The Terror of Life as a Freelancer: Or, Why All Women Deserve Paid Maternity Leave

I love my job. I love that I get to set my own schedule, make my own rules, and answer to no one. I love it even more that I've found a way to succeed in a highly competitive profession. Others put "writer" down as their profession because it sounds romantic and mysterious. I claim it because it's mine. It feels wrong to complain when you are as lucky as I have been, but there's one glaring hole in my otherwise awesome professional existence: I have no maternity leave.

I'm lucky enough to earn a good living at my job, but I've been crunching a lot of numbers lately. It's made me realize that, even when you have savings and work hard and do the right thing, continuing to pay your bills is extraordinarily difficult when you have to take extended time off work.

I'm in good company. Only 13% of American workers have paid family leave, and most of them are upper middle class folks like me--the people who need it the least. If we as a society are collectively unwilling to do something to fix this, it's simply unreasonable to expect that women will be able to be healthy after giving birth, form solid attachments to their babies, and continue paying their bills.




The Scary Numbers Behind Unpaid Leave
Opponents of paid leave often prattle on about how people need to take responsibility for their own choices. Pay your own way, ladies. Don't expect a handout. Let's consider how that works out for a person doing all the right things.

In 2013, the average college graduate in her late twenties or early thirties earned $50,000 a year.  Since that's the age around which most women have kids, I'm going to use that figure. Bear in mind that nearly 70% of Americans don't have college degrees--often because college is so expensive--so we're already talking about a highly privileged group.

At a $50,000 salary, you'll be paying 25% in taxes, dragging your take-home pay down to $37,500 a year.

You're a smart, responsible person so you decide to sock away the "gold standard" 10% for retirement. That brings your income down to $33,750. You also don't want to live paycheck-to-paycheck, so you decide to live on just 90% of what's left. This gives you a small fund for unexpected emergencies (such as the dental work insurance plans won't cover, the average $7,000 insurance deductible for a family of four, or any of the other expenses that make life difficult).

This means you'll be left to live on $30,375. That's certainly possible, and it's hardly poverty. But here's where it gets difficult: how is someone living on $30,375 a year going to take time off after having a baby?

"That's easy!" exclaim most conservative opponents of paid family leave. She just needs to be a responsible American and plan ahead.

Ok, so what does that look like? A person with the above salary lives on $584 per week. If we assume the standard maternity leave of 12 weeks, that means she needs to save up just over $7,000 to cover her maternity leave.

How far ahead, exactly? That figure is 23% of the total she has to live on for the entire year. Somehow she needs to save this up while pregnant. To accomplish this feat in 36 weeks (the length of time the average woman is aware of her pregnancy), she'd need to save $195 per week, leaving her with $389 left over to pay her bills. Now we're getting closer to actual poverty.

Let's say instead that our heroic pregnant woman has planned ahead. She's saved 10% of that $30,375 she has to live on to prepare for her pregnancy. How long would she need to save?

More than two years before she would have enough. 

And that would leave her with just over $27,000 a year to live on.

To achieve the level of responsibility that conservatives demand as they exhort us to pull ourselves up by our boot straps, a woman earning $50,000 per year has to survive on a near-poverty existence. She certainly can't buy a home at that income level. 

I'm being a bit sloppy with the numbers here, since tax brackets are not always cut and dry. At $50,000, you only pay 25% on earnings in excess of $37,000. My numbers are just an estimate, and they don't take into account the many, many expenses of daily life.

A Brief History of the FMLA
Sadly, this is actually an improvement on how things used to be. Until 1993, women had no right to take time off of work after the birth of a baby. You could be fired simply for having a child. The Family and Medical Leave Act changed all of that, entitling many women (and men) to six weeks of unpaid leave after the birth or adoption of a child, or in the event of a family medical emergency.

Most Republicans opposed, and continue to oppose, the FMLA. You know, because they're so pro-life. And thanks to their opposition to allowing women to recover from childbirth, the odds that the FMLA will one day push us toward paid maternity leave are minuscule.

