long of a wait. #Passpaidleave—now.

“I Started Working Six Days After Having My Daughter”

Karina Garcia, twenty-nine, is a chef from Harlem in New York City. She lives with her husband, Eduardo Rodriguez, and their daughter, Yohualli, now four months. She had no paid leave and went back to work within a week of giving birth. As told to Natasha Pearlman.

My husband and I saved for a year and a half in order to have a baby. I am a chef, and my husband is a music teacher. We also run a supper club from our home on weekends, and I bake doughnuts for a café in Brooklyn four nights a week.

We put enough money aside so that we could take eight weeks off running our supper club. But there is no option to stop completely, so I always planned to keep doing the doughnuts without taking any break. I have to work. I worked until two days before I gave birth to our daughter, Yohualli, in May this year, and started up work again six days after she was born.

There is a part of me that always needs to feel productive, and creatively I’m in my element in the kitchen. It’s my happy place. But when I think about having another child, I don’t know if I could do what I’ve just done again—working so soon after the baby was born and being so incredibly tired while also juggling two businesses that are both run from our home. It makes me think we really have to get a brick-and-mortar location so someone else could take it on while I break or somehow figure out how to live without my income for a period of time.

Having Yohualli has been incredible, but it’s been a journey. My labor was long. It started on a Sunday night, and I didn’t sleep all of that night. I slept a little on the Monday, a little more on the Tuesday, but then on the Wednesday, I was managing only seven minutes of sleep in between contractions. I was ready to give up. I wanted this natural birth, no painkillers, no nothing, and to do it at home, in a pool. But I had no energy and I didn’t know if I was going to be able to take the pain, but that day she finally came. I can’t remember a lot, but I didn’t tear, and it was so beautiful to finally meet her.

Eduardo, my husband, had to go back to work immediately at the schools he works at. So I was on my own at home from day one. It was so hard for him, being away from our daughter for a lot of the days. He would say to me: “Every time I go out, I want to be back home. I want to see her.” When the summer holidays started, it was so much better.

Originally I had planned to start working on maybe day two postpartum, but we were just too tired. We make the doughnuts between midnight and eight a.m., and we have to be up and down in the night because we have to make the dough, let it rise twice, then shape the doughnuts, fry them, let them cool, and then fill them. I called the café we supply the doughnuts for, and the owner was completely understanding. But we didn’t want to stop for long, so within a week of Yohualli being born, we were working again. We make twenty doughnuts a day for the café, and every Thursday I make an extra forty doughnuts for local Harlem moms. I started selling to them through a Facebook group. Moneywise, I make $400 a week from the café doughnuts and $400 from selling direct locally.

I’m happy, but I’m also tired. Yohualli is perfect, but sleeping is tough, especially being up so many nights a week working. The other day I was so exhausted, I lay down next to her on the floor and fell asleep. But I thought I would find it harder. I thought I would be in a less joyful mood to be changing diapers and to hear her cry. But it doesn’t bother me. Yes, sometimes I would like to be able to take a shower when all she wants to do is be on the boob, but it’s a beautiful time. Financially, however, I don’t know if I’d want to do it this way again.

Life is fair. It’s also unfair. But hopefully something will change. I knew going into the situation that I would have to take care of myself, that I wouldn’t have access to paid leave, so it wasn’t a surprise. But should I have had to go back to work straight after having a baby, just to make sure we would be able to keep our apartment, to pay our bills? No. I hope things will change.

“In the First Days After Giving Birth, All I Could Think About Was Money”

Shukura Wells, twenty-eight, was a mortgage credit underwriter and is launching a business supporting Black-owned cosmetics brands. She lives in Detroit with her daughter, Zendaya, age four; her boyfriend, Dazz; and their son, Dakari Gold, three months. She had no paid leave. As told to Natasha Pearlman and Ruhama Wolle.

