As a professional woman who also knew she would want to have kids some day, one of the first things I would discreetly research about my possible employers was maternity (discreetly so as to not lose a job prospect because of my silly womanly desire to have kids). Does it offer maternity leave? Is it paid or unpaid? If it is paid, what percentage of my salary would be paid? I was applying for jobs in the education field, so I considered myself a lucky one; most teaching jobs offered some kind of maternity package.
When I got a little older and wiser (and pregnant) I heard even more hype about how lucky I was that my school offered maternity leave for 3 months at 66% of my pay, and even though they tried to get out of paying me for it (due to a doctor’s note about having to take early maternity), I received my leave for all 3 months. I felt like a lucky one.
It wasn’t until I arrived to the Dominican Republic that I really understood how lucky I was. This little island in the Caribbean offered a mandated maternity leave for expecting mothers. In fact, they even offered a mandated 2-day paternity leave for fathers – with our school recently upping that number to 5-days. Mandated maternity? Paternity leave? Wasn’t the powerhouse United States supposed to be more developed than this third-world country?
I got another maternity smack across the face last year over Thanksgiving break, when I met a recent first-time dad from Norway. He and his wife had been traveling for the last few months to different beach towns with their infant daughter and ended up in Cabarete. Norway’s maternity and paternity leave was so extensive that they could enjoy their first year as a family… together without any other focus than being only a parent (cause I can’t imagine what good that would do for children). They were lucky ones. Mother. Father. Daughter. Lucky.
It was is no secret that the United States’ view on maternity is not caught up with the rest of the world. And while I have hope that the U.S. will some day catch up, for now they are quite behind. It has only been in the last 20 years that they have mandated a 12-week NOT PAID maternity, meaning, at least you won’t lose your job to have a baby and while some states like California and New Jersey have offered some form of maternity leave pay, we have a long way to go.