The world’s richest countries guarantee mothers more than a year of paid maternity leave. The U.S. guarantees them nothing.

Twenty five years ago President Bill Clinton signed "Leave Law on Family and Medical Care". This requires a qualified worker to have 12 weeks of unpaid leave to look after the newborn. Emphasize "free".

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States continues to be the only country in developed countries that does not obligate employers to provide paid holidays for new mothers.

For example, a new mother in Finland can get paid vacation for three years. The Norwegian mother is 91 years old. The new mother in England is 39 years old, the cold neighbor in northern Canada is 1 year old.

With obvious danger, making kids is a necessary condition for our biological and economic survival. The seed must exist forever, and if economic growth continues, the couple should train as many future employees and taxpayers as possible.

However, laying a baby is an expensive proposition. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, the cost to make a typical American child 18 years old is over $ 233,000 (this figure does not include educational expenses of the university). Approximately $ 13,000 per year per child

In order to complicate these costs, children - babies and toddlers - need a lot of intensive and practical care. This usually means that someone had to spend time early, and the biological reality of childbirth means that people are usually mothers.

As a result, as shown in the map below, household income sharply declined over time. When giving birth in the United States, typical household income has declined by 10% until parents return to work in a few months to fully recover.

In the case of a family led by a single woman, the decline was even bigger, at birth was 42%, and shortening of working hours related to pregnancy decreased in the first few months.

In other words, in an important work of maintaining economic (and seed) survival, families experience a reduction in revenue at enormous expense.

Therefore, all the other wealthy countries in the world are their interests to help these families when they need it, and that parents with work, especially mothers, have the right to get some paid leave believe.

Here, the mandatory paid leave policy can be condemned as "new domestic rights to avoid", "burden on small and medium enterprises", and "best way to retire to the employer over the government" There are many.

But we know what will happen when you leave these decisions to your employer: according to a small business survey of 2016, over 40% will not provide these decisions at all did. As a result, American women work after pregnancy and are back to work shortly after birth.

This is not good for working mothers who need time to recover from physical and psychological trauma of childbirth. This is not good for children who need special attention and care during an important month after birth. This is bad for the economy. According to research, paid maternity leave is related to better occupation and consolidation of mothers, increased household income, and increased economic growth.

During the visit, these women discovered that American women "lost their rights" compared to the rest of the world. For example, according to the United Nations International Labor Organization, the United States is one of the three countries in the world that does not guarantee women's paid maternity leave. The United Nations recommends that each country guarantee at least 14 weeks paid childcare leave. In some countries we are going further - In Iceland, we require each parent to take 5 month paid vacation and 2 months of sharing.

If we truly value mother-child relationship, it will not be the only country in developed countries that does not guarantee paid maternity leave. OECD countries provide an average of 30 weeks, but the United States is one of the only five countries in the world offering zero - the other four are Lesotho, Liberia, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland. Among all the measures, the United States is at the bottom of family policy. Although we are saying that we want to protect our mothers, we accept obstetric violence at a staggering rate on the day they got the title. US law enforcement agencies do not protect mothers threatened by domestic violence but do not believe abusers ignoring until they hurt their children - and mothers who are more seriously injured than the actual injured men I am punishing.