Federal Paid Maternal Leave, Unpaid Intermittent leave & College flexibility

The most common reason why women abort is out of fear that a baby would “interrupt” their career or education. Also, being a full time working mom or student can cause a lot of toxic stress and the full time separation between babies/young children and their primary attachment figure can cause long term developmental harms. Finally, maternal deaths often happen days or weeks after childbirth, and lack of maternal leave is associated with higher maternal mortality rates. The following solutions will save people’s lives, supporting healthy families and lifestyles for everyone:

12 week Federal Paid Maternal Leave

We should pass a federal law which entitles working mothers to 12 weeks paid maternal leave following the birth of her newborn, as long as she is employed by a company with at least 50 employees in a 75 mile radius for employees who have been employed by that employer for at least one year and have worked at least 1,250 hours for that employer in the last 12 months preceding the maternity leave.

Unpaid 8 hours weekly leave for eligible, caregiving, full time workers

It would also be helpful if certain workers, who have worked full time for at least one year in their current position for an employer that has at least 50 employees within a 75 mile radius, can be entitled to voluntarily have their work hours reduced to 32 hours per week, upon the employee’s personal request/30 days written notice. In exchange, the government can fund the employer’s portion of the group health insurance.

The employer should not be able to require that the employee use up their sick or vacation pay accruals towards the 8 hour decrease. The employee would not be able to collect overtime pay simply for working beyond the 32 hours.

This right to a reduced, 32 hour workweek should be offered to custodial parents of a child under six, a child with Autism, ADHD, Down Syndrome or other disability requiring a school IEP, or children who were blocked from their local day-care because of their special needs or behavioral or learning disorder. (Custodial fathers can use this option following the birth of their child, too.)

NEW EDIT ADDED 10/14/24: This option for an unpaid/intermittent 8 weekly hours off work, should also be offered to workers whose immediate household member is disabled, and workers who are in charge of caregiving for a disabled relative.

College flexibility for mothers & working students

New mothers who are also college students who have successfully completed at least 24 semester course units should also be eligible for 12 Federal Paid Maternal Leave, to earn 75% of their state or locality’s full time minimum wages and have the right to resume courses at the end of the 12 weeks.

Students who work at least 32 hours per week, and students who are custodial parents of a child under six, should be entitled to take their classes online or have them available in the evenings, as long as the course can be taught that way.

EDIT: As of today, 10/13/24, this proposal has earned 8 votes and I would like to add additional ideas. While I do not support my taxes being used to pay for twice the amount of leaves/paying for two parents’ dual/concurrent leaves, I strongly support the following supplementary ideas:

As long as the father’s employment status & employer meet the criteria for FMLA outlined in the first paragraph above:

-The custodial father shall be entitled to two weeks paid family leave following the birth of his child, in order to assist with bonding and support the needs and transition to routine of his newborn and the newborn’s mother.
-The custodial father shall have to up to 12 weeks paid family leave, following his child’s birth, ONLY IN THE FOLLOWING CONDITIONS, and ONLY when these conditions still apply, again for a MAXIMUM of 12 weeks following the child’s birth:

  • The mother is deceased or incapacitated.
  • The mother presents a post-partum diagnosis that she is suffering from a mental illness that is so severe, that it would present a risk of self-harm or harm or neglect to her child.
  • The mother has lost custody of her child to the father due to her neglect, abuse, suicidality or criminality.
  • Mother remains hospitalized beyond the two weeks family leave, and the parents have an additional child at home under age six requiring the father’s care.
  • In the event of a twins or multiples’ birth.

*Remember that my intermittent leave idea, listed previously, would also allow a custodial father (who meets the employment criteria) to take 8 hours weekly unpaid intermittent time off, which he (as well as the mother) could utilize following the expiration of their leave.

To view my main policy proposal, related to abortion, go here: RIGHT TO MATERNAL/FETAL HEALTHCARE & EDUCATION to stabilize the abortion issue

Thank you.

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Couldn’t agree more! Great idea!

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Nurturing life should be the central principle of our culture. We need to start from that perspective. The Care Economy needs to be part of the Gross Domestic Product. The culture has to ask women to be generous. It needs to honor and respect women and not erase them from language, economics, culture and religion. We need to rethink so much -

“There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember… You say there are not words to describe it, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent”
Monique Wittig

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Some basic things that would show that mothers’ caretaking work is valued/appreciated properly would be:

-flexible work options like the ones I described in the OP to give us time to do our more important job as a mom and allow us access to the economy

-tax funding for part of the childcare expenses

-more awareness teaching about the value of human life, fetal/child development, the harms of absent parenthood/counterparenting, toxic stress, all forms of abuse/coercion/exploitation, primary attachment figure. (I suggest a high school awareness class for that.) Men really think that they have rights to access women’s bodies and don’t take responsibility for creating a child. They have a playbook. People are brainwashed into thinking they have a right to irresponsible sex. This is the root driver of our society’s biggest problems.

