Childless women should get maternity leave

[Anonymous]

Paid leave advocates call for everyone to pay into a fund for leave for everyone. For a long term health condition, for caring for sick family members and yes, for caring for a newborn. I'm not sure what else people want. Should employers allow anyone to take 3 months off for any reason regardless of the time they have been employed by the employer? That is not going to happen nor does it sound remotely practical. And limiting it to women is a recipe for lawsuits.

[Anonymous]

i bet you op is a man

[Anonymous]

Maternity leave wasn’t invented out of compassion for mothers. As a society, we have a collective understanding that reproduction is necessary and we benefit from infants being cared for. Maternity leave allows women to be in the workforce and still reproduce.

Your tears didn’t produce anything valuable to society.

[Anonymous]

Refreshing with an infant, how quaint. Lol. The people at my company who are burned out or need a refresh apply for STD stress related.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think this is a troll post. But if not, as a childless woman I apologize for the clueless childless individual who wrote it. I cringe sometimes at the things that some fellow childless people say. It's embarrassing.

Some of us without kids have common sense and "get it"-I promise! I never in a million years would view maternity leave as a relaxing vacation.

The only clueless person is you, who apparently doesn't understand that if the benefit is available to everyone then it makes zero material difference whether it is used for maternity, paternity, or drinking margaritas on a beach.

If a coworker took maternity leave and the rest of the office adapted and got everything done they needed to, and it later was revealed that they were faking it and never pregnant to begin with, does the work everyone else did undo itself? Do the deadlines retroactively miss themselves? Of course not. There is absolutely no difference. To make a more extreme example, what if the person was actually pregnant, took their time off, everything got done at work just fine, and their baby dies of SIDs the day they go back to work. Would you be mad at them because they took maternity leave but they don't have a baby? Again, what exactly is the material difference? There is none.

Literally the only reason to oppose giving the same leave to everyone is childish whining - "but it's not FAIR!" And even that is plain wrong because it's actually the most fair to provide the same time off to everyone regardless of the reasons. If anything it's not fair that parents get extra time off simply because they chose to have kids.

Aside from all of the other points you're missing, you're missing the point that we as a society want to encourage people to have babies because it continues the human race. We as a society don't need to encourage people to drink margaritas on a beach.

also missing … employers give maternity leave (paid or unpaid) because they want to retain female workers at the peak of their productivity (30s) - most of whom have or plan to have babies. Maternity leave is a way to keep them in the workforce. It is not a perk.

Unpaid leave is required for many employees under FMLA (federal law).

But yeah also employers know they will continue to need workers so making it impossible to have kids is not good for their bottom line.

We are nowhere near a point where society can function without workers so I am not sure what OP wants. Does she want to grow old in a Children of Men type world? I don't want that and I imagine OP doesn't either so stop pretending other people having children doesn't benefit society including you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I never had maternity leave either. I used up all of my unused sick days and then back to work it was!

That’s still maternity leave. I used a combo of sick, annual and unpaid.