Black Mothers Matter: A Study of Black Pregnant Workers’ Challenges in Receiving Paid Maternity Leave 

Posted bykamilastlovePosted inUncategorized

My term paper for my Disciplining the Poor Welfare class:

In 2019, U.S. Olympic runner and six-time Track and Field Champion Alysia Montaño made headlines as she broke her contract’s confidentiality clause and informed the world that her sponsor, Nike, paused her contract when she became pregnant. Outraged, Montaño published the now viral New York Times op-ed, demanding the corporation to “stop treating our pregnancies like injuries.”1 Unfortunately, Montaño’s situation is not uncommon in the States, due to the fact that only forty-one percent of American women receive paid maternity leave, and of those who do receive paid leave, they receive, on average, just thirty-one percent of their regular pay for three weeks.2 

2021 saw the most recent attempt at passing a national paid leave legislation with President Biden’s Build Back Better Act,3 but this welfare faced heavy scrutiny, even within the Democratic party. One of the most pronounced opponents to Biden’s bill, Senator Joe Manchin, asserted that his constitutes “have responsibilities” and thus don’t need federally funded paid pregnancy leave. Despite this bill’s failure due to Manchin’s opposition in the Senate,4 I’d like to dive deeper into both Montaño’s and Manchin’s claims in order to prove that their two statements reveal the underlying issues of why the U.S. has no national policy for paid maternity leave. Thus, I will attempt to prove that the current debates orbiting paid maternity leave undermine the societally deemed “undeserving” single, working class Black mothers through racialized ideologies of motherhood and gendered capitalism to the point of jeopardizing not only these mothers’ livelihoods but also their lives. 

The current debates surrounding paid maternity welfare stem from racialized ideologies of gendered work that ultimately excludes the needs and obstacles impeding Black, working-class single mothers. In October of 2021, moderate Democratic President Joe Biden proposed a paid maternity leave program that included twelve weeks of fully paid leave for all American mothers funded by the federal government.5 While twelve weeks may seem like a decent amount of paid leave, in comparison to the majority of nations worldwide that number is still less than half of the global average of twenty-nine weeks of fully paid leave for mothers and sixteen weeks of fully paid leave for fathers, let alone the fact that the United States is one of only a handful of nations worldwide that fails to offer its citizens paid maternity leave.6 Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat from New York, strongly pushed the bill’s passage with the full twelve weeks Biden initially proposed, arguing that countless families are in need of paid leave, for without they would be forced to make some very difficult decisions, such as how much time they can take off work, who will watch their child if they cannot pay for daycare, and will they need to apply for food stamps or other forms of welfare if they cannot make ends meet.7 

Unfortunately, not all Democrats felt that the paid maternity leave was a good investment into the welfare state. Like his earlier quote indicated, Senator Joe Manchin was not a proponent of the paid maternity leave component of the spending bill, though he failed to give a single, concise answer as to why he felt this way. In one interview, Manchin declared that he was not actually opposed to paid maternal leave on its own; rather he opposed this paid maternal leave because it was in Biden’s spending bill. “When you throw all of that [money] at our national debt, at the taxpayers, usually [in spending bills] when someone else takes over, that [paid maternity leave] gets flipped-flopped” Manchin argues, continuing to defend his position by suggesting new legislation specifically targeting paid maternity leave and enshrining it permanently into U.S. law would be a more effective course of action. Nevertheless, he refused to commit to drafting and proposing such legislation and did not do so before leaving office in 2023.8 In her interview regarding these debates, Senator Gillibrand offered us a different reason for Manchin’s refusal to back the bill, informing the public that Manchin’s biggest hurdle regarding the paid maternity leave welfare was the idea of it being “self-sustaining. He likes the idea of it having employer and employee contributions – that is, it’s something that pays for itself… an earned benefit.”9 Here, we start to see the more explicitly racist welfare tropes constantly portrayed in this country – the idea of the deserving poor, who earn their welfare as it is not, according to some, an innate human right and civil protection. According to African American Studies Professor Rosemary Ndubuizu, these notions of the deserving poor often stem from the U.S.’s political origins in the Social Contract. This political ideology declares that if the people contribute to economic development and work towards the betterment of their society, their government is obliged to grant them social and civil protections, including the right to participate in politics through voting and the right to receive welfare.10 Many, myself included, disagree with the notion that paid maternity leave and other types of welfare should be earned benefits as opposed to civil rights; however, for a moment I wish to take this argument as truth in order to prove how Manchin’s thought processing is working in racialized and gendered capitalism – or the general approach that sees race and gender as critical to capital development. For if there is a deserving poor, the positive implies a negative, meaning that there are some poor who are undeserving of welfare, even paid maternity leave. Who then, is the deserving, and who is the undeserving? And most importantly, why?

