America: why the worst baby policies in the industrialized world?

For the past couple of months the office where I work has masqueraded as a belly-parade: three pregnant women pace between a series of small rooms at the outer fringe of which I perch, the gatekeeper. The bellies belong to two professors and an academic administrator of the university. Fielding questions from students is my job, as is controlling who may pass into the chamber within. Tempers run short and hot among the bellies. There are a number of shadow-bellies around too. They belong to the men whose partners are belly-bumping into things somewhere other than our office. “There must be something in the water around here!” my boss exclaimed in response to the baby boom sweeping the office.

By late January, one of the bellies had been exchanged for a tiny parcel of hunger and breath: a baby boy had been born. The new parents brought him into the office for the rest of us to inspect. He was so small! Crinkly eyelids and pencil-line mouth: a little old man in a foot-long body. He slept for most of the time he was with us, and even when he was awake he hardly opened his eyes. The parents, new at the job, rocked and patted and swaddled, all with a fiery look of desperate excitement and equally desperate fear. When I was asked to hold him, I declined. The thought of dropping him, of holding on too tight, of the short, shallow breathing stopping while in my arms…he was such a tiny thing. But someone else is going to be holding him soon enough because the parents of this little person will be returning to their respective jobs within a matter of weeks. It’s work time in a busy city, in a rich country with the worst baby policies in the industrialized world.

On January 28, 2010, the British government announced plans to extend paternity leave by several months. In Britain, women already have a right to nine months of paid maternity leave, now father will be able to take up to six months of this time while the mother returns to work. However the couple works it out, British parents don’t have to leave their mini parcels of life until they are nine months old. Other Europeans have it even better. Swedes have the right to eighteen months of paid parental leave that can be split between the couple as they see fit. The United States is the only industrialized nation in the world that fails to provide any paid parental leave to its citizens. The women in my office will file a few weeks as disability insurance, an odd label for the creation of new life. They will struggle to cobble together a tenable childcare solution, as money is tight and expenses only increasing with the new addition. Unlike their counterparts in most European nations, my co-workers also won’t have affordable public daycare to turn to, and no guarantee of health insurance if they or their children fall ill.

I marvel at the parents-to-be in my office and their relative calm at what I view as an unbelievable travesty. It’s not that they aren’t incensed, but they are reluctant to waste energy being angry; it is unlikely things will change. But I, an ex-pat Swede, cannot get past the irony of the enormous rhetorical emphasis on “family values” from a nation that provides the least provisions for families in the industrialized world.

What I have written in this post is not news, to you or to the Work.Life blog. But it is fueled by fresh rage. I turn 25 next month, and no longer feel like a child myself. The thought of bringing forth a child sometime in my future in a country without a humane parental leave policy is terrifying. How do you brave souls make it work?

American parents: what is your baby story? If you could wish for a changed system, what, exactly, would you wish for? And, finally, why is it that America, and Americans, are unlikely to demand or implement any serious change that would really be worthy of the slogan “family values?”

- Astri

Illustration by Gustaf von Arbin