The afternoon sun heats her left cheek, and a gentle breeze makes her drowsy; her body is aching for sleep and she fights to keep her eyelids open. She is driving and somehow she has to stay awake. Two lives are at stake—hers and her unborn child’s. As she turns onto the 405, one of a myriad of Los Angeles’ pulsing veins, she closes the window, blares the radio and turns up the air conditioner, hoping to keep her eyes open over one last freeway. It’s no use. She pulls over and falls fast asleep. Twenty minutes later she awakens from her power nap and safely negotiates the remainder of her journey home from work.

Everyday for nine months, Mary Smith*, 38, battled something that 72.9 percent of all 70 million working women in America go through at some point during their career—pregnancy exhaustion. With plenty of rest it’s possible to keep this exhaustion under control, but working full time and commuting an hour each way to and from work, which Smith had to do, is not only physically straining but can also be dangerous. Pregnancy related car crashes are common, and Smith was worried that she would be in one.

Smith started bleeding four months into the pregnancy and had to be put on bedrest for two weeks, but when she asked if she could go home an hour earlier or work from home during the rest of the pregnancy, her regional boss, who doesn’t have any children, answered: “I don’t know anyone else who had that problem.” End of discussion.

Despite that incident, she considers herself lucky. Not only could she keep her job at the staffing company* and the health coverage that came with it, but her baby was born two weeks after she hit her year mark, which meant that she could take out maternity leave. With the vacation time that she had saved in preparation, and the six weeks of partial pay that California’s Paid Family Leave Law requires employers to provide their employees, she could take a little more than two months off from work to bond with her newborn daughter. And then her mother-in-law stepped in.

Not every working parent in the United States has this privilege.

California (since 2002) and Washington (since 2007) are the only states where workers have the right to take up to six weeks partially paid parental leave. Few can actually afford to take the time off with only 55 percent of an already meager salary.
In the rest of the country, eligible employees are only guaranteed 12 weeks of unpaid leave each year to “care for a newborn or newly adopted child, seriously ill family member, or to recover from their own serious health conditions, while ensuring job security” under the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA). Eligible workers are defined as those who work for a company with more than 50 employees. According to the National Partnership for Women and Families, an organization working for “fair and flexible workplaces,” 78 percent of workers who needed family and medical leave but didn’t take it said they couldn’t afford to miss a paycheck.

How the un-eligible and low-income families manage to balance work and family is a mystery, as it’s already nearly impossible for middle-income families.

“It’s heartbreaking,” says Arlyce Currie, program director for Bananas, a non-profit childcare referral and support agency in northern Alameda County, Calif. “Everyday desperate pregnant women call to ask if we can help them find a solution.”

Only those who already went through the “welfare door” before they started working can get state supported childcare assistance, explains Currie. Those who didn’t have to rely on friends, relatives, and neighbors to take care of their newborn children.

“It’s barbaric that parents have to go back to work so soon after their babies are born,” she says.

And compared to most countries in the world, the United States’ parental leave policies are primitive. A study from McGill University’s Institute for Health and Social Policy looked at 173 countries from different parts of the world and found that only four other countries had similar or worse parental leave policies than the United States: Lesotho, Liberia, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea.

The study also showed that 98 countries offer 14 or more weeks of paid leave. Sweden, known for it’s pro-family policies, offers 480 days paid parental leave. If both parents have custody of the child, they can share those days. An anti-discriminatory law encourages fathers to use it as well. If a mother in Sweden is exhausted, starts bleeding or has other pregnancy related discomforts, such as back problems, swollen legs, or general ungainliness, the woman can start taking out the parental allowance as much as 60 days before the expected due date. Almost all women in Sweden take advantage of this as an opportunity to rest, shop and prepare before their babies are born.

This is only but a dream for most American women. Here, women have no choice but to work all the way through the pregnancy, give birth and soon thereafter get back to work—even though study after study have proven that paid parental leave decreases infant mortality and improves children’s learning and wellbeing. ABS News reports “the United States is now comparable to Croatia, Lithuania and Taiwan. Most analysts currently rank the United States 28th in the world in infant mortality, far behind other industrialized nations such as Sweden, France, Japan and Germany.”

A few years ago when Celina Allen and her husband James were expecting their second child, the unexpected happened. Baby Connor arrived one month prematurely and had to be rushed to the intensive care unit—he survived but the situation left Allen with the hardest decision in her life: was she going to use her barely affordable month of unpaid leave to stay at the hospital with her newborn son, or was she going to take time off after he got home? She decided for the second option, so after giving birth on Wednesday, she had to be back at work on Monday the following week.

“A piece of me got left at that hospital, and now I had to pretend that I’m okay,” she says, fighting back tears in the documentary film The Motherhood Manifesto.

She and her husband, who live in Kent, Wash., are officially middle-class but are struggling to make ends meet. They can only afford part-time daycare for their boys; she drives them there in the morning, her husband, who works a graveyard shift, takes a nap, she goes to work, her husband picks the kids up by midday, she comes home around 5:30 – 6 p.m., he takes another nap, they have dinner, and then he leaves for the night again. They have what is called a “tag-team” marriage. One out of three Americans with small children live this way, according to the film.

“It’s been a horrible strain on our marriage,” Allen says.

Even though it’s painful to be away from a newborn, most women want to keep their jobs for personal stimulation and/or have to stay in order to survive economically, as in Allen’s case. But some experience pregnancy related discrimination and others learn after they’ve given birth that they can’t come back to their position, leaving them completely powerless. (See side bar for more detailed information)

In 2003, Kaiser withdrew a job offer to a labor and delivery nurse because she was pregnant. The nurse, Margaret Mcllroy, filed a lawsuit with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) under the Title of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Mcllroy won and will receive $180,000 from the company. EEOC’s stats show an upward trend in pregnancy discrimination, and another report from the National Partnership found that since 1992 there has been a 39 percent increase in the number of pregnancy discrimination charges filed. In the same amount of time, there has been a nine percent drop in the national birth rate.

