Janet Walsh on Parental Leave

Janet Walsh, the deputy director of the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights and former attorney for New York law firms in the United Nation’s legal division, uses her platform to advocate for women’s rights. One of her advocacy programs focuses on the rights of working mothers in the US suffering from unpaid parental leave and family-support.

Walsh has spent years reporting working-mothers’ struggles with the social and financial repercussions of pregnancy and maternity leave. One interview that caught my attention was with a working-woman by the reported name of Samantha. Upon delivering her first via C-section, her wound became infected. She then took eight months of maternity leave off from her job, most of which was unpaid. Once she returned to work (still in physical pain), she was laid off under the reasoning that she was no longer capable of meeting the company’s demands for working late-shifts with little notice. The months of unpaid leave in compound with her new status as unemployed and temporarily but physically disabled, Samantha fell into debt and depleted her years of savings. The issue with our society is that cases like Samantha’s are not just isolated case-studies, but systemic patterns.

If I were given the opportunity to meet Janet Walsh and dive deeper into why patterns like this exist (and subsequently what we can do to change this), I would ask the following questions:

1. You have quite a personal connection to the issue of unpaid maternity leave in the US. Can you elaborate on the lack of support systems put in place for working mothers such as yourself?
   1. How is pregnancy a sort of temporary disability? Is this disability constrained to merely the 9 weeks of carrying a child to term?
   2. Did this affect your significant other? How?
   3. How might your experience with motherhood and work-life have changed if you had a spouse who was required to take the same leave as you? 
   4. How does this lack of support for working parents differ between heterosexual and gay couples?
2. How does the USA’s enforcement of parental leave differ from other developed countries around the globe? How does this difference in policy translate into American’s values and expectation of parental roles, if any?
3. What type of policies can governments or individual companies put in place to better support parents with newborns? Is there a “one-strategy-fits-all”?