The takeaway from all of this: employers in the U.S. do not care about mothers of young children at all, unless we’re consumers of their products. It might be more accurate to say that they view us as horrible useless burdens who need to be ushered back to full-time work as swiftly as possible. They will do anything in their power to keep employees from exercising their federally guaranteed rights to twelve weeks of MOTHERFUCKING UNPAID LEAVE, up to and including forcing employees to give up paid sick leave.Wow. She is a hero for writing this.
Here's what's terrifying, and it's why our society is doomed to fail in the next 30 years if it keeps acting up this way: we need people like her to reproduce, and we're punishing them when they do.
Extreme economic inequality, a bad health insurance system, an expensive education mess that puts a huge burden on parents, declining social mobility, and a corporate structure that punishes childbirth and the raising of children (especially for women) have had an anti-eugenic effect. The thoughtless, ignorant people who live in the present are having lots of children-- just as many as ever. The thoughtful, well-educated ones are having fewer kids, because they're more attuned to the cues of society and the obvious signal that they're not wanted by this world. We're seeing an adverse differential in reproduction.
If something kills the U.S., it's not going to be China or the EU and it's certainly not going to be immigration, which is a good thing. It's going to be the adverse reproductive differential caused by a society that penalizes intelligent, thoughtful parents. (It also penalizes less intelligent parents, but they don't give a shit and breed anyway.) That issue is the one serious existential threat to us as a society.