Good Good Good · 6 hours ago

Historic win: Nurses Fought to Secure the Nation's First Countywide 12-week Paid Parental Leave Policy

When Jean Stone calls NICU parents in the middle of their workdays, she always begins with "Everything is OK" - because she knows they are carrying the weight of not being there, forced back to work to save whatever leave they have left for when their babies finally come home. That daily reality moved her and her fellow nurses at UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital to do something that had never been done before: organize a coalition of working parents, advocates, and elected leaders to draft a paid parental leave policy for Allegheny County, Pennsylvania - and win. On a Tuesday night in October, the county council voted 11 to 4 to pass 12 weeks of paid parental leave, the first county-level policy of its kind in the nation. The victory was built not on political leverage but on something quieter - a community survey that nurses had sent out asking what would improve maternal health, and in which "people wrote in in astonishing numbers that, 'what we need is real paid parental leave across the board.'" In a country that remains the only industrialized nation without federal paid leave, the nurses who spend their days tending to the most vulnerable lives had decided that bearing witness was no longer enough.