Referencing back to the political ideology of the Social Contract, a citizen who contributes to capital development and is an active participant in the economy is deserving of state protections, it seems rationale to conclude that a citizen who works in the U.S. economy and pays taxes would be deemed worthy of civil rights and would thus be deserving of paid maternity leave. Yet for this specific type of welfare – a supplemental income for mothers whenever they have to leave their job in order to give birth – work requirements would not be an issue, for if they need paid leave, that inherently means that they are leaving their job, hence they already had a job. When we look at the statistics, roughly a third of all working women receive paid maternity leave.11 If there’s no national paid leave policy, where are these women receiving paid welfare from? To answer this question, I’d like to take a step back and review a brief history of maternity in the U.S. workforce in order to show how the gendered and racial capitalism in this country devalues women’s work and fails to acknowledge the contributions of Black folks, particularly women, to this country’s economy. 

The current discussions around paid maternity leave that surrounded President Biden’s 2021 Build Back Better Act were entrenched in racialized ideologies of women’s work, which largely excluded the experiences of Black, single working class women. With the passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, employers were prohibited from discriminating against their employees or potential employees “on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, and sex.”12 With sex being included as one of the manners in which an employer cannot discriminate, it would seem logical to assume that since females are the only persons who can bear children,13 discrimination on the basis of sex would also include discrimination on the basis of pregnancy. However, the United States Supreme Court ruled otherwise in both Geduldig v. Aiello in 1974 and Gilbert v. General Electric Company in 1976, where multiple women were denied disability paid leave from the state of California and their employer due to the fact that their disabilities resulted from their pregnancies. In the majority opinion for Gilbert v. General Electric Company, Republican Justice William Rehnquist stated that the disability company’s exclusion did not violate the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment since gender based discrimination does not include discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, the latter which the court found legal.14  

In response to these rulings, Congress sought to correct the Court’s rationale and the denial of paid maternity leave two years later in the form of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, also referred to as the PDA, which amended Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to prohibit the discrimination of pregnancy in the workforce. More importantly to welfare rights, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act also mandated that pregnancies be treated like “other temporary disabilities that affect the ability of the employee to work,”15 such as through paid company or state leave, which created the first type of paid maternity leave in the United States. Although pregnancy does physically limit women and other birthing people as their pregnancy progresses and postnatally, the fact that the federal government has pregnancy enshrined in law akin to a disability simultaneously undermines the normalcy of childbirth as the most fundamental fact and necessity of social reproduction, but also paints pregnant people by ableist societal ideals as incomprehensible, unreliable, and undesirable workers. Consequently, this idea that pregnancy is a disability primarily targets women in the workforce, which is why, as Alysia Montaño stated, that Nike and other companies treat pregnancy like an injury. 

Although this gendered ideology is a classic example of gendered capitalism, we are also confronted with major racialized capitalism. Nowhere in either of the court briefs are the women’s races mentioned, nor is there any reference to the role of race in these cases in any academic source I have found. Law professors Michelle Deardorff and James Dahl argue that “Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act] prohibits discrimination based on gender, race, religion, or national origin in the workplace, but makes no allowances for intersectionality in the workplace,”16 meaning that discrimination based on gender and race would have been separated and was possibly why race went unnoted in these cases. These women were claiming sex discrimination, which translates to the Court solely taking their sex into consideration as opposition to any other discriminations stemming from racism. Even though I agree that their point has merit for this historical moment, I also am inclined to think that the erasure of race in these cases ignored the vital perspectives and experiences that Black women had in the workforce during pregnancy.

Annelise Orleck writes that many Black women did not see the same emphasis on marriage that white women envisioned, for “in stark contrast to whites, most [B]lack unwed mothers surveyed said that a single mother could do just as good a job raising her children as could a married mother.”17 If Black women were more likely to be single, they were more likely to not have a husband’s income supplementing them and their children, which indicates two things: one, Black women were overrepresented in the workforce compared to white women, because they were more likely to be the breadwinner for themselves and their children. And two, if Black women were less likely to have a spouse, who would help them during their pregnancy and after childbirth economically? Because if they were not receiving income during their pregnancy and were overrepresented in low-paying domestic work,18 how were they to feed their children and support themselves and their newborn? Consequently, I will now turn my attention to bridging the past to the present to show how not only these conversations undermine single, working class Black pregnant women but also jeopardize their and their children’s health. 

