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Ap-paw-ling

By The Scrapbook

The child-free are getting uppity again. Last week USA Today reported on a minor trend in Britain, where a few companies are now offering employees paid leave upon the occasion of the worker getting a pet. It is called “paw-ternity” leave.

As is the case with most shocking lifestyle trend articles, it’s not clear how much of a trend paw-ternity leave really is. For starters, there’s the smell test: Has any labor market ever been so tight that employers felt they needed to give workers time off for a new cat? Then there are the dubious statistics: USA Today offered only one example of a company granting paw-ternity leave. The best evidence of the “trend” seems to be a slapdash survey, done by a company that sells pet insurance, which claims that 5 percent of pet owners in the U.K. reported being offered time off to take care of their pets.

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Even so, paw-ternity wasn’t the most offensive entry in the child-free sweepstakes. The week before, the New York Post published an interview with author Meghann Foye, who has decided that she wants maternity leave, even though she doesn’t have kids. She wants “meternity” leave. Here’s Foye:

I was 31 years old in 2009, and I loved my career. As an editor at a popular magazine, I got to work on big stories, attend cool events, and meet famous celebs all the time. And yet, after 10 years of working in a job where I was always on deadline, I couldn’t help but feel envious when parents on staff left the office at 6 p.m. to tend to their children, while it was assumed co-workers without kids would stay behind to pick up the slack. “You know, I need a maternity leave!” I told one of my pregnant friends. .  .  . It seemed that parenthood was the only path that provided a modicum of flexibility. There’s something about saying “I need to go pick up my child” as a reason to leave the office on time that has far more gravitas than, say, “My best friend just got ghosted by her OkCupid date and needs a margarita”—but both sides are valid.

Oh yes, quite valid. Raising a child entails substantial personal sacrifice and expense so that the next generation of Social Security payments will keep flowing and society can continue. Just like getting a drink with your bestie because she’s sad that her iPhone couldn’t deliver true love.

In a speech to the National Congress of Mothers in 1905, Theodore Roosevelt said,

There are many good people who are denied the supreme blessing of children, and for these we have the respect and sympathy always due to those who, from no fault of their own, are denied any of the other great blessings of life. But the man or woman who deliberately forego these blessings, whether from viciousness, coldness, shallow-heartedness, self-indulgence, or mere failure to appreciate aright the difference between the all-important and the unimportant,—why, such a creature merits contempt as hearty as any visited upon the soldier who runs away in battle, or upon the man who refuses to work for the support of those dependent upon him, and who tho able-bodied is yet content to eat in idleness the bread which others provide.

The Rough Rider’s judgment would seem overly harsh if today’s child-free weren’t so insipid.

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