HOW do US women physically manage to back to work so quickly after birth?!

[boboismylove]

I was watching The Good Fight the other day and one of the characters said she was planning on returning to work THREE DAYS after birth. I know this is fictional but I looked it up and apparently 1 in 4 American women return to work within 10 DAYS.

This is obviously awful. But I don't actually understand how it's physically possible?! I couldn't sit up properly for a month after birth, and was limping for around the same time. I didn't have a C section, and technically had a relatively smooth birth - so I can't imagine going back earlier! How do women in the US manage it physically?! What about prolapse risk? Looking after stitches? Extremely heavy bleeding? - and again, this is only with a "normal" birth.

I know even in quite a few developing countries they have 6 weeks leave - maybe connected to the idea women should rest and be housebound for 40 days.

"One possibly unpopular opinion I have as someone who's lived in Britain and the US is that while lengthy maternity leaves is undoubtedly good for babies it has distinct disadvantages for mothers/women. It sets up a dynamic of the childrearing/house being the women's job because she's there for months on end and makes her paid employment seem less important as she may be taking multiple years out of the workplace. So it only seems natural for her to continue to deprioritise her career and for the man to deprioritise looking after his own children.

It describes the situation perfectly. But what is the solution? Many mothers dont want shorter leaves but equally dont want their careers to be automatically devalued as a result of taking their legal allowance of leave."

I like the idea of shared parental leave. Mothers go on maternity leave first for obvious reasons. Then there is a period of leave that either parent could take, and a period of leave that only fathers could take (at any point between birth and, say, 1-1.5 year old). The paternity leave would obviously need to be long enough to make a difference.

Also, as in the Netherlands, normalising part time work for both sexes and at all career stages. I know of a Dutch junior minister who is male and works four days a week.

@Xenia the Beebs parental leave isn't the best but it's higher than the minimum.

But BB the point is they forced her off the payroll, they made her be self employed, they required her to set up a limited company so like I was when I had my twins you dont' an iota of anything. I was taking business calls the next day as I needed to feed the family. If you are self employed other than about £120 a week maternity allowance if you've paid NI you don't get anything, not even 6 weeks at 90% pay. And then poor her having accepted no sick leave, no maternity rights etc all those years, now HMRC are asking for masses of "back tax" which the BBC is not offering to pay.

@Xenia if you work through a limited company, like these people did (and I do), you are entitled to statutory maternity/paternity pay which is slightly more as you still pay class 1 NIC as long as your company has been around for over 26 weeks. It's only if you don't work via another legal entity that you get stuck with maternity allowance.

Where the women were completely screwed over is that they were paying themselves the minimum wage for a director to cover NIC due to being wrongly advised so their 90% of normal pay for 6 weeks was SFA. If they had been told they were IR35 caught from the beginning they would have got a decent amount for 6 weeks.

Where they really lost out was not being able to use any saved holiday.