Because of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act’s enshrinement into law, states that offered Temporary Disability Insurance, more commonly referred to as TDI, were required to pay benefits to pregnant mothers pre and postnatal, which supplemented the lack of a national paid leave welfare policy. At the time of its inception, five U.S. states offered Temporarily Disability Insurance and continue to do so today: Hawaii, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and California.19 Immediately after going into effect, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act greatly expanded access to paid maternity leave, increasing the number of recipients to roughly fifty percent of all women and eighty percent of all working women in said states.20 At the same time, since these were state run disability welfare programs, the states had total control of not only who had access to this welfare but also how this welfare was funded.

 Beginning with the latter point, economics professor Jenna Stearns notes that the TDI in California and Rhode Island were entirely employee funded,21 meaning that the money was and is withdrawn from these women’s paychecks in order to fund this leave that may eventually go to them, if they so choose to have children. But this is actually the income they’ve already earned, therefore qualifying as back-pay instead of fully paid leave as an additional welfare benefit. On the subject of fully paid leave, most pregnant workers do not receive fully paid leave unless their pregnancies result in some form of temporary or chronic disability, as Sterne writes, “eligible workers are entitled to six to twelve weeks of partial wage replacement for normal pregnancies.”22 As a result, women are not receiving full pay checks during their paid leave on welfare, which causes one to wonder why workers are not offered fully paid leave.

This question leads me to my second point in addressing who the eligible or read deserving recipients of paid maternity leave welfare are. According to the updated guidelines of the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which sought to provide citizens in states without TDI programs the ability to receive paid time off for pregnancy, the employee in question must work for the same employer for at least a twelve month continual duration and at least 1250 hours during that time, which spread out over a calendar year requires an individual to work roughly twenty hours per week.23 These stipulations arguably could have been implemented in order to aid small businesses who may not be able to afford fully paid leave for temporary and new employees; this falls in line with the Republican Party’s stance on this issue, for Republican Representative Kevin Brady from Texas argued that businesses should be the ones to provide paid maternity welfare to their employees, as opposed to the “Democrats’ one-size-fits-all socialist solution.”24 However, what Representative Brady and the Republican Party have failed to consider is that that does not address and provide aid for the workers who primarily work in temporary, seasonal, or part time labor. And I offer a different reason for this work requirement as opposed to being champions for the small corporations of America: as an incentive to keep women at work in order to ensure their productivity and work ethic to discipline the poor. While some women do have the privilege of working a steady, well paying job where half of their income could keep them financially comfortable during their pre and post natal leave, there are plenty of other “low skilled workers”25 who are more likely to have several temporary jobs that work odd hours and months of the year, which may not meet these requirements, much less have a substantial enough income where half of their paycheck can keep them above the poverty line.

As if this work requirement did not punish the poor enough, the types of jobs that meet this stipulation are also racialized. Julia Goodman describes in her groundbreaking article “Racial/Ethnic Inequalities in Paid Parental Leave Access” how “jobs in which women of color are overrepresented” are often the ones that fail to meet these work requirements, such as “part-time, seasonal, or low-income jobs.”26 From the results of her 2016-2017 study on racial disparities in paid maternity welfare in the Bay Area of California, Goodman found that “while a majority [read over fifty-percent] of white women receive at least some pay from their employers, 68% of black women and 60% of Hispanic women did not receive pay from their employers.”27 Moreover, those women who did receive a full paid equivalence, or FPE, of their salary were greatly racialized as white women averaged seven-point-six weeks of FPE, Hispanic women earned five-point-six weeks of FPE, and Black women had the lowest average FPE coming in at just four weeks.28 This could be largely due to California’s self-pay program, since Black women make sixty-one cents for every dollar a white man makes and white women make nineteen cents more than Black women to every white male dollar, causing paid maternity leave to be a privileged benefit for the wealthy as opposed to a vital piece of welfare for the poor.29 

Even so, I’d like to pause and ponder this for a moment, for why are the wealthy receiving welfare and the poor denied it, preventing the latter from attaining some semblance of financial stability, if you can call partially paid leave to go give birth stability. After all, while one may argue that paid maternal leave, as a principle, should be offered to all women regardless of income, it does seem suspicious that the women who are far more likely to fall below the poverty line with their low-income paychecks are being denied maternity leave welfare and that women who are financially more secure in a higher-paying job are offered this welfare, consequently discipling the poor. Not only are Black women overrepresented in low-paying work that is less likely to provide them with paid leave welfare, but they are also overrepresented as single mothers, therefore leaving them less likely with both a partner to support them during pregnancy and an extra income to financially back them. Why does this welfare discipline the poor instead of aiding those who need it most?

