A MomLeft Mother's Day Gift Guide

Are any of your kids lawmakers?

When I search “mother’s day 2024,” most of the top hits are gift guides. This is mostly an SEO play and I’ve worked long enough in digital media to respect it. Adult children need last-minute gift ideas and websites need clicks.

As a website operator, myself, I wanted to get in on the action. So I’ve drawn up my wishlist for American motherhood: the policy changes and societal shifts that would make parenting better for women. Not all of it’s cheap at the outset. But even discounting its moral value, much of it ultimately pays for itself.

A better world for mothers means making motherhood an opt-in identity. 

That requires ending the expectation that women and girls without children are—as sociologist Jessica Calarco terms it in her forthcoming book—“mothers in waiting.” It means the end of socializing girls, alone, as caregivers, plying them with domestic-themed play and additional chores while stigmatizing boys who play with dolls or demonstrate the sensitivity that lends itself to care work.

A better world means providing comprehensive sex-education in schools so that young people are armed with the information they need to plan for or prevent pregnancy.

It means legal and financial access to birth control in all forms. The right to use birth control is under a multi-pronged legal assault, with conservatives attempting to eradicate some forms by conflating them with abortifacients amid a crackdown on abortion access. The legal battle on birth control has also seen its opponents call for the overturn of Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 Supreme Court case that enshrined birth control rights. Those same opponents have advocated for the revival of the Comstock Act, which would ban the transport of birth control in the mail or across state lines. A better world for mothers means refusing those attacks on our medical freedom. It also  means making birth control affordable to all who want it, and accessible to people who live in areas with limited access to medical care. A fairer world also demands birth control, with fewer side effects, for a greater range of people, including men.

A better world for mothers means free abortion on demand without apology. For people who can become pregnant, our autonomy is bound up in the ability to choose whether, when, and with whom we have children. Forced pregnancy is not just a physical assault; it’s an obstacle to one’s lifelong career and relationship options, to one’s physical mobility and financial freedom. For the majority of abortion-seekers who already have children, forced birth can be an impediment to the care we can offer our existing children.

When we do pursue motherhood, a better world means socialized medicine, available not just in blue cities, but in America’s widening maternal care deserts. It means ending the medical racism that puts women of color at dramatically higher risk for complications and death during pregnancy, and means the demand for dignified and appropriate medical care for pregnant people who do not identify as women. It means the end of cruel carceral practices that see incarcerated people give birth in chains and without adequate medical attention.

A better world for mothers means workplaces willing to accommodate us. We need stronger anti-discrimination measures for pregnant people, and guaranteed paid parental leave, for all parents. We need flexible scheduling, paid sick days, and the guaranteed right to pump milk at work, in spaces free from harassment. We need to destroy a work culture that is incompatible with care, and refuse the demand for women to retreat to unpaid domestic labor while men take on paid careers. A better world means compensating carers for their domestic work, recognizing their labor as essential and paying them the means to live, even if their work does not directly contribute to a corporate bottom line. And it means ensuring that male partners do an equal share of care work at home, rather than add to women’s burden.

It means ensuring that children and their carers never have to fear going without nutritious food. It requires extending—not cutting, as lawmakers often attempt—food benefit programs that cover pregnant people and their children. It means ramping up free school lunch and breakfast programs, and leaning into summer food funding for kids, not cutting it as Republican officials did in at least 15 states this year. It means ending the time-consuming and stigmatizing process of means-testing that keeps food-insecure families from accessing their full food benefits.

A better world for mothers means public spaces that are more receptive to children. That means an end to performative public kid-hatred (seriously, what the fuck?) and the expansion of wheelchair-accessible infrastructure, which is also stroller-accessible infrastructure. It means widely available nursing spaces, and an end to homeless-hostile architecture like leaning benches and standing-room-only tables that are completely impossible for small people to use.

A better world for mothers requires high-quality, publicly funded early childcare, staffed by well-paid professionals working sustainable shifts with manageable teacher-child ratios. 

It means well-funded K-12 public schools that do not have to compete with private and religious schools for public money. It means a workforce of unionized educators who are paid enough to thrive, and the end of censorship laws that restrict what their students can learn. It means uplifting students from marginalized groups, from queer youth to migrant children who turn to their schools for support. It means sensible gun laws to protect our children in their classrooms, and an end to cops on campuses and the in-school security theater that does little beyond funnel poor and minority students into a school-to-prison pipeline.

A better world means overturning policies that prohibit children from expressing their gender identity, and that threaten to separate gender-nonconforming children from their families. 

And it means funding a network of eldercare parallel to our childcare systems. It means making mutual responsibility a lifelong practice, easing the burden on mothers who care for the generations above and below them, and ensuring that those mothers will have reliable care, in turn. In a better world, when we are old and turn to our children for care, all generations will be able to opt in or out, according to their needs, all of us freer.