I had my son on June 25 this year. And a few weeks before I gave birth, I took severance from my job. I was working for a mortgage company in Detroit, but the housing market has been slow and our department was really affected.

I thought it would be okay because the money I was being paid in severance would take me through to November, my health care was still covered for six months, and I thought it would give me time to put into the beauty business I started recently. But I think I thought I was superwoman and that even while heavily pregnant and in the early days postpartum, I would be able to do what I needed to with my website: reaching out to businesses, pitching to carry their products on my site, promoting everything. But I didn’t, and in the first few days after giving birth, all I could think about was money—stressing about what we did and didn’t have and the fact that the severance money I had was coming to depletion. I didn’t mean to cry, but when I said it out loud, it felt real.

On day four I knew I would have to start back working pretty quickly doing something—at the very least part-time just so that we would have enough money with my and my boyfriend’s income. So it was the two of us working, so we weren’t struggling. This isn’t what I wanted. I would have loved to take a proper maternity leave. I wasn’t able to do it with my first child, as I had no paid leave from my previous job and only about $500 in paid time off.

The irony is that I feel if I wasn’t so stressed about money, I would be really happy. When I had my daughter, Zendaya, who’s now four, I was so sad and depressed. It just wasn’t a good postpartum experience, and it was really tough learning how to parent for the first time. But with Dakari, he’s such a chill baby. He’s had some trouble latching, but he does feed well. I gave birth naturally and it went pretty fast, and I should have felt so good, and in many ways I do. It’s definitely money that’s become the greatest stressor.

Stability is so important to me because we didn’t have a lot of money when I was growing up. We lived in a lot of houses, and at one point we didn’t have a home. Two of the houses that I grew up in aren’t even standing anymore. So I always knew I wanted to own a home of my own, so I could always give that to my children. I never want them to think, “Oh, where am I going? And where am I going to live?”

When I came back to Detroit after graduating from college—I went to Grand Valley State—I started working and saving. In fact, until now, there hasn’t really been a day where I haven’t worked. And then last year I’d saved enough to buy the house we live in now. I wanted to do it on my own, that meant a lot to me. I’m so proud of what I’ve achieved, but that’s why I care so much about keeping everything I’ve worked so hard for. About two weeks after giving birth to Dakari, I started working from home, doing hair a few times a week. It’s enough to take a bit of the financial pressure off, but it’s tiring, and I have the baby with me all the time too.

Luckily, Dakari is great. His name, like mine and my boyfriend’s, has an African origin. The “Kar” means happiness. And his second name, Gold, is because I don’t just love the color; I love that it’s a natural element and has a connection to the earth. And he really is brilliant. He has his own little schedule. He feeds around eleven a.m., one p.m., three p.m., six p.m., nine p.m., and then usually midnight. And he sleeps in between, but I also have to work, look after my daughter, and then pump as well. So when I do get to sleep, it’s like for a second only, and then I’m up again. The increments are so close. And I’ve just had to be like, “Let’s push through.”

Along with the tiredness, I wish more people would talk about the physical aspects of postpartum recovery. I thought I was doing okay at first, but if you want to get real personal, my butt really hurts. I think I’ve got hemorrhoids, and honestly, for the entire twenty-eight days, I found it quite terrifying to go to the bathroom.

I bled for nearly four weeks. After two weeks I was still getting cramps in my stomach, and I sweat in my sleep now. I feel like my body is so different, as far as everyday things go. My doctors told me that everything can take a while to get back to normal, but it’s really tough. And people don’t really tell you about this, about how hard it will be. I don’t know if enough women know about this. You definitely don’t want to be intimate with a partner with all this going on. Then the other day my daughter was like, “Hey, Mommy, let’s race.” I was like, “No, I’ll just cheer you on.”

My daughter has been amazing. She wants to help all the time, and I love to have her. I just want to make sure that I give my children the best life I can. I’m already applying for full-time jobs to hopefully start in October. My business is my dream, but I don’t know if now is the right time.