As current Secretary of Transportation and Democrat Pete Buttigieg remarked after receiving snide comments from  ultra-right conservative and former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson following Buttigieg’s acceptance of paid parental leave after he and his husband welcomed home twins, “the work that we are doing is joyful, fulfilling, wonderful work.”30 Yet note the word Buttigieg uses to describe his parental leave: work. “There’s still this cultural idea, I think, out there in some places, that this is vacation.”31 Welcoming a newborn child into one’s home is not a time where one has mountains of free time and relaxation, much less as a white male who did not have to do the tremendous physical work of the birth labor and works a stable, well-paying job alongside his significant other. How much more draining emotionally and physically would the aftermath of welcoming a child into the world be for a low-income working Black single woman who not only has to care for this child on her own but also is physically recovering from the pregnancy and delivery? This does not even include how the medical bills would be paid if Black women are less likely to receive paid leave, and if their paychecks are significantly less than their white counterparts, they are less likely to have savings to dip into in order to pay for the necessary medical care. 

But this notion that paid maternity leave is not work but a vacation stems from gendered ideologies of women’s work being unworthy of paychecks. As Keonia Gaines described in her piece Gateway to Equality, Black women had to fight and unionize in order for their domestic labor, known colloquially in modern times as pink collar jobs of domestic, care, and mothering labors, to be recognized as labor worthy of a living wage, since their labor was and still is more often than not referred to as a personal service that does not require the same skills as men’s labor.32 Thus, women’s work has largely been underpaid both historically and in the modern moment, making women not only more likely to be impoverished but, especially for Black single mothers who are not relying on a male’s income, ignoring the labor they are doing while on maternity leave and contributing to the social reproduction so vital to capital development.

What’s more is that Black women’s mothering is also highly undervalued and diminished, for while white mothers are seen as the struggling Madonna worthy of welfare, Black women are often seen as suspicious when attempting to use the lacking services this country provides for them in order to provide the best lives possible for their children.33 The two most pressing myths damaging the image of Black mothers are the infamous mammy and the unchaste Jezebel. While both stem from the epoch of enslavement in this country, the mammy myth harkens to the loving, selfless tendencies Black enslaved women were expected to show their enslavers, and lifts her up as a Black woman who “would not even consider challenging ‘her place.’”34 On the other hand, the Jezebel myth stemmed from white men’s predatory nature towards Black women, painting Black enslaved women as promiscuous, immoral temptresses that were not worthy of respect as a way of justifying white men’s continual sexual violence and assault towards them.35 Although not explicitly tied to motherhood, the idea of the Jezebel caused many whites in U.S. society to see Black women as immoral and sexually deviant, consequently meaning that their lack of morality equated them to being bad mothers who were and are not worthy of welfare, just as the mammy stereotype argues that Black women should be caring for others as opposed to their own families and should take some responsibility instead of asking for paid time off. When referencing back to Joe Manchin’s point that his constitutes have responsibilities and thus do not need paid maternity leave, may we keep in mind that his state, West Virginia, has a population where ninety-two percent of his constituents are white and only three-point-seven percent of the population is Black,36 yet Black people constitute over thirty-percent of the impoverished people in the state.37 Thus, it seems to me that when Manchin says his constituents in West Virginia have responsibilities, I’m inclined to deduce that he’s saying his constituents are white and thus deemed as good, hard-working white mothers who don’t need free handouts from the government. Consequently, due to the racialized and gendered myths surrounding Black mothers, Black single, working class mothers are not deemed as worthy welfare candidates, justifying their lack of paid maternity leave access.

