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Times
2 days ago
- General
- Times
What changed when I had a baby? Around the world in four mothers' stories
When the American journalist Abigail Leonard was six months pregnant, her husband was offered a job in Japan. Moving was 'the sensible choice' — what luck to be able to swap living in the US, one of the only countries in the world with no mandatory paid maternity leave, for Tokyo, where encouraging a baby boom is part of the government's economic policy. Leonard was thrilled at the prospect of what we take for granted in the UK, including free check-ups for babies. Soon, however, she realised that being pro-mother is not the same as being pro-woman. In Japan motherhood is synonymous with sacrifice — starting with birth, when women are seldom offered pain relief because of a belief that suffering creates a deeper bond with the baby. Leonard was asked what she did 'before becoming a mummy', while her husband carried on as normal with his career. Still, she had it a lot better than in the US, where an uncomplicated birth costs about $3,000 and paid maternity leave is rare. So Leonard, who is very much still a journalist as well as a 'mummy', decided to investigate which countries get it right. Four Mothers begins at the start of 2022 and follows four women, from the US, Japan, Kenya and Finland, through their first year of parenting. Japan and the US were chosen partly because of Leonard's own experiences; she picked Finland for its low maternal and infant mortality rates — and for frequently coming top of happy country studies — and Kenya because it has introduced policies to stop high maternal mortality rates. As Leonard says, 'parenthood is shaped by the systems our societies have built over time' and personal decisions, such as how much leave to take or even which parent shushes the baby back to sleep at 2am, are, in large part, determined by politics. It's particularly true at the moment, with Donald Trump suggesting $5,000 baby bonuses for American mothers and right-wingers in the UK urging women to do their bit to reverse our declining birth rate. Leonard is a masterly reporter. The four women share intimate details of their shifting post-baby lives, which read like gripping fiction. The American, Sarah, 33, is a teacher in Utah who grew up Mormon. She's married to Brian, an Amazon delivery driver who is also — this is a curveball — a polyamorous bisexual. Their relationship provides enough material for a book in itself. Sarah is remarkably generous towards Brian, making time for him to see his boyfriend while she cares for their newborn, ignoring 'a faint sense that she has her own needs'. Her husband's sexual preferences are the least of Sarah's worries, however. If you aren't well-off, motherhood in the US is punishing. When their baby, Vivian, struggles to breastfeed and doesn't put on weight (a common problem and one that we have free council-run breastfeeding clinics to help with in the UK), Sarah has no one to turn to, and misses the Mormon community. I felt for Sarah — even more so when, without maternity leave pay, she must rush back to work after three months and begin a punishing schedule of pumping milk for Vivian. According to Leonard it's Richard Nixon's fault. In his 1968 presidential campaign he promised to expand access to public childcare. But the conservative branch of his party revolted — Mormons worried that it would upend family structure while others called it communist, so in 1971 Nixon nixed it and childcare policy has been taboo since then. On top of that, Leonard argues that there is a vested interest in childcare not being state funded — private equity invests heavily in profit-making childcare companies and corporations want to use what paid leave they do offer to entice talented employees. Finland, no surprise, is a far better place to have a baby. Anna, 36, begins maternity leave a month before her due date and receives generous maternity pay. Until the 20th century most Finnish women gave birth in their home saunas (turned off, of course) but now just 0.2 per cent of births are at home, and 92 per cent of women receive some sort of pain relief during labour. They are also offered prenatal counselling to discuss their own childhoods. It's so good for women that attention has now shifted to how men can be better supported to look after their children. But Leonard is interested in what happens when things go awry in a feminist utopia. Anna's partner, Masa, who grew up in Japan with a single mother and no father figure, is more interested in which pram to buy than spending time with the baby, although when breastfeeding isn't working he accuses Anna of starving their child. Anna's reaction to their relationship breakdown is underpinned by her coming from a country with a strong history of women's rights — she doesn't want their son 'to learn that women are the ones who will take care of all the world's population when babies are born'. In Kenya, Chelsea, 23, gets pregnant after an affair with a married man from a different tribe because of a faulty morning-after pill. Many Kenyan women rely on this pill as there is stigma around other forms of contraception. Birth in Kenya has a lot in common with the US — both are countries with vast gaps between rich and poor, and