This is it, the big day. After months and months of eager anticipation, your bouncing bundle of joy is on the way home, or maybe stuck inside of your cut-in-half globe. You've watched all the parenting hack videos online. You've decorated the nursery. Maybe you've even bought a color-coded cake to do a gender-reveal party for the 'Gram. You should be all set. And then you remember that you have to head back to work in a few short weeks. So the question arises for many working parents: What happens to an infant once the shimmery sheen of joy wears off and the practical concerns of reliable childcare set in? And what does World War II have to do with this historical and social puzzle?

(Describer) Title: Origin of Everything.

[playful music]

Part of the dilemma here is the debate over whether or not new working parents should have the right to paid parental leave. Since the majority of us out here have to "work hard for the money, so hard for it, honey," the length and time frame of parental leave is of utmost importance to most new parents. And they aren't the only ones concerned about baby's big day out. This also raises concerns for healthcare professionals, insurance companies, government agencies, and employers. They're probably second only to parents with fears about folks being kept out of the workforce for too long after receiving a visit from Mr. Stork. There's also an interesting historical intersection between World War II and concerns over childcare because the baby boom that gave the generation born after World War II its name wasn't just a metaphor. It really was like a boom of babies. The whole idea seems pretty adorable to me. I mean, picture thousands of infants shooting out of booming cannons in little onesies. But the entrance of millions of women worldwide into the workforce, followed by the actual baby boom, created a logistical dilemma for employers and working families alike. And since we're coming up on the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, let's get to the root of where the urge for paid maternity and paternity leave originated. It seems that World War II was a critical juncture for the introduction of seismic healthcare changes worldwide, and there's no greater evidence of that than some of our older "Origin" episodes. After you finish watching this one, go ahead and check out our episode on sex ed and what makeup sales taught us about employer-sponsored healthcare in the post World War II era. But it's easy to understand how all of these healthcare changes came to pass since the war itself caused huge cultural shifts, like the rising spread of STIs, soldiers returning home with health issues, mass global migration, and all of those hardworking Rosie the Riveters joining the workforce. But today, we're focusing on a specific invention of the post-war era: maternity leave. Okay, so from our research on the topic, it seems that the easiest way to break down this mountain of thorns is into four categories of the major players behind paid parental leave. Because if the saying, "It takes a village to raise a child," is right, then we can also alter it to read, "It takes a village "and several government regulatory bodies to raise a child" when we're talking about paid parental leave. So, the four major players I discovered were, first, families, primarily the parents of the bouncing new babe, but maybe also other family members who become involved in childcare if the parents get called back into work. Oh, and this also includes the kids themselves since, without them, there's really no major debates to be had. Second, the government. Third, employers. And fourth, healthcare officials. All of these groups are concerned about the balance between baby care and working life, but they approach it from pretty "storkly " different angles.

(Describer) She puts her hands on her hips.

