While my 8-year-old daughter puked yellow goo into a hospital bedpan, I couldn’t be a doting mother bent over her shivering body, rubbing soothing circles over her back. Instead, I spent long hours folded into a blue vinyl armchair, my fingers hovering over my laptop’s trackpad in case I needed to unmute my Zoom. As a single parent of two kids and our household’s sole income provider in a state with no paid family leave, I had to keep my mind on my job while my daughter’s body was ravaged by years of aggressive chemotherapy.
The U.S. is one of seven countries in the world that doesn’t guarantee paid family leave to new mothers, according to a 2023 World Policy Analysis Center report . Federal workers in the U.S. are given 12 weeks of paid parental leave when welcoming a child, but no paid leave to care for a sick family member. For nonfederal workers, leave policies are set at the state or even company level. The result is a patchwork leave system of varying amounts and durations with no consistency and no guarantees. Currently, just 13 states and Washington, D.C., have laws in place mandating paid family and medical leave for eligible workers.
These situations are often even more challenging for women, who disproportionately shoulder caregiving responsibilities. The Family Caregiver Alliance reported in 2012 that between 53% and 68% of caregivers in the U.S. are women, with two-thirds of those caregivers also employed full- or part-time, according to a 2004 National Alliance for Caregiving report . When comparing women’s labor force participation rates in the 15 countries with the largest gross domestic product per capita, the Department of Labor reported last year that the U.S. came in last, making us a global outlier. This comes at both an individual and collective cost…