The United States is one of the only countries in the world to not guarantee any form of paid leave. It's time for that to change

Habibah lives in northern New Jersey. She works for a university by day, and is an activist in her off hours. I watched as her boys helped the film crew load their equipment into the house, the ways they looked at their mother when she wasn’t watching. She has good posture, is composed, regal even, in a beautiful headscarf. When she shares the story of her husband waking up unable to move after a heart attack and stroke, and his disability in the months to come, her voice is steady.

Elizabeth lives in the suburbs of Denver. She works for a nonprofit and is an adjunct professor. She is part of a Denver Jewish community that meets in yards, homes, and churches. Her little daughter spins around the room and dances in a tutu. I watch Elizabeth rock her new baby in a rocking chair that she used to sit in alone during her daughter’s time in the hospital. She and her husband Lee are focused and always in motion, loading cars and strollers and baby seats. In spite of what they’ve just been through — more than seven weeks in the NICU — she is quick to laugh, even through tears. 

Two very different women, two very different families — stories that are far from rare. They both needed paid leave when the unexpected happened, and having access to it transformed both of their lives. Take that away, and you see what so many families are up against. It is an unconscionable failure that this kind of support remains the exception in the United States today. 

We don’t have paid family or medical leave as a country. Half of us don’t even have rights to unpaid leave. Tens of millions of us don’t have access to a single paid sick day. While new life and death happens to all of us, only one in four of us has paid family leave from our jobs in the private sector. Just this month, there was news of large corporations cutting back on their paid leave benefits, and a worker even being asked to take a meeting from the labor and delivery room before she was fired three weeks after returning from leave. And while the momentum is growing at the state level, we remain one of the only countries in the world, along with Papua New Guinea and several small island nations, that doesn’t guarantee any form of paid leave. And we all pay the price for that choice. 

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This spring, while working on the short documentary film Lifelines, I spent time with Habibah and Elizabeth and their families on their caregiving and paid leave journeys, both giving birth, both dealing with unexpected medical emergencies while dealing with their own healing and recovery. Their stories moved me deeply, but what I want you to understand — and what became clear while filming — is that they are far from unique. Caregiving, the building and growing and sustaining of families, is what connects us all — yet we’ve built a system that treats it as an afterthought. The need to both work and care is universal, but it’s a reality we have chosen to ignore in policymaking.

When we launched our organization, Paid Leave for All, in 2019, this was already clear. In anticipation of our launch, we visited the administration building for Washington state’s new paid leave program. As we walked through the hallway into the entrance, the walls were plastered with family photos. White, Black, brown. New babies, loved ones giving feeble thumbs up from gurneys, parents, grandparents, aunties, uncles. It was a reminder, they told us — a reminder as they walked into work every day of why they were there. It has inspired our work ever since. 

This week, advocates and legislators from 25 states will convene in Washington, D.C., to celebrate a stunning wave of paid leave victories over the last five years — momentum fueled by the pandemic, accelerated by the national push behind “Build Back Better,” and driven by the affirmation that paid leave is, in fact, a lifeline. Together, they will chart the path ahead: a 50-state strategy to sustain that progress now, and ultimately, secure a federal program that finishes the job. Against that backdrop, we’ll celebrate our short film Lifelines, a reminder of what’s at stake — and how much is possible. 

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We have piles of data about paid family and medical leave, reports and polling going back decades. The evidence doesn’t change; in fact, the case for paid leave grows. It saves lives. It boosts public health, improving maternal and infant health outcomes, cancer survival rates, mental health for whole families. It yields economic growth, keeping more caregivers in the workforce, reducing turnover costs and saving families’ paychecks. But what we forget sometimes is this experience is uniquely what we share across race, faith, gender, geography, walk of life. It’s about what matters most: a baby’s first smile, a parent or partner’s last breath. 

In October, Habibah’s husband Rasheed passed away. A month later, my friend Faith Winter — a Colorado state senator, who had championed her state’s historic paid leave win on the ballot that helped Elizabeth’s family, and later expansion for NICU families — died in a car crash. 

It made me feel even stronger about this movement. Life is so short and we are all so fragile. At the end of the day, nothing is more important than being there for the people we love, especially in our most important and vulnerable and profound moments — a new birth, a NICU stay, an unexpected diagnosis, a death. These are the moments we heal, the moments we feel the meaning and limits and breadth of our humanity. 

We have an inspiring number of states who have passed paid family and medical leave programs. Most recently Virginia became the 14th state, along with D.C., to enact paid leave, and the first in the South. This year Maine, Minnesota, and Delaware began delivering benefits under their new programs and Colorado implemented a first-in-the-nation policy for NICU families. 

But the lack of a federal guarantee means most families are still struggling. Whether you’re a teacher trying to time a pregnancy around vacation schedules, a construction worker dealing with injury, or an executive who fears they can’t take the time away, paid leave impacts all kinds of people in this country. It impacts our life choices and trajectories, our physical and mental health, our ability to simply be present in our lives. 

Political circles are abuzz with the “affordability” conversation these days — the cost of eggs, the price at the pump. They should be, and it’s important. But what’s sometimes missing from the affordability conversation is time — our ability to have it with the people we love without sacrificing our livelihoods. Being denied that time is a poverty in itself. 

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We have to remember what we go to work for every morning. Why we get out of bed these days, what brings us joy and meaning. Much of the world takes these things — paid leave, the ability to give and afford care — for granted. It’s time we stop accepting anything less. 

Dawn Huckelbridge is the founding director of Paid Leave for All and co-executive producer of the documentary short Lifelines.