But for the United States’ lack of a national paid maternity welfare policy, the idea of paid maternity leave is quite popular among the populace. According to the Pew Research Center’s 2017 survey, eighty-two percent of Americans reported approving paid maternity leave, making this welfare, at first glance, seem like a bipartisan issue that both Republicans and Democrats could get behind; after all, since the fabric of our society’s social reproduction and economic growth comes from being able to reproduce the population, it would seem logical that this issue would not be contentious. However, the Pew Research Center also reported that out of that eighty-two percent of Americans who wanted paid maternity welfare, the issue of who would be providing this welfare comes to contention. Only twenty-one percent of Americans argue that the federal or state governments should pay for women’s maternity leave, and sixty-one percent of those who approved paid maternity leave argued that employers should be the ones to provide this welfare. And even those who prefer their employers to provide them with this welfare are deeply divided; fifty-one percent argue that the federal government should require all employers to pay their employees paid maternity leave, while forty-eight percent feel that employers themselves should decide if they wish to provide paid maternity leave for their workers or not.38 Although this research fails to distinguish who supports which sides of the argument based off of race and gender, another study by the same center found that women were twenty-percent more likely to be in favor of paid maternity leave as opposed to their male counterparts, leading me to believe that the majority of the eighty-two percent of Americans behind paid leave are women. And that if Black women are more likely to be single mothers, I’m inclined to believe they would more likely be supportive of paid maternity leave, as well.

As I have shown throughout this essay, many of the current politicians advocating for a national, federally funded paid maternity leave welfare program are white. But the majority of the recent organizers and advocates for this have been Black women, though they have received far less mainstream attention and credit than their white counterparts. Democratic Representative Alma Adams from North Carolina backed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s addition of paid maternity leave into Biden’s spending bill,39 and has started the first Black Maternal Health Caucus in the House of Representatives alongside Illinois’ Democratic Representative Lauren Underwood.40 Additionally, a handful of high profiled Black female athletes, including Montaño, have advocated for a national paid leave policy for pregnant mothers. Olympic gold medalist in track and field Allyson Felix has been one of the largest advocates for this welfare and job security,41 as well as the tennis legend Serena Williams.42 Although celebrities have, in recent years, become prominent spokespersons for topics that are not terribly controversial, they clearly have a large platform and will have job security as long as they do not say anything too worthy of being canceled. Yet I still argue that their contributions to this discussion are essential, because the majority of politicians pushing in Congress for a paid maternity leave program are not Black women but rather a mixture of white men and women, and as a nation that prioritizes sports so heavily, their stances draw more media attention than most of the politicians in Washington attract. On this subject, I’d like to now turn our attention to Serena William’s case as well as her personal experience, for she not only was and is a fierce proponent of paid maternal leave but also because her pregnancy experience demonstrates one of the most harrowing dangers to Black pregnant mothers: the intersection of systemic racism and sexism in the medical field.

Despite being one of the wealthiest nations in the world, the United States has a deep entrenchment of sexism and racism in the medical profession. From 1990-2015, mother mortality rates have dwindled worldwide by forty-four percent due to the advancements in medicine and expanded access to healthcare and benefits for mothers. However, during that same time period in the United States, mother mortality rates have jumped by sixteen-point-seven percent. And with that increase, out of every 100,000 births, Black women are three-to-four more times likely to die than white women, with sixty percent of those deaths being preventable.43 At the same time that the maternity wards are dangerous for mothers, they are also incredibly dangerous for infants. Out of every 100,000 babies born to the wealthiest white families, 173 die before they turn one, and to the poorest white families 350 babies die in the same time frame. Even worse, 473 babies born to the richest Black families die, and 653 babies in the poorest Black families die before their first birthday.44 

Jane Pryma agues through her research on the intersections of race, gender, and moral-boundary work that women who reported unexplained pain or concerns are often “read through gendered moral discourses that cast women as hypochondriacs, and weaker, less rational, more emotional, and more likely to complain then men,”45 leading many doctors, particularly men, to dismiss women’s concerns for their own health and their own bodies when the doctors cannot diagnose their pain. Pyrma also reports that the racial ideologies originating from the time of chattel enslavement in the U.S. “underpin(s) beliefs that Blacks do not feel pain at the same intensity of whites, and that Black women are exceptionally strong and accustomed to suffering regardless of class.”46 This last aspect regarding the irrelevant nature of class in the medical field’s systemic racism makes itself most obvious in Serena Williams’ case, where after an emergency c-section to save her daughter’s life, Williams began feeling chest pain and asked a nurse for a CT scan, since she knew she had missed her daily blood thinning medications and felt a similar attack coming on that she had several years prior. The nurse initially dismissed Williams’ concerns and refused to call for a CT scan until William’s doctor believed Williams and ordered one, where Williams’ fears were confirmed and she was rushed to emergency surgery in order to save her life. In a BBC interview months later, the tennis legend stated that her doctor “was great. Unfortunately a lot of African Americans and black people don’t have the same experience that I’ve had.”47 As one of the most iconic athletes in a country that places an incredibly heavy emphasis on sports, Williams’ case is unfortunately a best case scenario and rare exception for many pregnant Black women in the U.S. Although white families in the United States have an average of $140,500 in wealth, Black families only have an average of $3,400 in wealth,48 meaning the majority of Black, single pregnant women do not have the money to pay for extensive treatments to save their lives, even if they are believed by the medical professionals when there is still time. 

