The fight for paid parental leave is more winnable than you think

The United States is one of the only countries on Earth that doesn’t guarantee new parents paid leave after a child is born — time to recover, bond with a newborn, and get on your feet as a new family. Only about one in four private-sector workers has access to it, and among the lowest-wage workers, virtually none do. The rest must cobble together vacation days, sick time, or unpaid leave, if they can afford to take any time off at all.

The common assumption is that America just doesn’t care enough about parents to fix this problem. But the policy has actually long drawn broad bipartisan support in the United States.

The real problem is that parental leave has been yoked to a far more ambitious federal package for over 30 years, one that faces a much steeper price tag and an uphill battle to passage. It’s a strategic political choice advocates and Congress have made, and keep making.

By contrast, virtually every other country started with basic maternity or parental protections — and built outwards over decades, eventually adding paid time off for fathers, for workers with serious health conditions, and for those caring for sick family members. In most countries, parental leave isn’t bundled with medical or caregiving leave either — it’s its own program, designed specifically around the needs of new parents.

In the US, though, efforts to provide paid leave have been aimed at addressing a wider variety of situations and needs all at once. That approach goes back decades, to when a coalition of disability rights groups, feminist organizations, seniors’ groups, and labor unions teamed up to pass the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. The FMLA guarantees eligible workers up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave, and Democrats have been trying to make it paid ever since.

Their latest version, put forth in 2025, is the broadest it’s ever been, encompassing paid leave circumstances like caregiving for step-grandchildren and the spouse of a sibling, as well as leave for survivors of stalking or sexual assault. It’s an admirable effort to define all the relationships and situations that might require love and support, but one that makes the legislation even more expensive and challenging to get over the finish line.

The evidence for what paid parental leave can do is extensive: it’s been linked to lower infant mortality, fewer hospitalizations, more timely vaccinations, and better maternal mental health. When fathers take leave, researchers have found improvements in children’s school performance and mothers’ postpartum health. And employers have little to fear — studies of state programs have consistently found no adverse effects on productivity or costs.

A more realistic path to reform could start with a modest federal guarantee — say, six weeks of paid leave for parents, both mother and father, after their baby is born. That would still allow lawmakers to add other kinds of federally guaranteed medical or caregiving leave later, or extend parental leave itself over time.

That’s how virtually every other country has done it. But lawmakers in the US are reluctant to push for anything less.

“We may only have one bite at the apple, so the idea is not to undercut ourselves before negotiations even begin,” a staffer for New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the lead sponsor of the Democrats’ flagship bill, the FAMILY Act, told me. It’s a version of the same logic that guided Democrats’ push to pass child care, paid leave, elder care, pre-K, and an expanded child tax credit all at once in 2021 — but, in that case, when advocates were loath to prioritize, they ended up with nothing.

The fear that Congress only gets one shot per generation at legislating a big social policy has shaped Democratic thinking for years, but it’s increasingly at odds with recent history. Federal lawmakers have returned to the same big issues — health care, climate, economic relief — multiple times within just a few years, often building on earlier efforts rather than waiting for one perfect bill.

“Bipartisan proposals to make progress on paid leave won’t inhibit passing broader social insurance efforts,” said Curran McSwigan, an economic policy expert at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank. “Laying some of that groundwork now can actually help achieve that goal.”

During the pandemic, when support for federal paid leave surged, advocates believed a comprehensive bill was finally within reach. But among at least some advocates, there’s a growing realization that the window for one big paid leave package has closed.

“That coalition might no longer want to get something real done,” one longtime activist, speaking on background to talk candidly about the politics, told me. “They might want to talk about something beautiful, it’s become more a soapbox to stand on than a possible reality.”

The parent problem with the FAMILY Act

The pursuit of federally guaranteed paid leave goes back to the mid-1980s, when advocates began drafting federal legislation to ensure women didn’t lose their jobs after having a baby. But the bill quickly evolved. Opponents of maternity-leave mandates, led by pro-business interest groups, argued that pregnancy-only leave gave women “special treatment” under federal anti-discrimination law, prompting sponsors to reframe their proposal as gender-neutral. They also expanded it to cover workers caring for sick relatives, aging parents, and their own serious health conditions. Disability groups, unions, and senior organizations like AARP signed on, and the coalition grew.

