This Week in Abortion, Guest Feature on Paid Family Leave

A collection of good reads, events from the week, and policy insights.

Welcome back to your weekly roundup of good reads, legal updates, and legislative tracking on abortion. The news is light this week but the Good Reads are, well, good. And this week we have a guest feature on trends in parental leave from Beth Kenefick, a health and poverty policy expert. 

One of the things we love about writing this newsletter is knowing it’s reaching an engaged group of subscribers, many of whom are public servants and advocates in related areas. If there is something you’ve been thinking of writing about, let us know! 

Good Reads

• Oregon Public Broadcasting published a really powerful piece about two women in Texas who had different experiences with the abortion bans and are both part of the lawsuit against the state. This quote really resonated with Mollie, who has experienced receiving the news that your baby has a fatal condition:

  "If you're on life support, your family can take you off of life support," she says. "I feel like it's the same thing, except for my daughter was in my womb — like I'm her life support. I feel like I should have been able to release her into heaven sooner rather than later, and I wasn't given that right."

• A new study shows that maternal mortality rates in the US have increased over the last 10 years. Obviously this is the wrong direction no matter your stance on abortion access. As many of you can probably guess, the impact on women of color is higher than other racial groups, and abortion bans are connected with higher mortality rates (presumably since hospitals and doctors cannot accurately judge when the threshold of “mothers life in danger” occurs). 

• Time Magazine highlights anti-access Americans lobbying for abortion bans across the African continent. This is nothing new but really a blast from the colonial and post-colonial past. Mollie has many thoughts on this, but mostly hopes it is a reminder to folks that who you vote for in the white house impacts more than just us.

• Abortion rights are in the rearview in many states. But, at least people are getting free diapers. Chabeli Carrazana writes in The 19th that “2023 will likely be a banner year in diaper legislation” in Republican states. We joke, but as our guest feature covers, America is bad at supporting families. Our take is it is OK to celebrate these advancements so long as the big picture is not lost along the way.

• Laura Santhanam at PBS News Hour looks at the role reproductive coercion and control play in domestic abuse. It’s common now to hear advocates say, “Republicans want to control your body.” We try to stay away from broad statements like this, but Santhanam’s article serves as a strong reminder that restrictions on abortion have serious consequences for individual freedom and safety.

• It seems logical that with abortion bans in place, adoptions could be on the rise. But as Mary Pflum covers for NBC News, the adoption story is complicated. The article also goes into some of the rising risks including dangers of “baby brokers” scamming vulnerable women and concern about what to do if there is a rise in  babies with medical challenges like Down syndrome needing adoption. 

State and Local Events of the Week

• 👍 Maine will allow abortions at any point in pregnancy, with doctors’ approval for abortions after “viability.” This is an amazing precedent for access for so many reasons, though it is interesting to listen to the floor debates among Democrats on whether it goes “too far.” 

• 👎 Iowa’s legislature will return next week for a special session specifically focused on passing an abortion ban. We are not sure what will happen in the special session. 

  • The governor would like to pass something as strict, if not stricter than the five week ban that the State Supreme Court recently deadlocked on. However, what is less clear is what will be politically feasible. Iowa’s government is safely Republican, but it’s a different set of legislators since the ban passed in 2022.

  • This commentary from a local newspaper owner Art Cullen seems an appropriate reminder, “Abortion will be a leading issue in 2024 Statehouse races, but not around here [in rural Iowa]...abortion is not alone the issue that can turn Iowa politics away from a hard-right lurch.”

• 👍It looks like Ohio’s pro-access ballot initiative will appear on the ballot in November. Advocates collected twice enough signatures as they needed. That’s good, because the next step will be a review by the Secretary of State to determine over 400,000 of them are valid.

Legal Updates

• 👎 A judge blocked the city of St. Louis from implementing a program to help residents obtain abortions in the bordering state of Illinois. We are not surprised as there are many restrictions on using federal and state money on abortion (let alone to support other states), but appreciate the city’s creativity!

Guest Feature: Paid Family Leave and Abortion Policy

Previously we’ve highlighted that at least one good thing coming in the wake of the Dobbs decision was an increase in legislation supporting families and expanding women’s health benefits.