If women are still victims of gender based discrimination, then the question is whether the Civil Rights Act is still enough. Many believe it’s not. The existing Fair Employment and Housing Act protects families from housing discrimination, but there are no explicit employment protections for family caregivers. The Paid Family Leave Program only provides benefits, not job protection or return rights.

“There is a profound bias against mothers,” says Joan Blades during a brisk walk up the hills in northern Berkeley on a crisp October morning. “The top cause of poverty in America is having children.”

Blades, who is the co-founder of the online citizen advocacy groups Momsrising and MoveOn, believes that the system is making it impossible to take proper care of your own kids.

The sun breaks through the clouds, and its rays penetrate the yellow and orange tree crowns above her. “We’re trying to remind people that we don’t have to buck up and take care of our own,” she says of our individualistic culture. “It’s an investment for the society.”

Most companies and many politicians have yet to come to this realization.

Each year Working Mother Media, Inc., selects and ranks the 100 family-friendliest companies in the United States by reviewing employer questionnaires describing their “workforce profile, compensation, childcare, flexibility, time off and leaves, family-friendly programs and company culture.” An Institute for Women’s Policy Research analyzed the latest data and found that “nearly 24 percent of the best employers for working mothers provide four or fewer weeks of paid maternity leave, and half provided six weeks or less…While 28 percent provide nine or more weeks of paid maternity leave, many of the winners’ paid parental leave policies fall short of families’ needs.”

“The bottom line is to increase production,” explains Gino Di Caro, spokes-person for the California Manufacturers and Technology Association (CMTA). “But we’re losing productivity, and it’s becoming increasingly harder to do business.”

The association, which has 800 member companies, sent a letter to Gov. Schwarzenegger on September 20 this year, requesting him to veto SB 836, a bill to “protect employees from discrimination at work based on their familial status,” according to a press release from the Labor Project for Working Families.

Part of the letter reads: “Although the supporters of the bill will argue that this bill does not expand family leave rights, CMTA believes that it will create another avenue in which to litigate cases often related to family leave.”

In November 2007, the governor vetoed it with these familiar words: “This bill will not only result in endless litigation to try and define what discrimination on the basis of “familial status” means, it will also unnecessarily restrict employers’ ability to make personnel decisions.”

One company that understands the importance of well-rested and happy employees is Johnson & Johnson, which ranked in the top ten of the 100 winners.

“I want my daughters to have every opportunity that my sons will have. They should be able to have both a family and meaningful careers,” says Jim Johnson in The Motherhood Manifesto, the same documentary film mentioned earlier.

Johnson, owner of the old family business based in Denver, Colo., decided to make his company more family friendly after he’d heard Joan Williams, foundation chair and director of the Center for WorkLife Law, speak about the difficulties that mothers in the work force face.

His employees now set up their own schedules making flexible work hours a reality; new moms, who have worked for the company for at least five years receive 26 paid weeks of maternity leave, and people working part-time have benefits. Johnson says that his new work policies started attracting talent that he hadn’t seen before and the turnover slowed dramatically. Many of his employees work from home, which saves him workspaces, and with employees taking care of both work and family, his business is booming.

Johnson advises employees to go to their companies to tell them about their problems, because, as the true republican he is, he believes in the force of the free market. He believes the government should not dictate what the companies should do. Instead, businesses themselves should solve the problem.

Williams doesn’t agree. “For 25 years there has only been a snail paced progress,” she says. “You can’t depend on the market to solve these problems.”

“Americans don’t see collective welfare as a public asset and a societal goal,” says Valerie A. Young, advocacy coordinator for National Association of Mothers’ Centers based out of New York. “We mistakenly link socialism to social welfare.”

Young, who personally lives and works close to Capitol Hill, is frustrated that people ignore reality but believes that a few practical barriers have something to do with the “ignorance.”

“Americans don’t travel as much as people from other rich countries, which makes us isolated and insulated,” she says. “We don’t speak foreign languages, and our abilities to get information are impaired.”

Young says that American women tend to think that it’s their fault that they can’t balance everything. “This is not your personal problem. We can chose these things with changes in the law,” she says with passion in her voice.

Since no laws have yet to pass, Mary Smith is still faced with her reality.

She is tired, guilt ridden and dehydrated from the dry air in the office. Drinking a lot of fluids during breastfeeding is essential, but Smith doesn’t have the time. She gets 10 to 15 minutes, three times a day, to pump milk for her baby in the office. Her breasts are full with milk, but they only let out one ounce each time she tries to pump; that’s not enough to appease a hungry infant. After three weeks she gives up pumping and the last connection of being a mother during the long days at work without her child.

Smith may be luckier than many, but she describes her return to work from maternal leave as a nightmare: she wakes up before her baby so that she can travel an hour to the office, work a full day and drive another hour to arrive home while her daughter is still awake.

Smith likes to work outside of the home, but she would prefer to work part time than be away from her daughter all day.

“Of course I would have lost my job, and I don’t know what the next step would have been,” she says. “You have to pay the bills, to have a home to raise your baby.”

Because Smith’s mother-in-law is with her daughter more than she is, her daughter wants to go to grandma first if she gets upset. “When grandma is around, everything is great,” she says. “She is not as used to us.”

“I love every moment I have with her,” she says. “I wish I had more.” But Smith is carrying her family’s economical burden on her shoulders, and she cannot afford to quit. “We have been blessed, because she hasn’t been too sick.”

*Name of subject has been changed to protect her privacy
*Name of company has been withheld to protect subject from losing her job.