Topic: Family and Medical Leave – Peace and Life Referendums

Current legislation in the U.S. Congress considering methods of doing this, though we can’t be more specific just yet.

Current referendums: Alaska, Missouri, Nebraska

For the full list of referendums we’re tracking, see our home page.

What is paid Family and Medical Leave?

Family Leave means a period of time off work, usually a set number of weeks, to care for family. It includes parental leave – for one or both parents – to take time off to attend to a newborn or newly adopted child. It includes taking time off to care for family members with sudden medical needs; this especially helps people with elderly parents or any ill relatives.

The United States passed a requirement for employers to at least offer unpaid leave to employees (see the speech below in support of the bill). However, while this guaranteed people the right to return to their jobs when the leave period was over, they still had to go without income in the meantime.

States may offer referendums about Family and Medical Leave insurance, which would allow people who desperately need it to be paid during the period when they’re working hard, but for their families rather than their employers.

1. Reducing Poverty

For those of low enough income that having a good amount of savings isn’t workable, not having pay can be a severe hardship. If anyone simply can’t afford to go without the pay, then the newborn or adopted baby or ill relative will need to go without family help. Since such a low-income person obviously can’t afford to pay for professional help either, then the family member suffers one form of poverty by having less care from a family member, or the worker suffers another form of poverty by prioritizing their family but having insufficient money.

2. Helping Pregnant Women Choose Life

Having the ability to take a few weeks off for a newborn child eases the burden some. It also communicates clearly that society is supportive of the choice for life. Having the father be able to help with the newborn is both good for the mother and a great benefit to the father. Having a set-up to encourage both parents to bond with a child is a sure way of valuing that child’s life, from conception on.

3. Discouraging Euthanasia

When elderly parents or other relatives feel lonely, or suffer more because a family member that could be there to help isn’t, or have worse medical outcomes because that family member can’t afford to be there, or feel guilty about a family member having to lose income to care for them, then the message given about the value of their lives is not one we want to be conveying.

From a speech by Rep. Henry Hyde
in the U.S. House of Representatives
November 13, 1991

Madam Chairman, as one who shares a conservative vision for our society, I don’t think my support for family leave is aberrational, but rather that it’s consistent with traditional family values. The family supplies the moral glue that holds society together; it is the central institution that stands between us and social disintegration. . .

And so, what to do? Well, here is legislation that in a small way helps reinforce the family by humanizing the relationship between the employer and employee. Capitalism with a human face is an imperative, not an imposition. Oh, yes, it is an intrusion –and that government truly does govern best that governs least – but the law is also a teacher, and the lesson that family leave teaches is that children and parents aren’t always the last consideration as we try to fashion a caring and humane society in which to live and work. Capital formation and entrepreneurship are important to our economy, but so are the people who do the work.

We conservatives know that the struggle for freedom is the struggle against big government, but I don’t trust human nature enough to be a libertarian, and I believe that, at minimum, government exists to protect the weak from the strong, and that’s why, whether it’s a defenseless preborn baby whose mother is using crack cocaine or a pregnant woman who needs her job, there are human values at stake that government ought to protect.

Blind adherence to an abstract principle of nonintervention has spawned isolationism in the world and isolation in the workplace. The people who need this law are the least likely to abuse it, because they need their paycheck.

This legislation ameliorates the “Sophie’s Choice” a working pregnant woman must face – her job or her child . . .

What is paid Family and Medical Leave?

1. Reducing Poverty

2. Helping Pregnant Women Choose Life

3. Discouraging Euthanasia

See also: