The United States is Abusing Pregnant Women

My wife is pregnant with our first child and we are in the stage of exploring her maternity leave options after the birth. The more research we have done, the more we realize that there are no good options for working pregnant women in the United States.

As a nurse, the standard time off my wife gets is at her hospital is 3 weeks. After that, she can choose to use up all of her accrued vacation time, which is 7 weeks. That's a total of about 2.5 months, after which she is expected to go back to work full time. There are some businesses in the US that offer no paid time off at all.

Short Term Disability

The other option that is available in the US is short term disability, which is a range of 6-8 weeks. Short term disability only covers a portion of the salary and is different for every state. In my wife's case, she can take 6 weeks of short term disability at 60% of her pay or 3 weeks fully paid. She can do one or the other, not both.

Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA)

FMLA allows employees to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid time off for a family emergency. Birth of a child counts, but it's unpaid. Business are required to hold the employee's position for them during the 12 weeks and can't terminate the employee during that time. The basic requirements are that the employee have worked there for at least 1,250 hours the past year and the company has over 50 employees.

The intention of the act makes sense, but in reality it's not very helpful. If my wife takes 12 weeks off, it's hard to get back into the flow of a 12 hour high intensity nursing shift. In the corporate world where I work, it's frowned upon to take large quantities of time off for any reason. Ability to move up the chain goes away, and you may be the first to get laid off when the next round of layoffs happens.

What do other countries offer?

I work for a global corporation and I see a really wide range of maternity and paternity leave being taken across different countries. My perception was that UK, France, and Austria have the best benefits. I even heard of an Austrian employee taking some time off each year as part of his allowed paternity leave with a 5 year old! I did some research to see how the United States really ranks with other countries in terms of paid time off.

For real?

Scandinavian and Eastern European countries are the place to be! The 3 weeks my wife is getting pales in comparison to every country on that list. If she were to have an unplanned C-section, she wouldn't even be allowed to leave the hospital for 3-4 days after the birth. Average time to physically recover is 6 weeks after a C-section.

The workaholic environment in the US has made it really tough on pregnant women. In the corporate world, if a woman were to take 12 weeks off (paid or unpaid), it would be hard to have any sort of career growth. There should be a realistic time frame that is offered to women to recuperate mentally, emotionally and physically from child birth. This is our first child, so I don't know what the right number of weeks is...but 3 weeks doesn't sound like it's nearly enough.

Data source for country maternity leave: International Labor Organization

How much time did you (or your wife) get as paid leave after pregnancy?

How many weeks is needed?