Despite the fact that paid maternity leave does not in any way address the overarching systemic racism and sexism plaguing our medical field, it can help both Black mothers and children have higher chances of survival. The National Partnership for Women and Families based in Washington, D.C., who initially advocated for and saw the passage of the Family and Medical Paid Leave Act and continues to lobby for a national paid maternity welfare policy, has found that “women who receive paid leave” have their “chances of being rehospitalized reduced by 51%,” including improved mental health and infant health due to the lack of stress during the last trimester.49 Furthermore, in 2018 the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists endorsed “at least six weeks of fully paid leave for all new mothers” in order to “reduce high rates of maternal mortality in the United States,” especially since Black women are overrepresented in the more strenuous, manual labor likely to induce more stress on them and their children.50 Thus, while paid maternity leave will not solve all of the barriers Black pregnant women face, it can decrease their rates of mother mortality, as well as infant mortality, making this piece of welfare essential to the physical wellbeing and economic stability of Black pregnant women.

Admitting this welfare’s gendered and racialized roots that sought to solely benefit the middle-class, white collar married white women and ignored the needs of single, working class Black women, the paid maternity leave welfare program is even more necessary to poor, Black pregnant workers. This means there must be reformation of paid maternity leave in order to be all inclusive with no work requirements or additional barriers, including not leaving this responsibility in the hands of local or state governments or trusting employers to provide for their employees out of their own pockets. Thus, a national, federally funded program is the most effective form of welfare in order to create this new legislation. Though the Black Maternal Health Caucus has yet to propose a piece of legislation that addresses this disparity,51 it is vital that it be enacted. For too long has the United States fallen behind the rest of the world in regards to the most basic form of social reproduction: human reproduction and the wellbeing of those who bear the brunt of childbirth. Only then will we finally be able to move towards validating the work of women and mothering that U.S. society automatically places on the shoulders of mothers and so that Black mothers’ lives, financial stability, and health will matter.

