It’s not right that where you live in this city determines how you’re able to care for your family. We are the nation’s capital. We should be leading the way.

More than most, Amazon has been on the cutting edge. The retail behemoth not only offers a generous paid parental leave policy for both moms and dads, it also helps parents ramp back up after being out and even pays for its employees’ spouses who do not work at the company to take time off.

The push for paid parental, family, and medical leave is gaining traction. But legislative action in Congress is still iffy and could easily be eclipsed by events or partisan rancor over the next year.

Unlike many parents, [Brent Wright] and his spouse faced some unique challenges. Because both are men, neither parent had access to a paid maternity leave policy. Because they adopted, their time away from the office began with travel to a nearby city to meet the birth mother.

[Sen. Kirsten] Gillibrand has introduced the [FAMILY Act] twice before, but supporters are hopeful that this time will be different because support for paid leave appears to be growing.

Washington’s [state Senator Joe] Fain said when the Legislature looked at who had access to paid leave in the state and who did not, and which employers were able to offer the benefit and which were not, it was a “stark picture.”

When filmmaker Ky Dickens learned she was about to become a mother, her doctor advised her that she would need at least 12 weeks of maternity leave to heal after giving birth to her daughter.

With a wide gap between the have’s and have-nots, conservatives and liberals agree that expanding paid family leave to all is crucial to the workplace.

With America being one of only four countries without guaranteed paid leave, many are left vulnerable to their employer’s leave policy. If you’re a part-time or retail worker, that’s likely to be less than generous—if it exists at all.

If corporations want Millennials to apply for and stay in jobs while having kids, an ideal leave policy would grant parental leave to all employees welcoming a child.

If they work for a company with fewer than 50 workers, their bosses are under no obligation to continue to pay their health care benefits during their absence or give them their jobs back when they return.

Glacially, at a pace slower than the melting of the ice caps, we are moving toward an acceptance that fathers deserve to spend precious time with their newborn children.

“Here’s a very American masculine institution of baseball that is communicating that babies are men’s work as well as women’s work, and we need to support them becoming a father,” says Claire M. Kamp Dush, an associate professor of family science at The Ohio State University.

To address these inequities, we need a broad menu of solutions that addresses income and wealth. On the income side, that means pushing for pay equity, affordable childcare and paid family leave.

“Family lives have changed dramatically in recent decades but our policies have remained frozen in a Leave-it-to-Beaver 1950s world which no longer exists,” said Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara).

The United States is one of the only industrialized nations that does not offer paid leave to new parents. This flies in the face of extensive, long-standing research on the importance of the first thousand days of life.

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg discusses paid family and medical leave during an interview with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang.

Senator Angus King is standing with local business owners and showing his support for new paid family and medical leave legislation.

No matter what strides individual working mothers make, the country’s lack of a paid family leave policy remains a burden to women and parents, in ways both big and small.

Because FMLA leave is unpaid and only applies to some workers, many others are still forced to make the difficult decision between being there for loved ones or returning to work out of financial necessity.