if you can't afford a private birth it's brutal. Chelsea asks for an epidural and is told it costs US$300, which she can't afford. Only 2 per cent of Kenyan women get epidurals. Still, things have improved since the country made prenatal care free in 2013: the under-five mortality rate has since dropped from 50 to 39.9 deaths per 1,000 live births, according to Unicef. (In the States the figure is 6.5, while in the UK it's 4.5.) Like Sarah, Chelsea goes back to work after three months, but unlike Sarah she can't afford formula milk. Her story is the most painful to read — she is so alone, both her parents are dead and having a baby brings back that grief. • Why am I being judged for having a third child? In Japan, Tsukasa, 33, is also lonely. Japanese fathers haven't traditionally been involved with babies; only two thirds are present at the birth (it's 95 per cent across most of Europe) and her husband, although doting, works all hours. Bedsharing with the baby, which most Japanese parents do, means between 50 and 70 per cent of Japanese couples don't have sex, although Leonard says long working hours also play a role in this sex drought. In America, by contrast, it's 15 per cent. A mother and baby group saves Tsukasa, giving her much needed company. I had my first child in November last year and much of what Leonard describes rings true, from 'the physicality of the work and the psychic weight of suddenly occupying the position of parent' to the unparalleled joy of your baby's first laugh, and overthinking everything down to whether the baby should wear socks. So how does the UK measure up? In my experience we are overstretched on the medical side but lucky that it's free, there is pain relief and choice around birth (albeit with some bias from the NHS towards inductions over caesarean sections). • Sexism is still entrenched, with women taking most of the caring burden — and this is not helped by regressive paternity leave policies. Two weeks' paternity leave is nowhere near enough, nor is statutory maternity pay of £187.18 a week (less than the London living wage). Childcare costs are astronomically high too, but there are growing movements of women campaigning for more support. Four Mothers is part of this movement. It's public interest journalism at its best — powerful human stories peppered with well-chosen facts. When describing Tsukasa's relief at finding women to talk to, Leonard quotes the psychologist Aurélie Athan: 'Debriefing with other new mothers is crucial to psychological wellbeing. It's similar to what trauma victims require. They need to process what's happened to them.' With Four Mothers Leonard has provided that debrief, as she elegantly makes a compelling case for a fairer society.
The Guardian
27-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
She compared motherhood in four countries. The US isn't looking good
When Abigail Leonard saw the news that the Trump administration was considering handing out $5,000 'baby bonuses' to new mothers, she realized that she had already received one. A longtime international reporter, Leonard gave birth to three children while living in Japan, which offers a year of parental leave, publicly run daycare, and lump-sum grants to new parents that amount to thousands of US dollars. But it was not until moving back to the US in 2023 that Leonard grasped just how robust Japan's social safety net for families is – and, in comparison, just how paltry the US net feels. Not only is the US the only rich country on the planet without any form of national paid leave, but an uncomplicated birth covered by private insurance tends to cost families about $3,000, which, Leonard discovered, is far more than in most other nations. The federal government also spends a fraction of what most other wealthy countries spend on early education and childcare, as federally subsidized childcare is primarily available only to the lowest earners. Middle-class families are iced out. Leonard traces the effects of policies and disparities like these in her new book, Four Mothers, which follows the pregnancy and early childrearing experiences of four urban, middle-class women living in Japan, Kenya, Finland and the US. Published earlier this month, Four Mothers provides a deeply personal window into how policy shapes parents' lives. And it has emerged as an increasingly rightwing US seems poised to embrace the ideology of pronatalism and policies aimed at convincing people to have more kids. Pronatalism is deeply controversial, in no small part because its critics say pronatalists are more concerned with pushing women to have kids than with ensuring women have the support required to raise them. 'Being 'pronatal' – designing policy to increase the birthrate – is not the same thing as being pro-woman,' Leonard notes in Four Mothers' introduction. A $5,000 check would not have been enough to help any of the moms profiled in the book. Instead, the women relied on – or longed for, in the case of the US – extensive external support, such as affordable maternity care, parental leave and access to childcare. 'The book is an implicit comparison of the rest of the world to the US, and parenthood is so much harder here in many ways,' Leonard said in a phone interview with the Guardian. 