  1.  Alysia Montaño, “Nike Told Me to Dream Crazy, Until I Wanted a Baby,” The New York Times,  May 12, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/opinion/nike-maternity-leave.html.
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  2.  “Paid Leave Benefits Among a National Sample of Working Mothers with Infants in the United States,” National Library of Medicine, January 1, 2015, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3840152/#:~:text=Forty%2Done%20percent%20of%20women,paid%20personal%20time%20per%20year.
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  3.  Tony Romm, “How the House spending bill offers the first federal paid leave program,” The Washington Post, November 19, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/11/19/paid-family-leave-biden-spending-bill/. ↩︎
  4.  Joe Manchin, “Manchin responds to Pelosi adding paid family leave back into bill,” interview by John Berman, CNN, November 4, 2021, video, 02:11, https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/04/politics/joe-manchin-democrats-spending-bill-cnntv/index.html#:~:text=Democratic%20Sen.,it%20belongs%20in%20the%20bill.%E2%80%9D. ↩︎
  5.  Romm, “Paid Leave Benefits Among a National Sample of Working Mothers with Infants in the United States.” ↩︎
  6.  Claire Cain Miller, “The World ‘Has Found a Way to Do This’: The U.S. Lags Behind on Paid Leave,” The New York Times, October 21, 25, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/25/upshot/paid-leave-democrats.html#:~:text=Globally%2C%20the%20average%20paid%20maternity,data%20shows%20up%20to%202019. ↩︎
  7.  Kirsten Gillibrand, “Millions of Americans struggling without paid family leave,” interview by Andrea Mitchell, NBC, October 28, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/supporters-paid-family-leave-disappointed-after-democrats-slash-it-biden-n1282636. ↩︎
  8.  Manchin, interview. ↩︎
  9. Kirsten Gillibrand, “Senator Gillibrand isn’t ready to give up on paid family leave,” interview by Michel Martin, National Public Radio, October 31, 2021, article,
    https://www.npr.org/2021/10/31/1050980389/sen-gillibrand-isnt-ready-to-give-up-on-paid-family-leave.
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  10.  Rosemary Ndubuizu, “The Battle Between Conservatives over Welfare Reform,” Class Lecture, AFAM 2250, Georgetown University, October 19, 2023. 
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  11.  “Paid Leave Benefits Among a National Sample of Working Mothers with Infants in the United States.” ↩︎
  12.  “Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, last modified 2009, https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-1964#:~:text=Title%20VII%20prohibits%20employment%20discrimination,several%20sections%20of%20Title%20VII. ↩︎
  13.  I wish to acknowledge that there are some pregnant persons who do not identify as women; although only biologically born females have the reproductive organs to bear children, some people who were born female who become pregnant identify with a different gender than the one in which they were assigned at birth. Thus, I use the terms “pregnant women” and “pregnant workers” interchangeably, since these laws primarily discriminate against women but also reinforce the gender binary. For more on this subject, see Samantha Schmidt, “A mother, but not a woman,” The Washington Post, August 16, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2019/08/16/non-binary-pregnant-navigating-most-gendered-role-all-motherhood/. ↩︎
  14.  Gilbert v. General Electric Company, 429 U.S. 125 (Supreme Court 1976). Cited in Denise Dunkin, “The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978,” (New York Law School, 1998), 25.
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  15.  Gilbert v. General Electric Company, 429 U.S. 125 (Supreme Court 1976). Cited in Denise Dunkin, “The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978,” (New York Law School, 1998), 26.
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  16.  Michelle D. Deardorff and James G. Dahl, Pregnancy Discrimination and the American Worker, (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2016), 52. ↩︎
  17.  Annelise Orleck, “‘Bad Luck and Lousy People’: Black Single Mothers and the War on Poverty,” in Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War On Poverty, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 70. ↩︎
  18.  Keonia Gains, “‘Their Side of the Case’: Domestic Workers and New Deal Labor Reform,” in Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis, (Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 2017 ), 66. ↩︎
  19.   Jenna Stearns, “The effects of paid maternity leave: Evidence from Temporary Disability Insurance,” Journal of Health Economics, Volume 43, September 2015, pp. 85-102, The effects of paid maternity leave: Evidence from Temporary Disability Insurance – ScienceDirect.
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  20.  Stearns, “The effects of paid maternity leave: Evidence from Temporary Disability Insurance,” 86.
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  21.  Stearns, “The effects of paid maternity leave: Evidence from Temporary Disability Insurance,” 86.
    ↩︎
  22. Kevin Brady, “Democrats manage to get 4 weeks of paid leave back into social spending bill. But it’s still too early for Americans to count on,” interview by Lorie Konish, November 3, 2021, article,
    https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pete-buttigieg-defends-paternity-leave-supply-chain-issues/story?id=80670846#:~:text=%2C%22%20he%20said.-,%22Every%20American%20ought%20to%20be%20able%20to.
     Stearns, “The effects of paid maternity leave: Evidence from Temporary Disability Insurance,” 87.
    ↩︎
