I saw the poll about abortion and the thread about paid maternity leave and I’d like your opinions on a couple of related issues.
Those of you who support making abortion illegal, how do you feel about requiring paid maternity leave? For the rest of us, is there a dichotomy between attitudes towards abortion and paid maternity leave in the US?
Given according to the Guttmacher institute that a women whose incomes are below the poverty level are four times more like to have an abortion than women who are making more than three times it (the latter is about $30,000 USD per year) and that 3/4 of women who have abortions say one reason is because they cannot afford a child, would requiring paid maternity leave be one way to reduce the number of abortions?
It seems to me that, if we really do want to reduce the number of abortions, rather than just making them illegal, we as a nation should address why women have them and do something about the underlying causes. It seems to me that providing paid maternity leave might be one way to go about that.
Fuck paid maternity leave. Seriously, I don’t see any reason why a company should pay any employee not to be at work, other than fairly accrued annual leave. Explain to me why any employer should be required to pay TWO salaries - one for the maternity leave person, and one for the person to replace her - for one job?
It can be hard enough getting a job as a female of child-bearing age as it is, when all the employer has to do is keep your job available.
Without being ‘discriminatory’ as such, many small-to-medium businesses are leery of hiring a woman if they think she’s likely to go off and have a baby, leaving them to find and train someone to replace her while she’s gone. Government or large employers can handle that kind of shake-up, but smaller employers have to plan for the reality of maternity leave. I ran afoul of it a lot when I was in my early and mid-twenties - but now I’m late 30s I’m noticeably hotter property in the employment stakes. What’s changed? Nothing noticeable aside from the fact that I’m obviously at an age where I could be expected to have teenagers rather than little kids or be planning a pregnancy.
If you change that scenario to include paid maternity leave, well that’ll really fuck things up for young women looking for work. May as well just get them to sign up for unemployment straight out of school, since the only jobs they’ll be able to get will be shitty ones with a revolving-door employment policy, or casual work.
Have you noticed casual work is on the rise? Have you noticed that statistically, women are more likely to be casually employed? Employment studies keep reporting this statistic but never really explain it. I read an article once that said it represented women seeking ‘work-life balance’.
More likely, I think, is that while they’re casual they’re not entitled to any kind of maternity-related benefits, and if they do suddenly decide they’re going to take nine months off the employer isn’t required to put them back on - which allows the employer to make informed staffing plans without waiting to find out if their employee is going to come back or not.
I should point out I have nothing against maternity leave as a concept - I’m glad it exists, and I’m glad that women aren’t being forced out of their jobs for choosing to have a baby.
But I am dead against paid leave, because it’s just unsupportable. I took unpaid leave this year to study - should I also get paid because I took time off work to do something that was totally for my own benefit and of no use to the company?
Actually it could at least be argued that any study I complete can be used to benefit my employer. Expain how having a child would benefit the employer, and then you can argue for paid maternity leave.
Indeed. That’s why in the Netherlands, maternity leave is paid in part by the government, and in part by a common fiancial fund to which all employers contribute through taxes, thus spreading the financial risk.
Paid maternity leave isn’t going to do diddly about the abortion rate among people who can’t afford to raise a child, for a couple of reasons. Paid leave typically just pays whatever you make already, if it pays 100% of that–if you’re already below the poverty line, paid leave is still going to leave you under the poverty line, so you still can’t afford a baby. And even if leave did pay you enough to afford the baby for the time it covers, that’s typically 3-6 months out of the 18 years you gotta support the critter. Okay, so the government will provide paid leave for 3% of your child-rearing, but you still have to find some way to afford the other 97%.
They’re two separate issues, but it’s an interesting question to think about. My gut reaction would be to say- if it would make a difference, why not? But **Bites When Provokes **makes a good argument as to why not.
I’d vastly prefer much more complex sex education, at older ages, when one can understand more, with an education about birth control and the risks and the heavy weight of pregnancy.
I am also against paid maternity leave. I think mothers and fathers should get leave, but I also think it’s unsupportable to put into practice actually paying for it.
