The US and Australia are the only industrialised countries that do not provide national paid leave for new mothers
WHEN PATRICIA Kohler, a nurse, told her boss at a private doctors’ practice that she was pregnant, he asked her how many days did she plan to take off.
As an American mother-to-be working in Ohio, she had no entitlement to maternity leave. The US and Australia are the only industrialised countries that do not provide national paid leave for new mothers, though there are exceptions in some US states.
Australian mothers do have their jobs protected for a year and the government is considering introducing 14 weeks’ paid leave. In the US, only bigger firms have to keep your job open, and that’s for a maximum of 12 weeks.
Kohler (35), who now lives in Malahide, Co Dublin and works with the Meningitis Research Foundation, describes herself and her husband as “ultra planners”.
They took out an insurance policy in January 2005, which kicked in after 10 months. Their first child, Kyan, was born the following month. The policy covered a percentage of Kohler’s income for seven weeks before she went back part-time and she resumed full-time working at 12 weeks.
“Physically, it was hard. I had had a C-section and that’s major surgery. Mentally, I think going back helped me. Seven weeks is too early,” she says. “Maybe 12 weeks is okay.”
She was relatively new in her career at the time, she says, “and there was this pressure to be your pre-baby self”. Now she sees motherhood as a second pane in the glass ceiling that she had not realised was there.
It’s hard to believe that the US has such an unenlightened attitude to the raising of the next generation and that women put up with it.
“Like every issue, you have a tendency not to care until it actually happens to you,” says Kohler.
Does she tell Irish women how lucky they are with their paid maternity leave?
“Is it luck, or a society that is more equal, a society that is more humane?” she replies. “So many of the Republicans say they are pro-family yet they fight against any government-mandated requirement that would protect the family, because they worship the almighty dollar.”