Argumentative Essay On Maternity Leave

Two weeks into her new job, Jill St. John discovered she was pregnant. She had just been hired as the project manager for IBM. She was only a few weeks along when she walked into the president’s office and told him that she was pregnant. “His face immediately changed,” she says. “The first words out of his mouth were, ‘You know you’re still on your 90-day probation period.’ So I pretty much knew what that meant.” A few weeks later, she was let go.
This kind of scenario happens all too often in America. Prominent American philosopher, Noam Chomsky (Author, date) has claimed America to be the “country in the world”. However, when it comes to paid maternity leave, the U.S. is the only industrialised country from a recent 185-country study (Addati, Cassirer & Gilchrist, 2014) where new mothers are not guaranteed paid leave. The closest thing they offer is the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA),

Not only that, but there’s a good chance that many of those women returned to the jobs they had before giving birth. That, in turn, can significantly reduce costs for employers, who don’t have to take on the expense of hiring and training new employees when women temporarily leave their jobs after having kids. Higher workforce participation for women isn’t the only benefit of paid maternity leave. It may also translate into savings for taxpayers. The same Rutgers study found that women who took paid leave were roughly 40% less likely to receive public assistance and food stamp benefits in the year after their child was born. Those who did receive benefits needed less help, receiving $413 less in benefits than those who didn’t take paid leave. Men who took paid leave after their child was born were also less likely to be on public