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Among the 38 Western nations with advanced or semi-advanced economies that comprise the OECD, the U.S. is the only one without paid family leave.
Just as Chief Justice John Roberts, in his 2013 decision striking down the core of the Voting Rights Act, serenely asserted that the white racism of Southern states was a thing of the past, so Associate Justice Sam Alito, in his leaked decision revoking a woman’s right to an abortion, blithely claimed that America had become a far friendlier place than it once was for women who’d be compelled to bear children. After all, he noted, there was a law on the books that hadn’t been there when his predecessors created that right in Roe v. Wade: the Family and Medical Leave Act, which requires businesses with 50 or more employees to grant up to 12 weeks of leave for such non-work distractions as caring for newborns.
What Alito failed to note was that the law doesn’t require employers to pay their caregiving workers anything when they’re home with their infants. Requiring employers to pay would have upset the delicate balance of power between capital and labor by giving workers an actual smidgen of power.
Among the 38 Western nations with advanced or semi-advanced economies that comprise the OECD, the U.S. is the only one without a paid family leave program (though, of course, it was part of President Biden’s late, lamented Build Back Better package). Among the other 37, the average time in which employers are required to pay their workers who are tending to their families is 50 weeks. I don’t think our exceptionalism in this is because we’re necessarily more anti-family than all our fellow nations; I think it’s because we’re more capitalistic in a particularly mean and stunted way, viewing any assertion of worker rights as a threat to cosmic routine.
That said, we do have a federal system, and under it, ten states and the District of Columbia have each enacted paid family leave programs of their own. None of them requires employers to help their workers for anything like 50 weeks, heaven forfend; 12 weeks seems to be the upper limit of our requirements for employer display of humanity. Among those ten states, the programs are already up and running in California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Washington, Connecticut, and D.C., while they’re still on the drawing boards or in tryout mode in Oregon, Colorado, and Maryland.
Notice anything else about those states? They’re all states that have their own laws legalizing abortion; they’re solidly blue states with strong pro-choice majorities. In the states where trigger laws have already been passed banning or restricting abortion as soon as Alito’s screed becomes the law of the land, and in other Republican-run states now crafting anti-choice diktats, however, the very idea of paid leave remains anathema. In South Dakota, where Republican Gov. Kristi Noem has repeatedly shown she’ll do anything to slither up the Republican right’s list of vice-presidential possibles, the legislature passed and Noem signed a law last year forbidding cities and counties from enacting paid family leave ordinances of their own—lest some bomb-throwing Sioux Falls malcontents think they can sneak a fast one past redoubtable Kristi.
So it’s in the states where women will be compelled to carry pregnancies to term that many of those women and their families will be on their own financially from the moment the child emerges from the sanctity of the womb into the hardscrabble penury of life outside, and from the fervent defense of the pro-life movement into its utter indifference to life post-womb.
