Kira West has many aspirations. Two of the American’s long-held dreams: to live abroad and to have a child outside the U.S. In January, she and her husband realized the first of those dreams when they immigrated to London. And, two months ago, West’s second dream came true: Her son was born in a National Health Service (NHS) hospital — the public health care system in the U.K. “We didn’t come here necessarily to do that, but I’m very grateful it worked out that way,” West tells Yahoo.
She’s now eight weeks into the 52-week maternity leave she intends to take. Having the option to take off the first year of her baby’s life brings West a sense of relief. She also feels seen, respected and welcome as a mother in London, a city that feels far more supportive and family- and child-friendly to her than her previous home in Chicago.
Had West and her husband stayed in the U.S., she would have experienced a very different — and likely much shorter — maternity leave. And “if there’s anywhere else I could go to have a more incredible [maternity] experience, it’s Canada,” she says. While the U.S., the U.K. and Canada share some similarities, their parental-leave policies are worlds apart. And those differences ripple out — impacting the mother’s health, career, her baby’s early development and even the broader economy.
We spoke to three moms — one from the U.S., U.K. and Canada — to find out how national parental leave policies shaped their maternity experiences — and stress levels.
The American mom
Name: Bri Adams
Job: Works in tech
When she gave birth: 2022 and 2023, and a third on the way
Leave time: 18 weeks with baby No. 1, 11 weeks with baby No. 2
The pay: Fully paid maternity leave for 15 weeks after her first baby; six weeks at 5% salary and 5 weeks unpaid after her second baby
Paternal leave: 12 weeks
Additional support: Adams’s mother has helped after each pregnancy and will again after baby No. 3 arrives
Bri Adams used to consider herself lucky. When she had her first child in 2022, Adams was working full-time at a tech company in the U.S., making as much as $210,000 a year, including bonuses. Her company provided 15 weeks of paid leave. And her home state of Virginia guarantees six weeks of short-term disability to all new mothers. So Adams was able to cobble together 18 weeks of maternity leave before she had to return to work. That was “so much more [time] than I ever thought I would get, which is appalling to say,” Adams tells Yahoo. Plus, her husband got even more parental leave than she did as a federal employee for the U.S. State Department.
Still, when Adams went back to work, it felt too soon. She left that company within a year, signing with a new company where her soon-to-be boss, the chief executive officer and most of the firm’s leadership all had young children. The day after she inked her offer letter, Adams found out she was pregnant. She knew she was too new to qualify for paid maternity leave — which typically requires at least a year of employment — but hoped that, as parents themselves, the higher-ups would understand. “I believed that they’d give me benefits, that they would give me something,” Adams says. Instead, “they told me, ‘It would not be equitable to give you an exception,’” she explains.
So when her second baby was born in 2023, Adams once again had to rely on short-term disability, which allowed her 50% pay for six weeks, and she took off five additional weeks unpaid. When Adams returned to work, she was still bleeding, suffering from a uterine infection and concerned about her baby, who wouldn’t yet take a bottle. Shortly after coming back to work, she was laid off. “It was a slap in the face, especially when I hadn’t been paid for the entire time,” says Adams.
Now, Adams and her husband spend more than $50,000 per year on day care for their two young kids — more than their mortgage payments. The couple wanted a third child, but thought it would be financially impossible. “The fact that we were making a quarter of a million dollars and could not make the decision to have a third kid in the U.S. is insane,” Adams says.
So, they started plotting to move to the Netherlands, as friends of theirs had done. Those plans shifted, however, when her husband found out he was being sent to Amman, Jordan, for work. The whole family will move there in January and stay for two years. And, “I am pregnant again, by choice, and I’m so excited about it,” she says. “But the only reason we were able to start family planning is because we’re moving” out of the country, Adams adds.
Her day care expenses in Jordan will be less than half what they are in the U.S. “It blows my mind that we’ll be in a more financially viable position there than we were here,” she adds. Plus, Adams has heard only great things about maternal health care in Jordan and the cultural value placed there on mothers and babies alike. Adams feels lucky to be moving abroad, but adds: “This is not an opportunity that the traditional American family has,” Adams says. “It also feels incredibly sad that, to get the support I want and need for my family and kids, I have to leave this country. … For a country that says, ‘We want to [raise] the birth rate,’ and ‘We want to support parents and families’ — prove it.”
Among the 41 high-income countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), only one nation does not federally guarantee any paid maternity leave: the United States. Even across all income levels, the U.S. is one of only seven countries worldwide that does not provide any federally mandated paid maternity leave, a distinction it shares with South Africa and small island nations, including the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Tonga.
American women are legally entitled to 12 weeks of unpaid leave at the federal level, with some states providing paid leave; the rest is up to employers. Thirteen U.S. states have passed their own laws to create paid family leave. But mothers only qualify for this benefit under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) if they’ve been at their job for at least a year and are a W-2 worker. Recent data suggests that a little more than a third of private sector employers in the U.S. offer paid maternity leave, but only 27% of for-profit sector workers have access to those benefits.
“There are benefits to having private sector employers try to do better for employees than what is available in the states where they are domiciled, and in this country as a whole at the federal level,” Lauren Smith Brody, cofounder and senior vice president of coalition and government partnerships at the Chamber of Mothers, tells Yahoo. “But what the private sector can’t necessarily do is cover anybody who is underemployed, unemployed, working for themselves, hourly wage workers, gig workers — and that’s an ever-growing segment of our population.”
The mom living in the U.K.