I think some of this may also be due to the fact that women with vastly higher incomes are also more likely to be well-educated, and the well-educated are more likely to have a more comprehensive understanding about pregnancy prevention, as well as the means (insurance or paying for it out of pocket) to obtain the pill (which can be as much as $54 a month–that’s what I’m paying for it right now because I don’t have insurance) or other forms of contraceptives. As such, women making more money are going have a larger number of planned pregnancies and a smaller number of unwanted pregnancies than their lower-income counterparts who are not as well informed about, or as able to afford, pregnancy prevention in the first place.
I don’t know how much of a difference this would make. When my husband and I were thinking about the financial impact of having a child, we actually didn’t consider maternity leave at all as a factor; the big cost we had to make sure we could absorb was child care, with secondary costs being diapers, clothes, food, etc. You can often get along for twelve weeks one way or another – when you first have a kid, family and friends are more willing to pitch in a bit. But for years? Not nearly as likely. I would bet that a lot of these women who say they can’t afford a child are making precisely that calculation.
Despite starting the thread on it (mostly because a) I was curious and b) wanted to prove my mom wrong, which turned out to be futile because she was right) I’m not necessarily a proponent of paid maternity leave by businesses, for the reasons Bites gives – though I will admit that I am also not a good spokesperson, as I am lucky enough that I can afford unpaid leave. (On the other hand, if you are having issues with really wanting unpaid leave and being unable to afford it, maybe you need to think about the other costs of a kid as well.) The way CA does it, where you pay into a disability/childbirth fund and then are able to draw from that fund, seems a bit better. Though I will say one of my friends actually refused the money from that fund, because she reckoned she had made a choice to have her kid, and she didn’t see why money for unforeseen disabilities should go to a woman who knew exactly what she was getting into. (And she is against abortion, too!)
And I’m totally in favor of the Family Medical Leave Act, don’t get me wrong. And if you want to give paid maternity leave and attract really awesome female employees, I’m very much in favor of that.
Don’t some countries offer, what six months? a year? of maternity leave? France, somewhere in the Netherlands, something like that? How do they handle it?
I guess since paid maternity leave offers so many societal benefits, a govt-based program to handle the reimbursements could work. Yes, that would mean my tax money goes to you deciding to have a rugrat, but again, there are greater social implications to the idea, so it wouldn’t grind my gears nearly as much as some of the places our taxes currently go.
$55 is what it costs me WITH insurance paying their portion. I actually started ordering mine online from Germany because I can get 6 months worth for $115 that way.
As far as paid maternity leave preventing abortion I don’t think it would have a huge impact. If we want to prevent abortion making birth control easily available and affordable is the best option we’ve got. I do think that paid maternity leave, especially long term paid maternity leave like what they have available in Canada, Albania, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, etc. goes a long way to providing the means and time to properly bond with your baby and allow you to parent without the stress of working full time which probably helps prevent child abuse and other problems that can come from trying to work full time and parent full time. It probably also allows a new mother to use some of that time to go back to school and get more education or certification if she wants so that she is better able to provide for her child in the future.
Paid parental leave cannot exist in a vacuum without the other benefits afforded to women (and men) in countries where it is available. Subsidized birth control and OBGYNs, early childhood education programs, paternity leave, subsidized daycare. It is possible, but people actually have to be serious about caring where the next generation comes from regardless of their family’s income, and they have to be serious about women’s equality at home and at work. The Dope’s relationship threads occasionally have accusations against women of being gold diggers or requiring a man with a higher status job – and while I don’t think this is always the case, I do wonder how the hell a woman who wants kids is supposed to pursue that in a realistic way without a partner who has a secure, well-paying job when she may not be able to count on keeping her own job let alone getting time off to have one or more kids.
But yes, overall, I find it ironic that many of the people who think women should be forced to carry unwanted children have little interest in preventing unwanted pregnancies or even taking steps to ease the burden on women who have do want children, if only to give them up for adoption. I can’t imagine that many women are short-sighted enough to use paid maternity leave as their deciding factor in whether or not to get an abortion, but it does speak to an overall culture in pure widdle babies are God’s gift (but it’s up to you to figure out how the hell to afford to raise one).