Oh hey USA, I do like to see you campaigning for a paid maternity leave scheme for yourselves.
That’s ultimately the problem for working moms at every income level—maternity leave, if it’s offered at all, is all too brief. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that new mothers breast-feed exclusively for six months and continue breast-feeding until the child is a year old. That’s much easier when you’re in the same room as your kid. The Family and Medical Leave Act requires companies to give employees only 12 weeks of unpaid maternity leave, and that applies only to companies with more than 50 employees and workers who’ve been with a company for more than a year.
If Americans are committed to encouraging women to breast-feed, the biggest help won’t be covering the cost of breast pumps. It will be catching up with the rest of the industrialized world by offering paid maternity leave for longer than a scant three months. (For perspective: Uzbek mothers get 18 months; Iranians receive 16.) Until then, we’ll be waiting here in this cramped pumping room.
From the Bloomberg Businessweek.
(More of my thoughts on maternity leave: Why you should support paid maternity leave? Because I already have it and you deserve it; Maternity leave as a human rights issue; We must not walk away from this fight; and Let’s get something straight about maternity leave).
blue milk 
I am a huge proponent of paid maternity leave, but if I could wave a magic wand and get a law here in my home country (the U.S.A.), it wouldn’t be anything as simple as “Mom gets a year off paid.” For me personally, I did twelve weeks at home with my newborn son, and I was DONE. Staying home all day every day was so not my speed. Now my husband and I are both part-time, and we have someone come help a couple days a week. I’d love if our laws meant that instead of taking a huge paycut, we could get some paid time off that we could use intermittently, to facilitate this sort of schedule. It keeps my husband and me on equal footing with childcare, and it keeps us both with one foot in the “adult world,” so as to maintain our sanity.
The upside of this sort of policy, as relates to the article you linked, would be that if you had some pile of leave to use however you saw fit, you could make those pumping breaks paid breaks, thereby mitigating one of the major reasons it’s hard for a lot of women to pump at work.
Question: in countries where the mother is entitled to lots of paid time off but has no desire to be a full-time mother, what are her other options?
Here in Canada you’re entitled to a total of 52 weeks paid 55% of your salary through employment insurance; your employer can add an allowance on top of that. IIRC, the first 17 weeks are for birth mothers specifically, I’m guessing to allow for breastfeeding and physical recovery; the remaining 35 weeks are “parental leave” and both parents are entitled to share it. So you can take your 17 weeks of leave and then go back to work while your co-parent takes the remaining 35 weeks; you can divvy up the 35 weeks with your co-parent, in whatever proportions; or you can take the whole year yourself.
[…] obligatory rant about how American maternity leave is stupidly short here. Andie at Blue Milk has covered this in far more detail. But basically, short maternity leaves are a serious public health issue. We can do […]
Well, if you think about it. If more companies were allowed to have half of their employees to work from home, they would save so much in the long run. Most people, can not afford to be home sick and so they bring their illness with them to work and get more people sick. Having half of their employees work at home would save people money on gas, be productive at home and would save money on running the place they work at.
If they hired a woman, to work from home, she can be able to have the child at home and they would not have to hire a temp replacement. She could work from home and still be able to take care of the baby at the same time.