Why American Women Are Losing Rights While Other Democracies Move Forward

September 20, 2026|QLP News Room

American exceptionalism used to include, at least in its own telling, leadership on women's rights. That story doesn't hold up well against the actual numbers anymore. On paid leave, childcare, and increasingly on abortion access itself, the United States isn't just failing to lead its peer democracies. It's falling behind nations it has spent decades treating as less developed on exactly these questions.

Paid Leave: The U.S. Stands Genuinely Alone

This isn't a close comparison. The United States is the only country among the OECD's 38 member nations that guarantees zero weeks of paid maternity leave. The OECD average sits around 19 weeks. Countries like Austria, Mexico, and Luxembourg guarantee fully paid leave, at 100% of wages, for extended periods. Mexico, a country the U.S. political conversation rarely holds up as a policy model, offers twelve fully paid weeks. The U.S. offers none, federally, leaving the question entirely to individual employers or a shrinking handful of state programs.

Women, including African American women, working at punching and coding actuarial cards at the Social Security Administration in Baltimore — American women have always worked. What other wealthy democracies eventually built around that reality, paid leave, subsidized childcare, was policy the U.S. simply chose not to build. Image: Library of Congress. Public domain.

Childcare: Same Story, Different Number

American couples earning average wages with two young children spend roughly 20% of disposable household income on childcare. Single parents spend 37%. Among OECD nations, only Switzerland comes close to matching the U.S. burden, and even there, single parents pay less thanks to stronger subsidy structures than America offers anyone. Most wealthy democracies treat childcare as public infrastructure, the way roads or schools get treated. The U.S. treats it as a private market good, which is precisely why it functions the way a private, under-regulated market tends to: expensive, uneven, and hardest on the people with the least bargaining power.

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Abortion Access: A Company America Didn't Used to Keep

Pre-Dobbs, the U.S. sat roughly in line with most of its peer democracies on abortion access. Post-Dobbs, with more than a dozen states enacting near-total bans, the U.S. legal landscape has moved sharply out of step with Canada, most of the European Union, and other wealthy democracies that maintain broad legal access, in some cases with fewer restrictions than even the pre-Dobbs American standard. The company the U.S. increasingly finds itself keeping on this specific issue is not its traditional peer group of wealthy democracies. It's a different list entirely, one the U.S. has historically criticized rather than resembled.

Exterior of the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. — A single ruling from this building in 2022 was enough to move the entire country's legal position on abortion out of step with most of its peer democracies. Image: Supreme Court of the United States. Public domain.

Political Representation: The Quota Question

Many countries use candidate quotas, legal requirements that a certain share of party candidates or elected seats go to women, to accelerate representation faster than voluntary progress ever manages on its own. Countries across the EU, Latin America, and parts of Africa have used quota systems to reach far higher rates of women's parliamentary representation than the U.S. currently has in Congress. The U.S. has never seriously considered adopting anything similar, relying instead entirely on voluntary party recruitment and candidate fundraising, the same slower, less reliable pipeline discussed earlier in this series.

Maternal Health: Moving the Wrong Direction

This is maybe the starkest comparison in the entire series. Maternal mortality has been falling across most wealthy nations for decades. In the U.S., it has been rising, the only wealthy democracy moving in that direction rather than following the broader global trend downward. Layer state-level abortion restrictions on top of an already-rising baseline and the gap between the U.S. and its peer nations widens further every year this continues.

The Backlash Isn't Only American

None of this is unique to the U.S. in isolation. Poland fought a prolonged, high-profile battle over abortion restriction in the 2020s that drew massive street protests. Hungary and other countries with more authoritarian-leaning governments have seen parallel rollbacks on gender equality policy generally. What sets the U.S. apart isn't that backlash exists here too. It's that the U.S. backlash is happening inside a country that still tells itself a story about being the global leader on rights, a story the actual policy comparisons increasingly contradict.

Dorothea Lange's 1936 photograph Migrant Mother, showing Florence Owens Thompson with her children — Dorothea Lange's 1936 photograph "Migrant Mother." Other wealthy nations eventually built social safety nets in response to exactly this kind of hardship. The U.S. mostly didn't, and the gap that decision created is still visible in the numbers today. Image: Library of Congress. Public domain.

What International Solidarity Actually Looks Like

Feminist organizing across these countries increasingly shares strategy and language with each other, not just headlines. Reproductive rights organizers in the U.S. have studied Poland's and Ireland's organizing models directly. Global feminist networks share legal strategy, messaging research, and direct organizing support across borders in ways that didn't exist at this scale even fifteen years ago. That cross-border exchange runs in both directions. Ireland's 2018 vote to legalize abortion, reversing decades of some of Europe's strictest restrictions, drew directly on lessons from earlier reproductive rights campaigns elsewhere, proof that this pattern moves both ways.

At Quietly Loud Prints, closing out this series here feels right. Understanding how the U.S. compares internationally isn't about national shame for its own sake. It's proof that none of this is inevitable. Other countries have built something different. That means a different policy path was always available here too.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it really true the U.S. is the only wealthy country with no paid maternity leave?

Yes. Among the OECD's 38 member nations, the U.S. is the only one that guarantees zero weeks of paid maternity leave at the federal level.

How does U.S. abortion access compare to Europe now?

Post-Dobbs, more than a dozen U.S. states have near-total bans, putting the country out of step with most of the European Union and other wealthy democracies, several of which maintain broader legal access than many U.S. states currently allow.

Do other countries actually use quotas to increase women's political representation?

Yes, extensively, across the EU, Latin America, and parts of Africa. The U.S. has never adopted a comparable system, relying instead on voluntary party recruitment.

Is maternal mortality really moving in the opposite direction in the U.S. compared to other wealthy nations?

Yes. While maternal mortality has fallen across most wealthy countries for decades, U.S. rates have been rising, particularly in states with the strictest abortion restrictions.