After nine years of legislative battles and two presidential vetoes, the FMLA finally passed in 1993. Compared to what was first proposed, it had a shorter leave period (12 weeks, down from 18), a higher threshold for which employers qualified (those with 50 employees, up from 15), and stricter eligibility requirements. But sponsors preserved the broad architecture that covered new parents alongside workers with their own health conditions, those caring for sick relatives, and aging family members — and that became the template Democrats have worked to establish ever since.

When states started creating their own paid leave programs — California first in 2004, then New Jersey, and eventually 14 Democratic-led states in all — they adopted the FMLA’s comprehensive framework, bundling medical, caregiving, and parental leave into a single social insurance program. Those early state programs were relatively modest, and most gradually expanded their wage replacement rates, duration, and worker eligibility as political support and funding allowed.

At the federal level, a comprehensive paid leave approach has been a harder sell. It’d cost hundreds of billions of dollars and has never come close to passing, not even when Democrats had unified control of government.

Comprehensive paid family and medical leave bills also have other problems. They treat leave as a form of worker insurance, meaning you pay in through your job earnings and draw benefits when you need time off. That works reasonably well if you’ve been steadily employed, but not if you’re young, just out of school, or between jobs. Even a parent who qualified for leave for their first child might not qualify with their second if they haven’t been back at work long enough. The 2020 version of the FAMILY Act would have excluded 30 percent of new parents from qualifying altogether.

And because the FAMILY Act is so expensive, Democrats have had to water down their proposed benefits, replacing only a portion of workers’ income. That might be manageable for an older worker earning a decent salary, but it doesn’t come close to covering the bills for a young parent making near minimum wage. The result is that many low-income parents who are eligible for paid leave don’t end up taking it because they can’t afford to live on a fraction of their already meager salaries — or they take on new debt or put off paying their other bills to do it.

Even in the states that have adopted a comprehensive model, new parents often fall through the cracks. A 2024 Niskanen analysis estimated that in six states with paid leave, between 18 and 26 percent of residents of childbearing age are ineligible because they haven’t worked recently enough to qualify.

The latest version of the FAMILY Act tries to fix some of the earlier problems by providing more generous benefits for low-income workers and loosening eligibility rules. But it still requires a recent work history to qualify, and the benefits still aren’t generous enough for many low-income parents to afford to actually take time off.

Gillibrand’s office told me that they don’t know how much their new bill would cost, or how many new parents would be eligible or likely to use the benefit. But it makes sense to hew to FMLA’s structure, they said, because people are already familiar with that framework.

Other advocates said providing the same amount of leave, regardless of the reason, helps prevent employers from discriminating against those they think are more likely to take leave, like women of childbearing age, and sends a positive message that people with different needs should be treated equally. “It’s a sound way to ensure you’re not inadvertently creating disincentives to hire particular types of people,” Vicki Shabo, a paid leave expert at New America, told me.

But other experts disagreed. Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project argued that it made no sense to treat all forms of paid leave the same: They serve different purposes and different populations. And amending the FAMILY Act or some other federal proposal to focus on parents would be easy, he adds. “Give me a day, and I’ll put a couple sentences in there that’ll make sure that everyone who has a newborn at least gets $800 a week,” Bruenig said.

Maya Rossin-Slater, a health economist at Stanford, added that the evidence that parental leave in the US leads to hiring discrimination is “really, really thin and limited,” largely because the leave on offer here is just not very long. In European countries where parental leave can stretch for several years, she said, there’s a clearer case — but that’s a far cry from the few months being discussed in America.

There’s already bipartisan support for parental leave

Parental leave has quietly been building real momentum in Congress over the past ten years. In 2017, a joint working group from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, and the Brookings Institution, a liberal one, proposed eight weeks of paid parental leave that would pay new parents roughly 70 percent of their usual wages. Their idea never became legislation, but Adrienne Schweer, who leads the Paid Leave Task Force at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said the effort helped bolster more concerted bipartisan efforts.

Momentum came from unexpected places. Ivanka Trump made six weeks of paid parental leave her signature cause in her father’s first term, even getting the president to call for it in his 2019 State of the Union. Sen. Marco Rubio introduced a bill in 2018 that would let new parents draw from their own Social Security savings to cover the months around birth, delaying retirement by about six months in exchange. That proposal had critics across the spectrum, but Schweer praised it for establishing the principle that parental leave could apply to parents regardless of whether they were currently working.

