Christine Charbonneau runs the regional office of Planned Parenthood in the Northwest, which oversees 27 clinics. She doesn’t offer paid maternity leave for her employees because, even though her office has a revenue of $77 million, she claims she can’t afford the $2 million it would take to provide that paid leave.
She’s not alone within Planned Parenthood. Paid maternity leave is scarce at the nation’s largest abortion provider, even though the organization receives an astounding $500 million in taxpayer funds a year and boasted over $1.4 billion income in its most recent annual report. But care for their own employees who are pregnant and want to keep their babies? Forget about it.
I also run a nonprofit organization whose mission centers around being pro-woman, as we empower women to choose careers that are life-affirming. My organization is pro-life and, unlike Planned Parenthood, I don’t operate with an enormous budget or celebrity endorsements or fundraisers during New York Fashion Week. Yet because my nonprofit is more than messaging and because I care about my employees, I offer 12 weeks paid parental leave. Sure, it stretches my budget, but I cannot claim to be pro-woman and pro-life if I don’t empower and support the women who work for me.
Today, women account for 47 percent of the workforce. Seventy percent of women with children under 18 work, and of those, 75 percent work full-time. Forty percent of women are the sole breadwinners in their families. The working world and the maternal worlds often collide with substantial force, putting an untold amount of stress on mothers in particular. This is why there has been a national outcry for a change in maternity leave policies.
If Planned Parenthood claims to fight for women, it needs to fight for the well-being of its employees. I would know — I worked for it for eight years as one of the youngest clinic directors in the nation. When I got pregnant, I was told by my supervisor that my pregnancy could be “taken care of” in order to continue my upward career trajectory. To Planned Parenthood, my baby was a hindrance to my career, even though I was married and very much wanted this child.
It’s not surprising, considering that abortion is how Planned Parenthood makes its money. The organization makes over a billion dollars a year by telling women they should abort their babies because they aren’t otherwise strong or capable enough to parent and go to school or to continue their careers. This philosophy carries over into how it treats its employees.
The United States is one of the wealthiest nations in the world, yet it has one of the poorest records of paid maternity leave in the globe. This has been well-documented. The Family and Medical Leave Act, passed in 1993, provides eligible employees with 12 weeks of unpaid leave, but that’s only for businesses with 50 or more employees. Again, this is unpaid: three months of no paychecks at all.
For a nation as prosperous as America, the very fact that women are being forced back into work when they have tiny babies at home or in day care is tragic. Newborn babies wake up all the time at night, making it nearly impossible for mom to be as productive as she could at work if she does go back early. Breastfeeding is often hindered when mom is at work and baby is elsewhere. And with about 20 percent of moms enduring postpartum depression, employers need to find a way to balance the costs of providing paid maternity leave with the value of their employees.
In many industries, it costs more in time and money to obtain and train a new employee than it does to continue to pay a new mom her maternity leave and wait for her to return to work. The Center for American Progress found that it can cost employers 16 percent of a worker’s salary to replace him or her if they are making $30,000 or less per year. If the employee is making significantly more and is on the executive level, it can cost up to 216 percent of that worker’s salary to replace them.
Financial considerations are the most common factor that makes pregnant women consider abortion. It is terribly stressful to be facing an unplanned pregnancy with no job, or have a job and know that you have no paid maternity leave. Many wonderful pro-life groups meet these women, offering them financial assistance, free diapers, free clothes, and housing. But these women also need to feel secure in their work; they need to know that they are valued enough not to be forced to make a regrettable decision because their employer was too cheap or too greedy.
Planned Parenthood is a nonprofit, but so is my tiny organization. I provide paid parental leave because my staff deserve to be well taken care of in the most delicate times of their lives, not shoved aside for profit.
This is the very definition of being pro-woman. Anything else is hypocritical rhetoric.
Abby Johnson is CEO and president of And Then There Were None and the subject of the upcoming film, “Unplanned”, which will be released in theaters nationwide in spring 2019.
