As scholars Carmen Knudson-Martin and Anne Rankin Mahoney write in their book Couples, Gender, and Power, U.S. public policies designed to protect mothers and help equalize some of the pressures on women created by their child-bearing capacity lag dramatically behind other high-income countries and even behind many middle- and low-income countries. Out of 173 countries studied, 168 offer guaranteed paid leave to women in connection with childbirth, over half of which offered 14 or more weeks. In contrast, the U.S. Family and Medical Leave Act, enacted in 1993 and heralded as a major piece of
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