Maternity Leave In The United States Vs. The Rest Of The World

By Kindred Media On Nov 12, 2014

From BuzzFeed

More on Maternity Leave from MomsRising:

Know the Facts

Having a baby is a leading cause of “poverty spells” in the U.S. — when income dips below what’s needed for basic living expenses.
In the U.S., 49% of mothers cobble together paid leave following childbirth by using sick days, vacation days, disability leave, and maternity leave.
51% of new mothers lack any paid leave — so some take unpaid leave, some quit, some even lose their jobs.
The U.S is one of only 4 countries that doesn’t offer paid leave to new mothers — the others are Papua New Guinea, Swaziland, and Lesotho.
Paid family leave has been shown to reduce infant mortality by as much as 20% (and the U.S. ranks a low 37th of all countries in infant mortality).

What You Can Do

Kindred Media

Kindred Media is an educational initiative of the award-winning nonprofit, Kindred World. Our mission is to courageously address the Bio-Cultural Conflict through conscious living and parenting. Our thought leaders, researchers, activists and social change artist contributors are through Sharing the New Story of Childhood, Parenthood and the Human Family.

We invite you to join us and consider:

What if the chaos we are witnessing in and around us today is a symptom, evidence even, of an Old Story - the belief in our separateness - breaking down?

Would our fears be lessened and our curiosity piqued if we made a conscious choice to turn our attention toward an emerging New Story? Could an expanding sense of wonder allow room for questions like:

What if babies are conscious? What if sustainability begins with conception? What if Womb Ecology Becomes World Ecology?

When we consider the way we create meaning has always been through stories, other questions arise, like, Who wrote these stories? Can they be changed? What steps can we take toward shifting our current, industrial story of a disconnected humanity to a life-affirming and empowering narrative, authored, as always, by US?

Our daily choices and habits are informed by the context, the Big Picture, whether we are aware we even hold a worldview, a personal mythology or a story of our own being and becoming. This revelation is no sentimental notion, but a scientific fact of human conscious development.

Kindred World, and it's nonprofit initiative, Kindred Media, have explored this New Story from the ground up - in grassroots’ communities - and from the top down - with frontier science researchers and social changemakers - for 20 years. FCL’s nonprofit work has been pioneered by families who have sought out insight and solutions to shifting their own awareness from the limits of the Old Story to the expansive, empowering practical wisdom heralded in the interconnected threads of the New Story. This New Story comes with its own language, phrases like Cultural Creatives, Bio-Cultural Conflict, Grounded Expansion, Harmonic Family Resonance, Phronesis and the Ecology of the Child.

What is needed at this time is a safe gathering place, a sanctuary, created with great compassion to inspire and welcome our imaginations to engage in open dialogue, create connected community and identify resources that support an adventurous exploration of holistic, peaceful and sustainable living.

Welcome to that safe gathering space.

Visit our parent nonprofit at www.KindredWorld.org