-I’m not a UBI supporter, but if there is UBI, then it has to truly be universal/unconditional and equally apply to children.

-Family court reforms

-some kind of pay for relative caregivers

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It should be longer than 12 weeks. Should be for 6 months.

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Men should be granted equal maternity leave and rights if claiming the child tax credits/filing jointly.

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I fully agree it “should” be longer than 12 weeks. But right now the federal paid leave is for zero weeks and the GOP usually votes against this. 12 weeks paid FML didn’t even pass when the Democrats had a trifecta. But who knows, maybe Trump will consider it; his daughter Ivanka has pushed him to support FML. Six month paid FML is too big of a political ask in this round.

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I don’t agree with my taxes going to DUAL leaves. However, I do agree that fathers should get some time off for bonding purposes and to support the primary caretaker. My idea would allow eligible, custodial fathers to take 8 hours of unpaid time off weekly.

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Your taxes go to pay interest on government debt they sell to foreign banks. The rest is sent to people in form of tax rerurn credits that equal way more than people pay into the tax system. That is the first thing that needs to be fixed with our country.

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12 week Federal Paid Maternal Leave
I would prefer to see something totaling 6 months for the mother then an additional 6 months for the father (if present) this would allow for the new baby to have 1 parent with them for the first full year of their life 3 month blocks would be ideal i think. As done in 3 month blocks first mother then father would allow time for bonding of parents to baby/baby to parents

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I would prefer six months paid leave also. But that’s not politically feasible at all right now. Even Biden couldn’t pass 12 weeks paid family leave when he had a Democrat trifecta. My ideas presented in this stance are probably too liberal for the Republicans, too, but I think it’s more Center-Left and worth pushing for as a minimum. Ivanka told her dad Trump he should support the 12 weeks paid maternal leave idea. Probably still won’t be considered, but still would stand a much better chance at passing six months. We can push for six months later.

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True enough but our goal should be to eventually go after it. I know all about incrementalism in laws. Get what you can passed and expand on later

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I wonder if many companies realize that there is an insurance benefit they can opt into for paid parental leave. Parento is an example, but if we enacted more paid leave policies, I’m sure a market would open up so that more workplaces could offer this option. Even if families had the opportunity to pay into this as an optional benefit, I believe they would. Short-term disability is simply not efficient.

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Most probably don’t the abortion lobby likes to work very hard and spend a great deal of money to prevent them from finding out. Simply put they would prefer companies think the best option money wise is to pay for abortions.

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I appreciate the thought and time put into this proposal. I understand the rationale for it, and I can understand why it would appeal to some people. You asked me to comment, so here goes.

My political philosophy on any topic begins with the question “what does the Constitution say about this?” My conclusions are based solely on what’s actually written in the Constitution, and I interpret it the same as the people of the Founding generation who were asked to ratify it. I put almost no stock in judicial rulings because judges have always been biased, and in their arrogance they often put their preferences above the Constitution itself. The Constitution begins with ‘We the People,’ not ‘We the Judges.’

This puts me in the position of being a naysayer on most ideas people have because America, under the Constitution, is a republic with very few federal powers, all of which are listed in Article 1 Section 8. All other powers are delegated to the states and to the people under the 10th Amendment.

Whether a proposal is good or bad doesn’t hinge on its constitutionality. Federally banning alcohol was a terrible idea, but they amended the Constitution to make it a legitimate federal power anyway. Then they amended it again to revoke Prohibition shortly thereafter when a sufficient majority realized the horrible outcomes that policy caused. Conversely, I think it’s probably wise to have federal regulators of nuclear power plants, and we do, despite the fact that regulating nuclear energy infrastructure is not an enumerated federal power. We should have amended the Constitution first to grant it.

I’m not just a simpleton rule-follower, either. The Founders were brilliant in arriving at the conclusion that the government should have the most power over people’s lives at the local level, where politicians are within easy reach. It should have almost no impact on people’s lives at the federal level, and that was the case in the USA until the Marxist Progressives came to power beginning in the late 19th Century.

For these reasons alone, I could not support this proposal at the federal level without an amendment giving the federal government this power.

Setting aside constitutional concerns, even at the state or local level I would oppose it because I’ve concluded that it was a horrible and unnatural social experiment to convince women that being tax slaves and competing against men in the workplace is better than fulfilling their biological role and raising children. The toxic stress the policy describes in the preamble is well documented, as is the thoroughly unnatural practice of leaving one’s infant in the care of strangers to raise as the state requires. From the infant’s perspective, he or she is being abandoned by the mother when she goes off to work, and the children’s reactions are almost always pure, unadulterated terror initially.