Oh my [laughs]. Let's start off with the most obvious group-- dear old moms and dads. In the U.S., the debates about maternity leave didn't start in earnest until after World War II, and that's because before women were pulled into the workforce while their male family members engaged on the front lines, there was no reasonable expectation that most women would, A, work full-time jobs, or B, keep working after they began to rear children. Women who worked in family-run businesses like agriculture or small stores did often play active roles in those businesses after the arrival of babies. But the massive influx of women entering the formal workforce of factories and offices for wages during World War II marked a sharp difference in the quality of women's labor. As a result of these new-wage labor ladies flooding the job market and many of them staying in the workforce even after the end of combat, employers now had to deal with a new question: What should happen to employees when they become pregnant? And should they be hired back once they've given birth? Well, the resounding and super disappointing answer to this question was largely a big fat "No!" In the intervening years between the end of World War II and the early 1970s, many women lost their jobs outright once their employers discovered they were pregnant, and we're talking many women because don't forget, after World War II, there was a baby boom in many countries. And during the Great Depression, there was about 18 to 19 births per 1,000 people in the U.S. And in 1947, that number had risen to 26 1/2 births per 1,000 people in the U.S. And if mothers didn't lose their jobs entirely, then there was no strong guarantee of getting their employment back once they'd recovered after childbirth. So, the options for new families were risk your job, risk your child's wellbeing, or just don't have kids, all of which seems like a pretty lousy set of options if you're interested in kids and not going broke. But all that began to change in the 1970s in the U.S. So, that's when our second major player in this whole game, the government, got involved. Countries around the world began to alter their policies. Pregnancy started becoming a protected category, meaning employers legally couldn't discriminate against pregnant women. But I'd also like to highlight that feminist activists played a major role in having this legislation come to pass because governments usually don't just up and decide to pass certain policies. Rather, major policy decisions are often the effect of years of activist championing. In 1972, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission required employers to treat disability from pregnancy the same as any other disability. And the 1974 case Geduldig v. Aiello was brought to the Supreme Court on the basis that pregnancy should be treated as a protected category and that denial of insurance to pregnant women counted as sex-based discrimination. And while the court at that time found that it did not, this case served, in some ways, as a precedent for the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978. The PDA amended Title VII of the Civil Rights Act so that discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth, or pregnancy-related illnesses was forbidden. The PDA-- if you think about it, that's kind of a funny name for an act about pregnancy. But while the U.S. government in the 1970s was grappling over how to classify and protect pregnant women, other nations around the world were going one step further and passing paid maternity leave laws. In 1974, Sweden made maternity leave into gender-neutral parental leave and was quickly followed by other nations in the region, including Norway and Finland. The UK passed their first paid maternity leave laws through the Employment Protection Act of 1975. Although just because a precedent was set doesn't mean it was immediately followed worldwide. The 1980s saw a sprinkling of maternity-leave progress, both stateside and abroad. The UK extended the Employment Protection Act in 1980, but the strict working requirements of law meant that only approximately 50% of women were eligible. Thankfully, by the early '90s, the law was extended to include most working women, and men were added to the bill with paternity leave in 2003. Meanwhile, during the same time frame in the U.S., efforts to enact paid maternity leave nationwide stalled, stopped, and started again before a resolution was reached. The Family Employment Security Act of 1984 asked for 26 weeks per year of job-protected leave, but it combined birth and other illnesses and was a request for unpaid leave. When this law failed to pass, Representative Patricia Schroeder introduced the Parental and Disability Leave Act in 1985. It was edited and reintroduced in 1986 and finally became the FMLA, or Family and Medical Leave Act, which was passed in 1993. So yes, there is a 12-weeklong job-protected family leave, but it's unpaid, meaning many families don't use the full leave or they struggle financially because they can't afford to do without their income for that long. And, let's face it, babies are pretty pricey. What with the cost of all those diapers, and doctor's visits, and adorable micro fashions to wear on Instagram, you can't just stick a baby in a cut-in-half globe. It's hardly the cheapest endeavor, but lawmakers balance the challenges of providing relief for individual families and the concerns of employers because the U.S. remains among eight nations in the world that doesn't provide any form of guaranteed government-regulated paid parental leave. So, the cost of paid leave, as it now stands, falls to individual employers. And while 12 weeks of job-protected unpaid leave are guaranteed for workers at companies with at least 50 employees, meaning you can't be let go if you leave to take care of an infant, the question still remains about who should be footing the bill. For many small businesses, that remains completely unfeasible, although larger companies sometimes offer maternity and paternity leave as part of their employee benefits. That's why employers are our third player in the parental-leave conversation. But the case-by-case system leaves large swaths of Americans uncovered. And one study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that taking maternity leave could be a damned if you do, damned if you don't dilemma for women, so check out this reasoning. The study found that employees who took maternity leave were seen as less dedicated to their job, less competent, and therefore less worthy of receiving rewards and benefits at work than women who decided not to take leave and women who didn't make it known whether or not they took leave at all. But those who continue to work were judged negatively as prioritizing their work over their families and less desirable as a result than both the employee who took leave and the ones who didn't state a choice, even though they were deemed more worthy of receiving rewards at work.

(Describer) Her fists uncurl near her head.

[imitates explosion]

Does your head hurt? Because mine definitely does. Now, imagine making this decision with a crying baby suctioned to your hip, and you can see why a lot of new parents are positively at their wit's end over parental-leave policies because these decisions have big and lasting impacts, not only on your job prospects, but also on the health of you and your newborn. That brings us to the fourth and final major player in the debates over paid parental leave: healthcare officials. Because while the conversation is often framed as a struggle between employers, government officials, and new parents, there are larger real-world health concerns that come along with this decision. For example, the World Health Organization recommends six months of breastfeeding for new infants. And this process is obviously easier to accomplish several times a day if parents are given adequate paid time off, with women who return to work later usually being able to breastfeed regularly for longer periods of time. A 2015 study states that there could be a positive correlation between paid maternity leave during the birth of a first child and lower instances of late-life depression for women over the age of 50. This is based on data from countries that participate in the Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe. And other studies find that there's a benefit to lengthier maternity leave for pediatric healthcare as well. So, be sure to check out some of those fascinating findings down in the Works Cited list. So, the postwar baby boom led us to the question, what happens to working families after the babies start booming? But even though most of the generation that were the first wave of infants that caused "global" concern over childcare are now either parents or grandparents themselves, the debates over paid maternity leave continue to rage worldwide. In nations with paid maternity leaves, like the UK and Canada, questions about the duration of the leave and the amount of compensation remain in the public discourse. And in the U.S., where no paid maternity leave decisions have been reached, activists continue to agitate for change that benefits working families and the babies in their care. So, what do you think? My only regret about this episode is that I didn't have a bunch of babies on set like I wanted to and only one fake baby, but the information is still worth knowing, even if I can't look into their beautiful, chubby-cheeked faces while I talk.

(Describer) She frowns and shrugs.