Crisis Conversations — Live From Better Life Lab (Session XVII)
Channel: New America
Date: 03/08/2020

The coronavirus pandemic is disrupting virtually everything about the way we work, live, connect with one another and expect from our government, businesses, communities and each other. And it’s exposing the deep cracks and inequities in American society. We can’t go back. So what will it take to create a fairer future of work and family? That’s what the Better Life Lab explores every week. Join us on Zoom to share stories, make sense of what’s so rapidly unfolding, and imagine together a better new normal.

Join us on Friday, July 24 at 1 pm for a live, interactive conversation on being pregnant in a pandemic. Some pregnant workers, who already face discrimination on the job, now face having to navigate workplaces and environments that pose real infection risks without recourse. And delivering a child in the pandemic has become fraught and isolating. Not to mention that the emergency paid leave law Congress passed doesn’t apply to new mothers, and the United States is the only advanced nation without a national paid maternity or parental leave policy. What can we learn from the pandemic to better protect pregnant workers, and ensure healthy outcomes for new mothers and children, and new African American mothers and children in particular, where rates of infant and maternal mortality are alarmingly high?

Host:

Brigid Schulte
Director, Better Life Lab at New America

Guests:

Khushbu Shah
Interim Editor in Chief, Fuller Project, a global nonprofit newsroom dedicated to objective, groundbreaking reporting on women

Rebecca Pontikes
Principal of Pontikes Law LLC who specializes in caregiver and pregnancy discrimination case

Dina Bakst
Co-founder and co-president of A Better Balance, which seeks to ensure that no workers, including pregnant workers, have to choose between job, health or family

Dr. Ashley Deutsch
Director of Quality and Patient Safety for the Department of Emergency Medicine at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, MA whose employer enabled her to practice telemedicine while pregnant during the pandemic

Gabrielle Caverl-McNeal
Director of Workforce Development at New Moms, an organization that partners with  young moms and their families to build strong foundations for well-being

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