During my Fulbright year in northern Spain’s La Rioja region, I built connections with two women in my host community who were both expectant mothers. I learned from them not only about language and culture, but also about how their professional lives supported motherhood.
The contrast between the maternity leave policies they described and those I was familiar with in the United States was striking.
Spain guarantees 16 weeks of fully paid, job-protected maternity leave, while the United States is the only high-income country in the world without paid leave.
The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) allows eligible employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave. To qualify, employees must have worked for their employer for at least 12 months and be employed at a workplace with 50 or more employees. This means millions of jobs nationwide are not covered, and the consequences for maternal-infant health outcomes are dire.
In 2019, the Connecticut legislature passed CT Paid Leave (CTPL), a law providing partial income replacement while on leave. These benefits launched in 2022, the same year that state protections under CT FMLA expanded to cover job protection for all employers with at least one employee in the state. Connecticut Paid Leave provides partial wage replacement on a sliding scale, but the federal FMLA and the CT FMLA separately cover job protection.
As of 2026, Connecticut is one of just 13 states plus Washington, D.C. with paid leave policies. But because the wage...
Law firms and advisers are charging fees to help migrants to fabricate sexual orientation-based asylum claims in order to remain in the United Kingdom (UK), a BBC investigation has revealed. In a...