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

The playbook has been hiding in plain sight.

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 US has bundled parental leave with broader medical and caregiving leave for 30-plus years, and that all-or-nothing approach keeps failing on the federal level.

The comprehensive approach excludes many new parents due to work-history requirements, and doesn’t replace enough income for low-income families to actually use it. A parental leave-only bill would stand a better shot of passing, and be better targeted to all families with young children.

There is bipartisan support for paid parental leave. Republicans have backed various proposals, red states have expanded it recently for state employees post-Dobbs, and bipartisan working groups are active in both chambers.

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........

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