This week we have a guest writer - Beth Kenefick, a policy practitioner specializing in the health and economic well-being of children and families centered on race and gender equity. We asked Beth to comment on whether she’s seen any state momentum for paid family and medical leave. Take it away, Beth…

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Pregnancy and the act of giving birth are major medical events with lasting physical and mental impacts on the individuals involved. And, the risks are unfortunately much higher for Black women due to systemic racism and discrimination. For those who survive childbirth, recovering takes time. But most women do not have access to this time to heal and bond with their newborns because, unlike in the European Union, paid leave is not guaranteed in this country at the federal level.  

What Mollie and Rachel wrote earlier this year remains true:

Women did actually birth babies prior to the Dobbs decision and were, in fact, in need of many of the benefits now being considered. Women, children, and families deserve social safety nets and supports, even if they have access to abortion services. Paid family leave, Medicaid expansion to new moms, affordable childcare options - all of these are things advocates have been pushing for YEARS and are not pawns in a game of chess. There is no checkmate when it comes to ensuring our country’s residents are able to thrive. 

Fortunately, some states have been trying to fill this gap through the creation of state paid medical and family leave programs, even pre-Dobbs. Unfortunately those states are not the same ones currently restricting or trying to restrict access to abortion, often in the name of being pro-family and pro-life. It begs the question of what pro-family really means for these states.

So what exactly is paid medical and family leave?

As a quick refresher for those not intimately following this topic:

1. Paid family and medical leave can include the following types of leave: medical, parental, caregiving, deployment-related, and safe. The most commonly understood and recognizable are probably the first three. Medical refers to coverage for an individual’s own serious health condition whereas caregiving refers to caring for a loved one with a serious health condition (as defined by the Family and Medical Leave Act). Parental leave refers to the coverage needed to bond with a new child, including foster and adoptive parents and parents of any gender. 

2. There is no federal law entitling United States workers to paid leave despite numerous attempts. This leaves the United States as one of seven countries without national paid maternity leave.

   • Adopted thirty years ago, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) enshrined many important job protections, but is unpaid and fewer than 60 percent of workers qualify for it.

   • A paid leave provision included in a version of Build Back Better that passed the U.S. House of Representatives in November 2021 was the closest advocates and legislators have gotten in recent years to passing a national program but it was ultimately removed in final negotiations with the Senate. 

   • U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) continue to push for it and recently reintroduced an updated version of their legislation – Family and Medical Insurance Leave (FAMILY) Act – to create a permanent, national paid family and medical leave program. 

3. At the start of this year, eleven states and Washington, D.C. had paid family and medical leave laws (CA, CO, CT, DE, MA, MD, NJ, NY, OR, RI and WA). Additionally, three states (NH, VA, and VT) provide voluntary opportunities to purchase insurance coverage, but it is not legally guaranteed in those states. The currently enacted state laws all provide benefits to workers for the first three types with some providing deployment and safe leave–which covers needs for a victim of sexual or domestic violence.

What’s happening now? 

While we’ve seen many state legislatures take action to restrict abortion access, in the past six months we’ve only seen one new state be added to the list with paid family and medical leave laws and one additional state with a voluntary program.

As Senator Gillibrand’s social media team has aptly pointed out again – the Venn diagram of those states restricting abortion access and those expanding obligatory paid leave has no overlap. (**If the states with voluntary programs are taken into account then Arkansas would now be in the middle).  

Minnesota became the 12th state to have a paid family and medical leave program after passing legislation that allows up to 12 weeks a year off with partial pay to care for a newborn or sick family member. It will operate similarly to unemployment insurance and take effect in 2026 and complements the shorter-term relief provided by a new state earned sick and safe time program taking effect in 2024. Additionally, Arkansas passed a voluntary program becoming the fourth state to do so. 

What happens next?

It remains to be seen if those states restricting access will take up the mantle and support families through paid family and medical leave programs. 

There have been baby steps in anti-access states. For example, Tennessee approved 6-weeks of paid leave for state employees this session. But, it’s not enough. In these states with seemingly intractable anti-abortion politics, policies like paid family leave are possibly the only way to provide some limited relief and advance support for women. I’d hope and expect more red states to put their money where their mouths are in supporting families.

The states that have passed these programs almost all did so prior to the Dobbs-decision. But I expect more will try in the coming years. Ultimately paid family leave is a key component of reproductive and economic justice policy platforms. And just like abortion access, should be guaranteed to all regardless of what state you live in.