1. United States
2. N.J.
3. Letter

With Mother’s Day around the corner I wanted to write and implore you to do more if you care at all about mothers and their children - the backbone of our society. Don’t pretend to care if your every decision isn’t driven by the desire to protect the women in your life that laid it all for your existence. Who suffered to allow your life to happen. We must move forward as a leading nation in offering equal pay, universal healthcare, paid parent leave, free child care, and mental healthcare coverage for our mothers. We’re so behind other countries it’s laughable. It’s also maternal health awareness month after all and 1 in 5 suffer through mental health issues largely due to hormonal changes postpartum. It’s unsafe to ask them to return to work. As someone who suffered with PPA/PPD with a traumatic emergency cesarean birth and is freelance I had no option of staying home to recover. I had to return to work a week later, in pain, limping. Taking time off has proven to widen the pay gap as mothers are passed up career advancements and penalized for caring for their families. It’s exhausting having to take time from parenting to try to make you understand how these should be baseline protections for families in our modern society. If you care about your mom, wife, sister, daughter you need to make this a forefront in your campaign this election season. You will not with the votes of women otherwise. I will be very vocal on this topic on social media and making sure everyone in my life is doing the same advocacy. You will not have my vote if things aren’t promised to improve.