Here’s what no paid parental leave in the U.S. looks like

The failure — again — for the U.S. to adopt paid leave policies for parents has brought a flood of stories about the horrors of managing jobs after childbirth.

The cobbling together of vacation days to cover just a few weeks of leave. Trouble finding child-care centers that will take newborns. Moms still recovering from postpartum surgeries struggling to take care of kids while their partner had to work.

The Biden administration’s initial proposal to have 12 weeks of paid family leave was whittled down to four and then abandoned completely after facing opposition from key members of Congress. The stories pouring out on social media underscore what a devastating blow that is in a country that already is far behind the rest of the world in supporting new parents. The U.S. is one of only seven nations that doesn’t provide paid maternity leave.

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The assumption seems to be that the way the country does things now works well enough, most women and their employers figure something out. But they don’t. In the absence of a formal law, only 5% of low-wage hourly workers have access to paid leave. Even people with advanced degrees and successful careers are still struggling to get by.

At universities, untenured professors are often excluded from whatever formal leave policies are in place. To get around this, some female academics try to time things so they give birth during the summer, when they have a few months off. But not all pregnancies are planned. A planetary geologist wrote a research abstract while lying on her living room couch, crying, because she’d had severe tearing during delivery and it hurt too much to sit.

The standard explanation for the lack of paid leave in the U.S. is that it’s too onerous for small businesses. Sure, a company as big and wealthy as Netflix can offer new parents up to a year off work, but if a small mom-and-pop joint only has a handful of employees, the argument goes, how can it be expected to afford to let one take weeks or months off, paid?

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It’s a fair criticism. That’s why every other industrialized nation has a federal policy in which a percentage of a new parent’s wages are covered by the government, relieving small businesses of an otherwise unmanageable burden.

These other countries aren’t just doing this to be nice. They get something out of it, too. There’s an abundance of economic research showing that women with access to paid leave are more likely to return to work after they have a baby, boosting a country’s labor force and economy. Health studies reveal that babies are more likely to be breastfed because their mothers can spend more time at home with them. Parents with access to leave are more likely to take them to doctor’s visits and get them immunized on time. There’s even a decades-long longitudinal study of Norway, which implemented its first paid leave policy in 1978, showing that mothers with paid leave were less likely to smoke or suffer from depression, even years after they gave birth.

In other words, by focusing only on the dollar amount of a paid leave policy, the U.S. is missing out on a myriad of positive benefits.

Congressional Democrats have tried to address this in other ways before. In every session of Congress since 2013, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has introduced a bill that would create a national program offering new parents 12 weeks of paid leave at 66% their salary. But it languished in subcommittee and never came to a vote.

This issue has been left unresolved for so long that entire generations of American children have grown up, become parents and even grandparents, and the U.S. government has failed to act. Maybe it never will.