We’ve been conditioned to accept the notion that “he’ll get used to it soon” (“it” = being abandoned by his mother every weekday morning). Rare instances of absolute unavoidability notwithstanding (i.e. death of the husband), I’ve concluded this is simply evil. It harms the child’s development, it harms the mother, all while forcing every taxpayer to subsidize this “benefit” at the point of a gun.

The same government gun is used to steal from taxpayers to subsidize maternal/paternal leave, which is only necessitated by our experiment with Marxist feminism. I’m a staunch anti-Marxist, so by default I oppose such policies. Mental health studies are regularly noting that this modern feminist world coincides with a wide range of female mental illness. I find this not at all surprising. It would be better to end the experiment.

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Don’t need to agree to say you put allot of thought in to your response i am sure it is appreciated. Here is the thing though you mention prohibition it is not really an apples to apples comparison. It was a ban on something. As it is right now our government at the federal level is using our tax money to the tune of 500m to 750m per year to fund the abortion industry. Then there are the billions being sent over seas to the Ukraine a war we have ZERO business being involved in. This money could all be better spent (more diverted really) to give companies tax breaks for providing paid maternity leave. We could give big corps tax breaks for a ton of things that would benefit the working class as much if not more than the corp just by cutting government overhead.
Fun fact the gov spends a couple billion or more yearly just on printer paper and prints every document out between 3 and 20 times only later to shred those same documents when they are done with them. They could for a few million hire a team or programmers to create a gov only communication protocol for internet like access and have a completely secure method of transmitting those same documents electronically then securely deleting once done this is just 1 area of gov waste. Another is usb thumb drives 128gb to 512gb that cost 20 to 60 bucks each consumer cost more because of gov contract overhead. They order insane numbers of these drives. Most are used only once and eventually destroyed and rarely have over 20 mb used space on them.

With all the massive waste in the fed gov like this and in other areas the fed could take that money and pay the mother maternity pay and pay the company they work for to keep their job open and still have money left.

You do not need a massive gov to do this in fact you need a smaller one to do it.

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OT but why is it some of my replies get sent to moderation and others do not somethings about this site are kinda odd. That said i am liking it here so far over all interesting concept and i hope they continue to keep growing it and adding new functions !

Thanks for the response.

You’re absolutely correct about how corrupt the US government has become. It’s an abomination that we are forced by threats of violence to pay taxes to subsidize evil things like abortion clinics. Needless to say, the entire Democrat platform is anti-constitutional, and has been for many decades. But the ‘apples to apples’ comparison involves granting the federal government additional powers not currently enumerated; the specific power in question is essentially a detail.

A caveat that I sometimes include in my initial commentary on constitutionality ties into what you wrote: the left has driven the US completely off the constraints of the Constitution. It is a certainty that we are in a post-constitutional, anarcho-tyrannical era. In such times, the Constitution has been de facto suspended, and literally anything goes.

In such an environment, with sufficient popular support, you could very likely push through this policy and many others that would not be possible if the Constitution were in effect, “supported and defended” by the politicians and bureaucrats who take the oath of office.

But as I indicated initially, my personal political philosophy on any topic begins with the question “what does the Constitution say about this?” I’m opposed to anarcho-tyranny. So my position on this particular policy remains the same, despite the fact that you are 100% correct and I’m very offended at the majority of my government’s current illegitimate policies.

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There are a number of big problems I see with this proposal, but they can be largely boiled down into two overarching points.

First: Social programs are already strained to the breaking point. Adding such a burden of cost to the budget would send us well past the point of breaking.

Second: This seems to me to be a problem of trying to legislate culture, which never works.

One of the biggest problems in current society is that we’ve built the economy around dual income households. Another is that motherhood in general is no longer viewed as the sacred and honored duty it is. This proposal is just a band-aid on a gaping wound.

There are other quibbles I have with the details, but I don’t feel like they’re worth going into because of the overhanging issues.

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None of these are “social” programs. Being a mom, and spending quality parenting time, isn’t a “social” program. It’s our job, but our paid job interrupts our parent job; being forced to be away from our children 50 hours a week causes long-term harm, but at the same time we often have no choice but to work.

When I had my first child, I was working full time at my new job, and going to school full time. A policy like this would have saved our mental health and given my son more access to healthy parenting time. It would have also decreased our dependence on child-care. It wasn’t my choice to have to go to work, and have to depend on college. And BTW, right now, I am my children’s sole economic provider.

So many Republicans talk about being pro-family. But when someone proposes a measure that would actually promote more family togetherness, they scoff at it.

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