Want Paid Leave? Have Your Baby in Britain Like the Duchess of Cambridge

Royal mums aren't the only women of privilege in the UK—every mother is guaranteed 39 weeks of paid maternity leave for bonding time with baby.

Not so here. 

The United States is the only industrialized nation not to mandate paid leave for new mothers. Only four states have such a policy (New York is not one of them). American families who don't work for beneficent corporations are out of luck.

"It is shocking, I think, to consider that the US has the distinction of being one of only four nations in the world—and the only industrialized nation—which doesn't mandate paid leave for new mothers," said Jeanne Zaino, an Iona College professor who wrote an op-ed piece on the subject for USAToday. "The other nations? Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland."

The Duchess of Cambridge and Prince George Alexander Louis are fortunate, Zaino pointed out in her op-ed piece, but they're not the only ones. 

All women in Great Britain are guaranteed 52 weeks of maternity leave, 39 of them paid. Compare that with what new mothers in the USA can expect. The 1993 federal Family and Medical Leave Act requires only that companies with 50 or more employees guarantee 12 weeks of unpaid leave for new mothers. Beyond that, how much leave time a new mother gets depends on what state she lives in and for whom she works.

And only four states—New Jersey, California, Washington and Rhode Island—mandate at least some paid leave for new moms, wrote Zaino, a professor of Political Science & International Studies and a New Rochelle resident.

"I wrote this," Zaino told Patch, "because it is a serious issue that impacts so many women in the US who don't happen to work for companies with generous leave policies. And it isn't just new mothers who are impacted, it is men as well (consider many countries provide leave for new fathers ex. Great Britain, men get two weeks). It is also the infants themselves and then more broadly society that is negatively impacted by this."

Read the entire op-ed piece here on USAToday.com.