# Jessica Shortall: The US needs paid family leave -- for the sake of its future

We need women to work, and we need working women to have babies. So why is America one of the only countries in the world that offers no national paid leave to new working mothers? In this incisive talk, Jessica Shortall makes the impassioned case that the reality of new working motherhood in America is both hidden and horrible: millions of women, every year, are forced back to work within just weeks of giving birth. Her idea worth spreading: the time has come for us to recognize the economic, physical and psychological costs of our approach to working mothers and their babies, and to secure our economic future by providing paid leave to all working parents.

- Kind: Talk
- Year: 2015
- Runtime: 15 min
- By: TED.com
- Genres: Education, Children's
- Archive: [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/JessicaShortall_2015X)
- Licence or status: [CC BY-NC-ND 3.0](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/) (as the archive states it)
- Who can watch: Kids profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/ia/JessicaShortall_2015X?play=1)