  23.  “Family and Medical Leave (FMLA),” U.S. Department of Labor, 2023, https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/benefits-leave/fmla#:~:text=Employees%20are%20eligible%20for%20leave,more%20employees%20within%2075%20miles.
    ↩︎
  24. Kevin Brady, “Democrats manage to get 4 weeks of paid leave back into social spending bill. But it’s still too early for Americans to count on,” interview by Lorie Konish, November 3, 2021, article,
    https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pete-buttigieg-defends-paternity-leave-supply-chain-issues/story?id=80670846#:~:text=%2C%22%20he%20said.-,%22Every%20American%20ought%20to%20be%20able%20to.
    ↩︎
  25.  Julia M. Goodman, “Racial/Ethnic Inequalities in Paid Parental Leave Access,”Health Equity, Volume 5.1, 2021, pp.738-749, Racial/Ethnic Inequities in Paid Parental Leave Access – PMC (nih.gov). ↩︎
  26.  Goodman, “Racial/Ethnic Inequalities in Paid Parental Leave Access,” 747.
    ↩︎
  27.  Goodman, “Racial/Ethnic Inequalities in Paid Parental Leave Access,” 745.
    ↩︎
  28.  Goodman, “Racial/Ethnic Inequalities in Paid Parental Leave Access,” 746.
    ↩︎
  29.  “Paid Family and Medical Leave – Racial Justice Implications,” Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, 2019, 2, 2019-6-5-Paid-Leave-Racial-Justice-Fact-Sheet-Final.pdf (lawyerscommittee.org).
    ↩︎
  30.  Pete Buttigieg, “Pete Buttigieg defends paternity leave,” interview by Joanne Rosa, ABC News, October 20, 2021, article, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pete-buttigieg-defends-paternity-leave-supply-chain-issues/story?id=80670846#:~:text=%2C%22%20he%20said.-,%22Every%20American%20ought%20to%20be%20able%20to.
    ↩︎
  31.  Buttigieg, interview.
    ↩︎
  32.  Gains, “‘Their Side of the Case’: Domestic Workers and New Deal Labor Reform,” in Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis, 66.
    ↩︎
  33.  Cybelle Fox, “Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal,” (Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2012), 106. 
    ↩︎
  34. Sunday Taylor, “An Investigation of the Relationship between Black Single Mothers’ Myth/Stereotype Acceptance, Parental Self Efficacy, and Childrearing Practices,” (PhD diss., Boston College, 2006), 29.
    ↩︎
  35.  Taylor, “An Investigation of the Relationships between Black Single Mothers’ Myth/Stereotype Acceptance, Parental Self Efficacy, and Childrearing Practices,” 29.
    ↩︎
  36.  “Quick Facts: West Virginia,” United States Census Bureau, 2022, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/WV/IPE120222#IPE120222. 
    ↩︎
  37.  “A Deeper Look at West Virginia’s 2022 Poverty Data,” West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, September 20, 2023, https://wvpolicy.org/child-poverty-increased-in-west-virginia/#:~:text=Among%20the%20full%20population%20of,more%20likely%20to%20experience%20poverty. 
    ↩︎
  38. Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Kim Parker, Nikki Graf, and Gretchen Livingston, “Americans Widely Support Paid Family and Medical Leave, but Differ Over Specific Policies,” Pew Research Center, March 23, 2017,
    https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/03/23/americans-widely-support-paid-family-and-medical-leave-but-differ-over-specific-policies.
    ↩︎
  39. Alma Adams, “Congresswoman Alma Adams Votes for the Build Back Better Act,” Press Release, November 19, 2021,
    https://adams.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/congresswoman-alma-adams-votes-build-back-better-act. 
    ↩︎
  40.  Alma Adams and Lauren Underwood, “About Black Maternal Health,” Black Maternal Health Caucus: United States House of Representatives, 2023, https://blackmaternalhealthcaucus-underwood.house.gov/about-black-maternal-health. ↩︎
  41.  Allyson Felix, “Allyson Felix: My Own Nike Pregnancy Story,” The New York Times, May 22, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/opinion/allyson-felix-pregnancy-nike.html. 
    ↩︎
  42.  Serena Williams, “Serena Williams:Statistics on deaths in pregnancy or childbirth are ‘heartbreaking,’” interview by Russell Fuller, BBC Sport, March 6, 2018, video, https://www.bbc.com/sport/tennis/43299147. 
    ↩︎
  43.  Adams and Underwood, “About Black Maternal Health.” ↩︎
  44.  Claire Cain Miller, Sarah Kliff, and Larry Buchanan, “Childbirth Is Deadlier for Black Families Even When They’re Rich, Expansive Study Finds,” The New York Times, February 12, 2023, 
    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/12/upshot/child-maternal-mortality-rich-poor.html. ↩︎
  45.  Jane Pryma, “‘Even my sister says I’m acting like a crazy to get a check’: Race, gender, and moral boundary-work in women’s claims of disabling chronic pain,” Social Science and Medicine, Volume 181, May 2017, pp. 66-73,“Even my sister says I’m acting like a crazy to get a check”: Race, gender, and moral boundary-work in women’s claims of disabling chronic pain – ScienceDirect.
    ↩︎
  46.  Pryma, “Even my sister says I’m acting like a crazy to get a check’: Race, gender, and moral boundary-work in women’s claims of disabling chronic pain,” 68.
    ↩︎
  47.  Williams, “Serena Williams:Statistics on deaths in pregnancy or childbirth are ‘heartbreaking.’” 
    ↩︎
  48.  “Paid Family and Medical Leave – Racial Justice Implications.”
    ↩︎
  49.  “Paid Leave is Essential for Healthy Moms and Babies,” National Partnership for Women Families,” May 2021, https://nationalpartnership.org/report/paid-leave-is-essential-for/. 
    ↩︎
  50.  Goodman, “Racial/Ethnic Inequalities in Paid Parental Leave Access,” 739.
    ↩︎
  51. Adams and Underwood, “About Black Maternal Health,” https://blackmaternalhealthcaucus-underwood.house.gov/about-black-maternal-health. 

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    Adams, Alma. “Congresswoman Alma Adams Votes for the Build Back Better Act.” Press Release. November 19, 2021.
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