The High Tech Way

Palin versus Biden on family values and choice

John McCain's VP choice Sarah Palin's Downs baby is just 4 months old.  Personally, I was bereft to go back to work when my boys were just 3 months onld. I would have stayed home for 6 if I could have, and begged off from travel for longer than that.  I couldn't see myself running for VP if I had a 4-month old infant who was ill on top of it all.  I wonder if she's breastfeeding. I wonder if she's pumping. Still, I think it's a woman's right as well to decide if, when and how she will go back to work.

Yet I hear a disconnect here between Democratic VP candidate Joe Biden saying "Delaware can always get another senator, but my boys only have one father," (after his wife and daughter were killed in an auto accident that left his two sons in the hospital), and Sarah Palin running for VP of the US when her chronically ill baby is only 4 months old.

Her baby's Downs was diagnosed during the pregnancy and she chose to take it to term, which is every woman's right to choose. I'm glad that she made the decision that she felt was right for her family and for her faith. But I wonder what she will say when the pro-choice question comes up during the campaign, as you know it will.  Does she understand other women in her place making a different decision than she made?

Barack or Hillary?

Last week David invited Barack Obama to join his LinkedIn network.

Now, we don't know Barack.  We haven't even gotten a recorded phone message from his campaign.  However, David now counts Barack among his 49 contacts on LinkedIn.

You see, somehow David joined the Democratic Party group on LinkedIn, said he and Obama were both members of it, and managed to send an invitation to Obama based on that. In the invitation, he also mentioned to Barack that he planned to vote for him in the Pennsylvania primary next week.

Tonight when David checked, Obama had accepted David's invitation. And, damn, if I haven't been trying to figure out how David got the invitation to Obama!  David can't even remember now.  I think the door is closed. Damn!

David's been a Barack supporter for a while now, and I have been undecided.  Over the last few months, many of the people I know have moved to the Obama camp, with the exception of my mother and stepfather. I have just been happy with the amazing crop of Democratic candidates we've had to choose from this time around, and would have been happy with ANY of them. Really, I've never seen anything like it, and I'm 43 now.

But although I spent quite a while in the undecided camp something that I read a month or so ago pushed me into the Barack camp. It's a blog entry from the inventor of the Netscape browser and founder of Netscape, Marc Andreessen. He met with Obama for an hour and a half in 2007 when things were getting started, and in this post he gives his assessment of the man. Check it out.

Why is U.S. Maternity Leave policy close to the worst in the world? (Yes, the WORST!)

While politicians here in the United States pontificate about the importance of "family values," they fail to support families with policy.

Case in point: the United States has the crappiest maternity leave policy of any industrialized nation.

From this story:

With little public debate, the United States has chosen a radically different approach to maternity leave than the rest of the developed world. The United States and Australia are the only industrialized countries that don't provide paid leave for new mothers nationally, though there are exceptions in some U.S. states.

Australian mothers have it better, however, with one year of job-protected leave. The U.S. Family and Medical Leave Act provides for 12 weeks of job-protected leave, but it only covers those who work for larger companies.

To put it another way, out of 168 nations in a Harvard University study last year, 163 had some form of paid maternity leave, leaving the United States in the company of Lesotho, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.

This article goes on to look at some possible reasons behind this discrepency (a different approach by feminists in the U.S. than feminists in Europe towards "mother" issues), and also looks at some efforts to fix this problem. In addition, it offers some of the reasons behind why such efforts to fix it have not been successful (money, and fear of putting more burden on employers).

This chart offers a pretty good summary of maternity leave policies around the world. You really ought to click on it and take a look, because it is kind of almost unbelievable how the U.S. stacks up, or doesn't, to anywhere else.

There is no paid leave in the United States. There are 12 weeks of unpaid parental leave -- if you have been with your company for a year and if that company has 50 or more employees.

Unpaid leave is difficult to afford for even the best-paid moms, as in the case of this attorney who had $20 left in her checking account by the time she went back to work.

Here are some quick examples, pulled from the chart, of places with better maternity leave policies than the United States:

Moms in Mexico get 12 weeks at 100 percent pay. Cuban moms get 18 weeks at 100 percent pay. Canadian moms get 55 percent of their pay for 15 weeks. Guatemalan moms get 12 weeks of full pay.

In Japan, another country of workaholics, moms are paid 60 percent of their pay for 14 weeks. In Korea, a country also known for its extreme work ethic, moms get full pay for 60 days.

In China moms get full pay for 90 days. In Israel its 12 weeks at 75 percent of pay.

Now this doesn't mean that individual states and companies in the United States don't have more generous policies.  The state I live in offers 6 weeks of partially paid leave and my company offers 6 weeks of fully paid leave (or 8 weeks if you had a c-section).

But, come on.  We claim to care about families and children.  Yet our materinity leave policy as a nation is worse than that of Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan (and so many others).

The only reason why we even get the 12 weeks of unpaid leave (under the Family Medical Leave Act) is because Bill Clinton signed it into law in 1993 when he was president. Without Clinton's work, we wouldn't even have any unpaid leave here at all. It's utterly appalling.

Women here often end up using all their sick days, vacation days, etc. trying to piece together enough paid time off so they can spend 6 weeks at home with their babies before returning to work.

Handing my little boy over to daycare after just 12 weeks of maternity leave was really really hard.  I can't imagine doing it after 6 weeks.  And we would have gone broke if we'd hadn't had any paid leave (that was thankfully offered by my company).

When we say "no child left behind" we are really offering a big spin marketing message with no substance at all. Why haven't we made moms and children a priority?

The United States figured out how to send a man to the moon, it has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a war in Iraq, it offers millions of dollars in aid to countries that offer better maternity leave policies than it offers its own mothers.  The United States is home to brilliant scholars and scientists and engineers and problem solvers.  Where is the attention to this issue?  Why aren't we REALLY working to fix this?