In a few left-wing cities, paid abortion leave is now a reality.
Cities such as Boston, Pittsburgh, and Portland, Oregon, expanded their paid leave policies for city employees this year to include pregnancy loss. That includes abortion for any reason. The policies in question grant leave to both women and men.
While it’s respectable that a city policy would offer leave for a miscarriage, acknowledging the loss of human life and the sadness the parents feel, offering paid abortion leave is an insane policy. It’s something the pro-life movement needs to push back against to prevent it from happening elsewhere.
Boston now offers the same paid leave for abortion that it does for childbirth. Men and women can get up to 12 weeks of paid leave: four weeks at full pay, four weeks at 75% pay, and four weeks at 50% pay, as I reported for New Boston Post last week. The city council unanimously supported the measure in September, something that went unreported by the legacy media.
And in Portland and Pittsburgh, city workers (men and women) can get three days of bereavement leave for loss of pregnancy, including abortion. Pittsburgh’s policy went into effect in September, and Portland’s went into effect in October. Both of their city councils passed the measures unanimously.
Bereavement leave raises the question: Who died? Was it the unborn child at the hands of its parents and the doctor? Abortion intentionally ends a human life. It’s a horrific act of violence against a vulnerable member of society regardless of whether it takes place at eight weeks or 28 weeks.
At a minimum, politicians on both sides of the aisle should work to reduce the number of abortions that take place. However, these cities are encouraging abortion by paying people to not work if they or their wife/girlfriend have one.
These policies are also another way to increase taxpayers’ involvement with abortion. If some liberal guy doesn’t want a child and pays for his girlfriend to end their child’s life, why should the city reward him with at least a four-week vacation on the taxpayers’ dime? In some cases, the city may pay several thousand dollars for people to not work because they committed a horrific act of violence against their unborn child.
Boston city councilor Lydia Edwards, who sponsored the Boston ordinance along with now-mayor Michelle Wu and former mayoral candidate Annissa Essaibi George, defended the inclusion of abortion in the policy when pushing it over the summer.
“Employees know what they need, and they will express what they need,” she said during a July city council meeting. “And we just want to make sure that we have the most compassionate laws to allow for people to say, ‘I need this’ or ‘I don’t.’ If a person terminates a pregnancy, and they do not need this leave, I don’t believe they’re gonna go and write this to you or abuse this policy. I believe they’re gonna move on with their lives — which is what they’re entitled to do, in any way, shape, or form.”
Given that just about every abortion that takes place in the U.S. is medically unnecessary, paid leave isn’t justified. The victim of an abortion is the one who lost his or her life, not those who allowed it to happen.
Lawmakers should enact policies that prevent unborn humans from being killed, not ones that incentivize the killing. Unfortunately, the city councils in Boston, Pittsburgh, and Portland won’t change these bad policies anytime soon, but other cities can protect life by making sure this doesn’t happen there.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts. He is also a freelance writer who has been published in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other outlets.
