Governor Kathy Hochul discusses New York’s first-in-the-nation paid prenatal leave policy, which takes effect on January 1, 2025.
New York State’s first-in-the-nation paid prenatal leave policy will take effect on January 1, 2025.
This policy, signed into law in April, gives workers the ability to take paid leave for any pregnancy-related medical appointments.
Governor Kathy Hochul said one of her top priorities is making sure that mothers and their babies have the best outcome in life, “And that means they can not be missing the prenatal appointments — which are so important for a mom’s health to keep a regularly scheduled appointment with her doctor to make sure that if anything is going wrong with her health or the baby’s, they’re getting attention early enough to make sure that there’s no complications later.”
Effective January 1, 2025, any privately employed pregnant New Yorker will now be able to receive an additional 20 hours of paid sick leave for prenatal care. The New York State Department of Labor estimates that about 130,000 pregnant women per year will be eligible for this benefit, with about 65,800 of those being hourly workers.
Pregnancy-related health care includes:
– Physical examinations
– Medical procedures
– Monitoring
– Testing
– Discussions with a health care provider needed to ensure a healthy pregnancy
– Fertility treatment
– End of pregnancy care
The paid prenatal leave benefits are in addition to New York State Paid Family Leave, existing employer-provided leave and existing sick leave benefits, ensuring workers can receive the health care needed to address all pregnancy related care to create healthy outcomes without jeopardizing their employment or finances. The law applies to all private employers in New York State, with no minimum employee threshold, and is applicable to both full-time and part-time employees.
In New York, rates of infant mortality are highest among those who had no prenatal care or did not begin accessing prenatal care until the third trimester. One recent study found that nearly 40% of women who did not get prenatal medical care reported this was due to a lack of paid leave or unaffordable care.
Studies show that prenatal health care is highly correlated with improved health outcomes for mothers and infants; and that pregnant women who have access to regular prenatal medical visits are less likely to die in childbirth, and their newborns are more likely to be healthy. Compared with infants born to mothers who received prenatal care, infants whose mothers did not receive prenatal care were three times more likely to have a low birth weight, less than 5.5 pounds, and five times more likely to die in infancy. Additionally, women who do not receive prenatal care are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than those who do receive care.
Pregnant women of color, especially Black women, face disproportionately higher rates of pregnancy complications and maternal mortality nationally. Black women are overrepresented among pregnancy related deaths, accounting for 14.3% of all births in New York in 2018 but more than half, 51%, of maternal deaths. Black women are five times more likely to die from pregnancy than white women and are also more likely to experience complications, and the preeclampsia rate is 60% higher in Black women than in white women.
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