“It was bold because it was creative,” she said. “If you were a stay-at-home mom who had worked in your teens and twenties and built up some Social Security credits, you could still access the benefit. You didn’t need a current employer. You didn’t need to return to work afterward.”

That principle — that parental leave should reach all new parents, not just those currently in the workforce — is central to the case for splitting it off from other kinds of worker leave.

A newborn’s need for care doesn’t depend on whether their parents had recent earnings. And most daycares won’t even accept infants younger than six weeks for liability and vaccination reasons, meaning families without paid leave have no source of income and no child care option during those early weeks that matter most.

By 2019, the Republican-led Congress passed 12 weeks of paid parental leave for all 2.1 million federal civilian employees, tucked inside a bipartisan defense bill signed by Trump. The same year, Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy and then-Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema introduced a bill that would have given new parents up to $5,000 after the birth or adoption of a child — money they could use to cover lost wages while taking time off. Their bill was paid for by slightly reducing the child tax credit over the following decade.

The bipartisan energy hasn’t faded. More recently, in 2023, working groups on paid leave launched in both chambers, co-chaired by Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) and Rep. Stephanie Bice (R-OK) in the House, and Cassidy and Gillibrand in the Senate. The House group rallied around draft legislation to help coordinate paid leave benefits across state borders and establish federal grants to allow states to start or expand their own programs.

The Senate group didn’t make any formal proposals, but a staffer from Gillibrand’s office told me Cassidy’s goal was to bring more Republicans into the fold, and that “the way Republicans now talk about paid leave is different from five years ago, which is a win.” This past winter, the influential and Republican-led House Education and Workforce Committee held a hearing on paid leave.

Red states have taken action too. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, at least a dozen GOP-led states have granted or expanded paid parental leave for state employees — framing it as “pro-life” policy. The benefits are modest, but they show that parental leave specifically is a less partisan issue, especially in a political climate where both parties are competing to prove they’re better for families.

Still, not everyone is convinced a narrower parent-only approach would break the federal logjam. Shabo, of New America, is skeptical. “This often comes up as a possibility, but we have seen no evidence that it would garner more support from people who wouldn’t support comprehensive paid leave,” she told me.

Patrick Brown, a family policy expert at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, acknowledged the challenge is convincing more Republicans to get on board. “Lots of GOP lawmakers want to provide paid leave through some way that isn’t raising taxes, mandating benefits, or creating new entitlements,” he said. “The problem is, that’s kind of an impossible circle to square.”

The pandemic briefly made the comprehensive approach seem within reach. The Families First Coronavirus Response Act, signed by Trump in March 2020, created temporary federal paid leave. The government paid people to stay home, and wage replacement at scale became politically normal. Support for paid leave also surged in polling, and employer support grew alongside it. When the Democratic-controlled Congress in 2021 began working on a massive reconciliation bill, advocates decided to go big or go home.

But as Senate holdouts forced Democrats to pare back the package, last-ditch proposals to save paid leave — including one that would have limited it to new parents only — came too late. Paid leave was cut, and then the bill itself collapsed. The result today is strategic paralysis. Democrats have shown they’re willing to make real concessions on policy — the 2025 FAMILY Act abandons the payroll tax that funded earlier versions, for example, and it still doesn’t push for full wage replacement, even though its drafters know that’s important for low-income workers. But the one thing they’ve been unwilling to seriously reconsider is the comprehensive structure that bundles several different kinds of leave.

As wonks continue to debate the details, Schweer told me she hopes her fellow advocates will be brave enough to try something different. “Don’t let great be the enemy of the good,” she said. “Look for the spaces where there’s bipartisan interest and push it as far as it can go to cover the most people — especially the people least likely to get it from their employers.”

A modest but universal paid parental leave guarantee — one that offers at minimum full wage replacement to low-income workers and a meaningful benefit to everyone else — would accomplish a raft of goals both parties claim to care about.

It would give every newborn a better start, close the gap between birth and the earliest age most daycares accept infants, and make life healthier and more affordable for all parents. It would also establish a floor that Congress could build on, just as every other country has done. It wouldn’t be the last fight Congress ever has on paid leave. But after 30 years of failing to pass a dream bill, it’s time for lawmakers to pick one they can win.