Motherhood Is Free Labor By Design
Originally published on my Substack at: https://amotherand.substack.com/p/motherhood-is-free-labor-by-design
We are, by every visible measure, finally talking about how mothers are set up to fail.
There are awareness months. We have screening tools with validated cutoffs. There’s a hotline, a number printed on the folder they give you on your way out of the hospital. There is a mountain of research telling us that a mother’s untreated depression ripples through a family for years. We know it shapes attachment, development, and the entire state of the household. We know this. We have the data. We can talk about maternal mental health out loud now in daylight without flinching.
Yet there is still no support.
In fact, America is failing mothers. Literally, there are established report cards that give each state a letter grade, and there isn’t a single “A” to be found. 1 Let me break down how, and I’ll do it in bullet points since apparently that is all people read nowadays2:
No federal paid leave
No affordable childcare
No affordable structure of support or “village” (everything is paid)
The caregiving default remains untouched and continuously relies on mothers
Maternal mortality, especially for Black women, continues to be a major problem in the US
For a long time, I kept thinking we had a gap or a lag. That the culture was maybe ahead of the policy and the policy would finally catch up at some point. I don’t believe that anymore. Now I’m starting to believe that the talking and the absence of support are the same system and running exactly as designed.
Talking about things is free. Being aware of how bad things are is also free. The most commonly used screening questionnaires used for perinatal mental health disorders are also free.3 The moment something requires money or a redistribution of labor, the energy drains out of the room. I’m seeing entrepreneurial mothers and nonprofits step in to fill existing gaps. I think it is because they have already figured out what I am just now realizing. It appears society will fund the conversation about the problem indefinitely, but not the answer.
To understand why, we have to look at what was never “counted” in the first place. The entire American support system attaches to a paid job. Your insurance, retirement, paid leave, and standing as a person the system “owes” something to. All of it routes through employment, and mothering sits outside that on purpose.
When the research says maternal depression “impacts families forever,” this does not point to a labor crisis or economic emergency. Instead, it dismisses it as a “personal health event” and slaps on labels to pathologize women experiencing a very real crisis. Society basically says the labor moms are drowning in was never “labor” to begin with, according to the way benefits are structured.
Plus, the labor is being done, and it’s being done for free. So why pour money into something that “works well on paper"?
Mothers are the unpaid shock absorber for a welfare state this country never bothered to build. I’ve been looking at the childcare gap, the eldercare gap, the sick-kid-home-from-school gap, the who-stays-up-with-baby gap, and seeing that women absorb most of this automatically. The absorption of this labor is so total and reliable that the system has responded by organizing itself on the assumption that women will always be there.
The thing is, we will. Because if we don’t, who will? We would have to sit and watch our children suffer for something we could help them with if we just put in a little work. But the thing that devastates me most, looking at it from this lens, is that when women are raising their hands to say something is wrong, the system is pathologizing them.
When new moms are struggling with their mental health, we place the blame (and the responsibility to get better) back on them. But what if the response they are having is a perfectly predictable and rational response to an impossible arrangement? I’m starting to believe that diagnosing 1 in 7 women with PPD is a tactic to keep the solution small. Instead of redesigning the entire system to better support mothers and families, we hand those who speak out a worksheet, a referral, or a hotline number.
With that response, we are not only perpetuating the issue at hand; we are also dismissing women’s labor and concerns. Our society has handed every mother a script in which her job requires sacrifice but offers no societal benefits. And when someone asks about this or points out discrepancies, they are told, “You should be grateful that you have beautiful children and get to be a mother.”
We tell moms that maybe they are struggling because they aren’t cut out for this, and convince them that their unmet needs are flaws in their character rather than a choice made on their behalf by people who were never going to pay for the alternative.
So, it’s not that no one cares. People (especially women) care, and they care loudly, constantly, and sincerely. The real problem is that the structure itself has found a way to appear responsive through awareness, screening, research, referrals, and hotlines, but it keeps the actual level of care where it has always been: far below where it should be.
https://policycentermmh.org/state-report-cards/
I know everyone here on Substack, and likely everyone reading this probably is the absolute wrong audience for this jab. So, if you’re reading this footnote, I’m sorry.
I did a DEEP dive on this for a paper I wrote for one of my graduate course projects. The EPDS is the most commonly used screener; it is free and also…it hasn’t been updated since it was developed in the 1980s.