The Unique Challenges of Life as a Freelancer
These figures all assume a normal salaried or hourly job. That's not the reality for freelancers like me, who make up a third of the work force. The FMLA offers us absolutely no protection at all. Every single last one of my clients can fire me because I'm pregnant, because I take time off, because I'm a woman, for any reason at all.

Several years ago, a client fired me because I had a miscarriage. "If I had known you might get pregnant, I never would have hired you," he said in an email as my doctor confirmed that my baby had died. This is typical behavior. And it's legal. It's also just scratching the surface of the terror of life as a freelancer. Consider the following:

• I have to pay higher taxes than employees, since employees' bosses cover a portion of their payroll taxes. Right now, the self-employment tax is around 15%. That means our hypothetical woman who earns $50,000 is now paying 40% in taxes. 
• I will lose business when I take time off. I work with a number of long-term clients who treat me like a staff member, but much of my work is project-based. Taking time off means taking time off from finding new projects, so I may return to work to find that there's little work available. 
• Because I have no right to unpaid time off, I have a strong incentive to take as little time off as possible, potentially endangering my own health. 

Why Many Women Don't Even Get Unpaid Leave
My husband (also self-employed, also facing the same pressures as me) works, and we've managed to accumulate some savings. We have a fairly comfortable life. We will be okay, though we might be white knuckling our way through life for a while. Don't feel too bad for us.

Other women and couples face a far more unforgiving reality. Consider these unpleasant facts:

• The FMLA only applies to government workers and to people working at private employers who have more than 50 employees. Given that small businesses employ a large portion of the workforce, almost half of all women are not covered by the FMLA. No paid time off for them. Pregnancy instead may mean getting fired or finding a way to work through childbirth and recovery. 
• More than three million workers are incorrectly classified as independent contractors when they are in reality employees. These unfortunate women not only have no paid leave, but also face the vulnerabilities of independent contractors, such as paying exorbitant taxes. 
• Think welfare will fix it and that women have an incentive to be lazy? Think again. The average monthly food stamp payment is $500 for a family of four--a little more than $100 per week. That hardly makes a dent when a woman has taken time off to give birth. 

Why Exhortations to Buck Up and Go Back to Work Early Are Laughable 
In the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality that so many conservatives endorse, there's a simple solution: women just need to go back to work after their babies are born. Or they need to not have babies in the first place.

Let's unpack that second piece of idiocy first: the same politicians who want to make birth control nearly impossible to access (and maybe even render it illegal), who want to ban accurate sex education, and who believe women should not be able to have abortions also want women not to have babies.

How exactly is it they are supposed to do that? Magic fairy dust? Drug dealing? Just, like, loving Jesus enough or something?

No serious, intelligent person asserts that not procreating is the solution.

What about the second option of immediately returning to work? I'm a big fan of women continuing to work outside the home after their babies are born, so I sympathize with the idea. I even understand how a person who is completely ignorant of biology, women, life, and pretty much everything else could endorse it.

Except that telling a woman to go back to work right after her baby is born is a lot like telling a person who has had open heart surgery to get up off the operating table, walk home, and get to work.

Postpartum recovery is brutal, and it is made even more so by an incompetent medical system and a world that encourages women to go back to work immediately. A quarter of women are back at work within two weeks of having babies.

How does that happen in a decent society?

Women who have C-sections need at least six weeks to recover, and usually can't drive for several weeks. They have, after all, just had major abdominal surgery. Pushing themselves too hard could, quite literally, be fatal.

Vaginal birth is no cake walk either. Ninety-five percent of mothers tear during delivery. I have no doubt that, if parenthood meant that men's penises were ripped open and stitched back together, we would have no problem giving the poor dears the time off they need.

And that's not even considering the psychological toll of going back to work too early. There's good evidence to support the claim that social pressures, not hormones, are the key player in postpartum depression. Do we really want to send a battered, bruised, injured woman back to work so she can get depressed and contemplate offing herself and her baby?

I struggle to understand how anyone could defend that sort of system.