Even Planned Parenthood is mistreating its mothers in a country where they face discrimination and farcical expectations
In December, I read a news article that had me cursing at the computer with rage. It was a New York Times investigation detailing allegations of poor treatment of mothers by Planned Parenthood, including not offering maternity leave, mistreating pregnant workers and discriminating against moms in hiring and promotion. So why did this get me so much more worked up than average? After all, we live in a general cascade of bad news, with no shortage of things to be outraged about. The story made me particularly angry because, in addition to being a mother myself, for the last two years I’ve been researching and reporting on working mothers. And the more I learn about motherhood in America, the angrier I get. Many thoughtful articles and interesting books are exploring new levels of anger in the public sphere – and there’s been a lot of attention on exploring our current renaissance of women’s rage. While mothers today are rightfully involved in all sorts political organizing and public protests, I think we should also make space to be truly pissed about what it’s actually like to be mother in 2019.
Let’s start at the beginning. When a woman learns she’s pregnant, she immediately becomes vulnerable to the “epidemic” of pregnancy discrimination; it appears no industry is immune. Mothers are more likely to die in childbirth in America than in most industrialized countries, and that rate is climbing. Even more disturbingly, black mothers are nearly 3.5 times more likely to die than white mothers. As hospitals try to address this, some of them appear more interested in blaming mothers for their own deaths than proactively changing outcomes. Since we live in the only industrialized country that doesn’t mandate paid family leave, nearly 25% of mothers go back to work within two weeks of giving birth. To give you a sense of where human mothers fall on the legal protection hierarchy, it’s illegal to separate a dog from her newborn pups before eight weeks in several states. Once we return to work, we unfortunately can expect anti-mom bias in hiring, pay and promotions. And, if a woman has a baby between the ages of 25 and 35, she can expect a lifetime of economic marginalization and diminished earnings.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2StAYgS
