What the law gives you after a child is born
How the world celebratesTaiwan's Labour Standards Act gives eight weeks of maternity leave, fully paid after six months of service. Japan's goes further in a different direction: Article 65 forbids an employer to let a woman work for eight weeks after birth — not a right but a prohibition. Brazil's Consolidation of Labour Laws sets 120 days. Indonesia's Law 4 of 2024 sets a floor of three months and a further three if needed, with the wage percentage written out month by month. The American FMLA says in plain words that the leave "may consist of unpaid leave". And India is stranger still: the constitution requires the state to provide maternity relief, in a part the constitution itself says no court may enforce.
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| Place | When is it? | How the date is set |
|---|---|---|
| United States | Date to be confirmed | Year-round |
| Brazil | Date to be confirmed | Year-round |
| China | Date to be confirmed | Year-round |
| Indonesia | Date to be confirmed | Year-round |
| India | Date to be confirmed | Year-round |
| Japan | Date to be confirmed | Year-round |
| Taiwan | Date to be confirmed | Year-round |
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How the world celebrates
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How does Brazil mark What the law gives you after a child is born?
Brazil's maternity leave is 120 days, set out in Article 392 of the Consolidation of Labour Laws: a pregnant employee is entitled to 120 days of leave without loss of her job or her salary. Paragraph 1 of the same article lets her choose when it starts — on a medical certificate, the departure from work may fall anywhere between the 28th day before the birth and the birth itself, so when to begin is her decision and not the employer's. There is also a route upward: Law 11,770 of 2008 created the Citizen Company Programme, under which a company that joins may extend the leave by a further 60 days, for 180 in total, provided the employee applies before the end of the first month after the birth; the same extension applies to those who adopt or obtain judicial custody for adoption. Brazil therefore runs a statutory floor that covers everyone and, above it, a voluntary extension driven by a tax incentive.
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How does China mark What the law gives you after a child is born?
China's maternity leave is set by Article 7 of the State Council's Special Rules on the Labour Protection of Female Employees: 98 days, of which up to fifteen may be taken before the birth; fifteen more for a difficult delivery; and fifteen more for each additional baby in a multiple birth. A miscarriage before four months carries fifteen days, and after four months forty-two. Who pays is in Article 8, and that is the real dividing line: the maternity allowance during the leave is paid by the maternity insurance fund for those enrolled in it, calculated on the employer's average monthly wage of the previous year; only for those not enrolled does the employer pay it directly at the pre-leave wage. In principle, then, the money does not come from the employer but from social insurance — the exact opposite of the American arrangement, which leaves the cost entirely to whatever the two sides negotiate. Provinces add their own extended childbirth leave on top, so the number in practice is often well above 98.
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How does Indonesia mark What the law gives you after a child is born?
Indonesia's Law No. 4 of 2024 — on the welfare of mother and child in the first thousand days of life, promulgated on 2 July 2024 — is the newest and the most itemised of these seven. Article 4(3) gives every working mother maternity leave of at least the first three months, and up to three months more where a special condition is certified by a doctor; a miscarriage carries a month and a half or whatever a doctor or midwife certifies. Article 5(2) then writes the wages out month by month: full pay for the first three months, full pay for the fourth, and 75% of wages for the fifth and sixth. Article 5(1) adds that a mother exercising those rights may not be dismissed and keeps her entitlements. Putting the length, the percentage and the protection against dismissal into one statute — and spelling out the percentage month by month — is what most distinguishes Indonesia here: elsewhere the law either states only a number of days, or leaves the paying to an insurance fund or to the employer.
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How does India mark What the law gives you after a child is born?
India put maternity protection into its constitution, but in a particular place. Article 42 sits in the Directive Principles of State Policy and reads: the State shall make provision for securing just and humane conditions of work and for maternity relief. The catch is Article 37, in the same Part: the provisions of this Part “shall not be enforceable by any court, but the principles therein laid down are nevertheless fundamental in the governance of the country and it shall be the duty of the State to apply these principles in making laws.” Maternity relief is therefore a task the constitution hands to the legislature, not a right one can take to court — and the only text that says so plainly is the constitution itself. That is unlike the other six markets, where the leave lives in labour statutes and the days, the wages and the penalties can be claimed directly. What an Indian worker actually gets thus depends on the legislation that follows and on whom that legislation reaches, not on Article 42.
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How does Japan mark What the law gives you after a child is born?
Japan's maternity leave is written not only as a right but as a prohibition. Article 65 of the Labour Standards Act says an employer must not employ a woman who has requested leave within six weeks of her expected date of birth (fourteen for a multiple pregnancy), and then states flatly that an employer must not employ a woman within eight weeks after childbirth. Before the birth, in other words, the woman has to ask; for the eight weeks after it, she may not work even if she wants to. The only exception is work a doctor finds unobjectionable, requested by the woman herself, after six weeks have passed. Where the other six markets write down how many days one may rest, this article writes down how many days an employer may not make someone work — the subject of the sentence is the employer, not the worker. Childcare leave sits in a separate statute, and the benefit is paid out of employment insurance rather than by the employer.
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How does Taiwan mark What the law gives you after a child is born?
Taiwan's maternity leave sits in Article 50 of the Labour Standards Act: work stops before and after childbirth for eight weeks, or four weeks for a miscarriage after three months of pregnancy. The pay threshold is in the second paragraph — wages continue in full for those employed six months or more, and at half pay for those below that, so the same leave at the same company can be full or half pay, and the dividing line is only the hiring date. The Act of Gender Equality in Employment adds two more pieces: Article 15 gives seven days of prenatal check-up leave and seven days of accompanying and paternity leave to the spouse, both fully paid; Article 16 allows unpaid parental leave after six months of service, until the child turns three and for no more than two years, during which the employee may stay in the original social insurance, with the employer's share waived and the employee's own share deferrable for three years. Eight weeks is not long among these seven markets; the real variable is whether those two unpaid years are affordable.
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How does United States mark What the law gives you after a child is born?
There is no federal statutory paid maternity leave in the United States. What exists is the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993: 29 U.S.C. §2612 entitles an eligible employee to 12 workweeks of leave in any 12-month period, for the birth of a child, for adoption or foster placement, or to care for a spouse, child or parent with a serious health condition. And subsection (c) of the same section is blunt about the rest: that leave “may consist of unpaid leave”. That sentence is what makes the United States singular among these seven markets — elsewhere the argument is about how many days, who pays and at what percentage; here the law never says anyone has to pay at all. The FMLA also has thresholds of employer size and hours worked, so people below them do not get even the twelve weeks. Whether the leave is paid falls back to the states and to individual employers, and two people in the same country can end up with twelve weeks at full pay and with nothing at all.
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