Name: Kira West
Job: Works full-time in marketing and creates travel and health social media content
When she gave birth: October 2025
Leave time: One year
The pay: Fully paid for 12 weeks, then £187.18 (about $250 USD) per week
Paternal leave: No
Additional support: Midwives, a doula, a lactation consultant, a health care worker postnatal well check, free dental care and prescriptions for a year for herself and her baby
Up until January 2025, Kira West and her husband were living in the luxury high-rise of her young adult dreams in Chicago. But the couple knew the apartment and the surrounding city weren’t where they wanted to start a family. Public transit didn’t feel safe, and their families lived too far away to be able to reliably help them in the early days of parenthood.
West, who works in marketing and creates travel and wellness content on the side, had always dreamed of living abroad and, specifically, of having a child outside the U.S. So, she and her husband started putting the wheels in motion to move to London, where they felt they could easily work and where West’s childhood pen pal lived. At the start of 2025, they made the jump overseas.
West got pregnant shortly after the move. Her son was born eight weeks ago in an NHS hospital, with the help of West’s midwife, a doula and, when she needed a greater level of care, an obstetrician. She loved that her childbirth felt more natural than her prior experience in the U.S., but included a physician when necessary. Her labor, delivery and postnatal care were completely free. In the U.S., West was pregnant once before and miscarried. She saw an obstetrician in Chicago, but, she says, “I did not enjoy my experience — and I paid for it.” In the U.K., she only had to pay for the additional scans she requested early on to ease her mind that she wouldn’t miscarry again.
By the time her son was born in October, West had a long list of support people — from lactation consultants and her doula to doctors and day care — recommended by her friends and her prenatal classes (which were also free). In the days following her delivery, a health care worker came to her home to check in on her and her baby and offer more supportive services. The township sent an email congratulating her family and offering still more neighborhood resources. West’s mother flew over to help her in her early days as a first-time mom. “[My mom] felt a lot more safe with me giving birth here, especially as a Black woman, knowing that the systems in the U.K. are more supportive” than those in the U.S., says West.
The U.K. ranks third (behind Bulgaria and Greece) for providing the longest paid maternity leave, at up to 39 weeks. But the amount of pay a woman is entitled to drops as the months go on. For the first six weeks, mothers are paid 90% of their typical weekly income. For the following 33 weeks, that amount drops to £187.18 per week (unless the 90% figure was already lower than that). For perspective, the average U.K. household spends £623.30 (or about $834 U.S. dollars) per week, according to the country’s Office for National Statistics. The final 13 weeks of maternity leave are unpaid. Fathers are entitled to leave too, but payment is shared between the parents. Up to 37 weeks of parental leave can be paid, but not to both parents for that full term.
West’s company will pay her full salary for about 18 weeks of maternity leave, and then she’ll receive statutory maternity pay, as set out by national law, which amounts to £187.18 per week. But West plans to take a full year off work, which is typical in the U.K. Even though it won’t all be paid, West says it’s a relief to know that most of that time will be — and that her job is guaranteed to be waiting for her at the end of that year.
The Canadian mom
Name: Nicole Kingston
Job: Full-time travel sales account manager with a side gig as founder, writer and content creator of the Toronto Baby Guide
When she gave birth: 2023
Leave time: 20 months
The pay: 93% of her salary
Paternal leave: Five weeks paid
Additional support: Subsidized day care
Nicole Kingston knows that most of the world looks to Canada’s family leave practices as a beacon of hope for what life after birth could be like. The country even has a booming birth tourism industry. And it is good, she says, but there are many misconceptions about just how good Canadians have it. “Comparing myself to parents in the U.S., I feel almost embarrassed sharing this, because that’s a whole other ball game,” she tells Yahoo. “But it still is tough. There are still things that could be done on the Canadian side because it’s not as wonderful as the entire world thinks it is.”
That’s because, even though Canadian law grants women as much as 18 months of maternity leave, not all of that time is guaranteed to be paid. Kingston, who also has a 4-year-old stepson, got 75% of her salary while on maternity leave with her daughter, who’s now nearly 3. She eventually got an employer to “top-up” — meaning she received 93% of her regular pay for a year of maternity leave. “For that year, I felt very comfortable. We had disposable income for me to enjoy my maternity leave, go on vacation and not worry about buying an extra onesie,” says Kingston. “I absolutely love being a mom, and I had the best 20 months of my life, throwing myself into the mommy groups and going on adventures.” But she’d only been able to do so because she’d spent countless hours wading through seemingly endless jargon explaining the arcane options for Canadian maternity leave. Kingston learned so much and was shocked by how confusing the whole process was that she decided to use her time to literally write the book about maternity leave in her area: The Ultimate Guide to Having a Baby in Toronto.
After that first year, Kingston was met with more uncertainty as she tried to get her daughter into day care (hopeful parents sometimes sign up before even getting pregnant in an effort to best the years-long waitlists for subsidized care), and her pay was reduced to $695 CAD (Canadian dollars, or about $502 U.S. dollars) per week — the maximum allowed by Canada’s employment insurance program — for the remaining four months of her leave.
Canada gets a middling ranking — 26th out of 42 OECD countries — for the amount of paid maternal leave it offers at the federal level. Birthing parents get 15 weeks of leave paid at 55% of their salary through Canada’s employment insurance program. Both parents are entitled to an additional combined 40 weeks of parental leave between them (no one parent can take more than 35, however), at a maximum payment of 55% of their weekly income up to $695 CAD per week. This adds up to about a year of leave. Mothers can also choose to take up to 18 months — Canada’s “extended” leave plan — but at a lower weekly payment rate.
All in all, Kingston’s maternity leave afforded her opportunities to have fun with her daughter, connect with other moms and even write a book. But it took her a long time to figure out how to make it all possible. “It shouldn’t be left in the hands of us moms; it should be a social policy, and that would make maternity leave so much more enjoyable for a lot of families,” she says. Yes, maternity leave in Canada is great compared to other countries like the U.S., but maybe the bar is too low to begin with, Kingston suggests.