'People are so accepting that things can be privatized and that government can be torn down and that there won't be any repercussions to that. We don't think about how integral government policy is to our lives, and for that reason can't imagine how much more beneficial it could be.' In the US, resistance to increasing government aid in childrearing has long gone hand in hand with a commitment to upholding a white, traditional view of the American family. At virtually every juncture, rightwing groups have been galvanized to stop sporadic efforts at expanding support. During the second world war, Congress allocated $20m to a universal childcare program that could help women work while men fought in the war effort. The program was so popular that people protested in the streets to keep it even after the war ended, according to Leonard. But the program was dismantled after political disputes over how to run the program, as southern states demanded that the daycares be segregated. In 1971, Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have created a national system of federally subsidized daycare centers. Inflamed by the idea that the bill would encouraged women to work outside the home, church groups organized letter-writing campaigns against the bill. Rightwing pundits, meanwhile, claimed the bill was 'a plan to Sovietize our youth'. Richard Nixon ultimately vetoed the bill, calling it 'the most radical piece of legislation' to ever cross his desk. Today, Leonard writes, corporations have an entrenched interest in keeping childcare from becoming a public good in the US. Private equity is heavily invested in childcare companies. Wealthy corporations, especially big tech companies, can also use their generous paid leave policies to lure in the best talent. 'I talked to a congressman who was telling me he was trying to get some of these companies on board to back a national paid leave policy, and they were saying: 'We don't want to do paid leave because then we give up our own competitive advantage.' It's so cynical,' Leonard said. 'These are companies that have been able to create this image around themselves of being feminist and pro-family. Like: 'They're great places to work for women. They help fund fertility treatments!'' She continued: 'They've feminist-washed themselves. They're working against a national policy that would benefit everyone and that ultimately would benefit our democracy, because you wouldn't have this huge inequality of benefits and lifestyles.' The US has become far more accepting of women's careerist ambitions over the last 50 years – especially as it has become more difficult for US families to sustain themselves on a single income – but balancing work and family life is still often treated as a matter of personal responsibility (or, frequently, as a personal failing). To improve mothers' lives, Leonard found, a commitment to flexible gender norms – in the home and at work – must be coupled with a robust social safety net. Each of the women in Four Mothers struggled with male partners who, in various ways and for assorted reasons, failed to provide as much childcare as the mothers. Sarah, a teacher in Utah, was married to an Amazon delivery driver who got zero parental leave. Sarah was entitled to three months of leave, at partial pay, but only because her union advocated for it. Although Sarah and her husband chose to leave the Mormon church, she found herself longing for the community that the church provided because it offered some form of support and acknowledgement of motherhood. Finland perhaps fares the best in Leonard's book. The country, which gives parents about a year of paid leave, invests heavily in its maternal care system and has some of the lowest infant and maternal mortality rates in the world; it even offers mothers prenatal counseling where they can discuss their own childhoods and how to break cycles of intergenerational trauma. (The US, by contrast, has the highest maternal mortality rate of any wealthy country.) Finland is also the only industrialized nation on the planet where fathers spend more time with their children than mothers do. (The difference is about eight minutes, 'about as even as it can be', Leonard wrote in Four Mothers.) Parents are also happier than non-parents in Finland – which is routinely ranked as the happiest country in the world – while the inverse is true in the US. Still, the birth rate is on the decline in Finland, just as it is in Japan and the US. It is not clear what kinds of pronatalist policies, if any, induce people to have kids. Nearly 60% of Americans under 50 who say they're unlikely to have children say that's because 'they just don't want to'. 'The pronatal argument here – that's really focused on people who make the choice not to have children. That is not only cruel and mean, but it's also ineffective, because people who don't want to have kids probably aren't going to have kids and none of this stuff is going to make a difference,' Leonard said. That said, had she been building her family in the US rather than Japan, Leonard doesn't know if she would have had three children. Given the cost of US childcare, 'it would have been more of a grind'. 'I just think it's harder and more expensive here. So it was somewhat easier to have that third child there,' Leonard said. 'It's not because they gave me a $5,000 baby bonus.'
