Marlon White was standing beside his wife, Farra Lanzer-White, as she gave birth to their daughter Olivia at 29 weeks when her hand went slack and she lost consciousness. The baby, weighing about 2 pounds, was rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit without making a sound. Terrified, White waited in the hall while doctors stabilized both his newborn and his wife. The next day, he was back at work as a welder.
Two days later, Lanzer-White was also back on the job, setting up a workstation at the Denver hospital. For two months she kept up with emails and meetings as alarms sounded each time Olivia stopped breathing and as she herself prepared for open-heart surgery for a condition discovered during her pregnancy.
The Fort Collins, Colorado couple made a choice familiar to many parents with newborns in intensive care: keep working to preserve whatever parental leave they had for when the baby came home. They are now part of a growing movement pushing for dedicated NICU leave policies across the country.
In January, seven months after Olivia’s birth, Colorado became the first U.S. state to adopt paid NICU leave, offering up to 12 weeks for parents with newborns in intensive care on top of the 12 weeks of parental leave already available under the state’s family and medical leave program. Next month, Illinois will implement a more modest policy guaranteeing between 10 and 20 days of unpaid leave to NICU parents.
Advocates are now focused on building support for a federal bill that would add NICU leave to the Family and Medical Leave Act, the 1993 law that entitles eligible workers nationwide to unpaid leave for family and medical reasons, said Inimai Chettiar, president of A Better Balance, a nonprofit that advocates for paid leave and other workplace policies supporting families.
“We think it’s promising in terms of bipartisan support, because as we’ve approached people, it seems that they intuitively understand it,” Chettiar said.
U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen, a Colorado Democrat drafting the federal legislation, said it would offer up to 12 weeks of NICU leave on top of the 12 weeks of parental leave available under the FMLA. The United States has no federal law mandating paid family or parental leave, an issue that has long divided the two major parties.
The state-level bills that passed in Colorado and Illinois offer mixed signals about the potential for bipartisanship. Colorado’s paid leave passed mostly along party lines, while Illinois’s shorter, unpaid measure had overwhelming bipartisan support.
Several Republican lawmakers in Illinois became co-sponsors of the NICU bill, including state Rep. Nicole La Ha, whose daughter spent 45 days in the NICU in 2017 after La Ha’s water broke at nearly 30 weeks.
“Unless you have had this experience, you can’t fully understand why something like this is so meaningful,” La Ha said. “You have an infant who is struggling to eat and breathe. The last thing you want to think about is work but unfortunately you have bills to pay.”
Colorado State Sen. Jeff Bridges, who introduced his state’s bill a year after his son Kit was born two months early and weighing 2 pounds, said the opposition was muted.
“It was the quietest opposition you could hear,” Bridges said, with few Republican lawmakers or business groups publicly speaking against it. “I wanted to share stories that were so moving that the lobbyists would look like monsters if they opposed it.”
Nearly one out of every 10 babies born in the U.S. is admitted to a NICU, according to the most recent CDC figures. While in intensive care, newborns are learning to swallow, breathe independently, and regulate their body temperature, said Dr. Karen Puopolo, section chief for Newborn Medicine at Pennsylvania Hospital and chair of the Committee on Fetus and Newborns of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Parental presence has a “multitude of advantages both ways,” Puopolo said. Skin-to-skin contact slows a baby’s heartbeat, improves breathing, and helps the mother with milk production.
In recent years, a handful of companies — including Morgan Stanley, Pinterest, and the organic baby formula company Bobbie — have adopted dedicated paid NICU leave. Others have extended parental leave or added caregiving policies that could also assist NICU parents. But the issue has largely remained a blind spot in public policy, said Sahra Cahoon, executive director of Love for Lily, a Colorado-based organization that supports NICU families and advocated for the state’s new law.
Cahoon launched the organization after her daughter Lily, born at 24 weeks and five days, died after three-and-a-half months in the NICU. Cahoon, who owned a jewelry-making business at the time, said she worked through her daughter’s hospitalization believing Lily would survive.
“It’s probably one of my biggest regrets,” Cahoon said.
Since Colorado’s policy took effect in January, nearly 800 people have applied for neonatal care leave, according to Tracy Marshall, director of Colorado’s Family and Medical Leave Insurance Division.
Among the first applicants were Chris and Stevie Madden, whose son Roczen was born almost eight weeks early on Jan. 11. Stevie Madden, a mental health professional rushed to the hospital after her blood pressure spiked and she began bleeding, said she panicked when she realized she had planned to start her maternity leave much later. A nurse told Chris Madden, an oil field mechanic, about the new NICU leave, which they both applied for.
“It was life changing not to have to think about money and stress and just be present with your baby,” Chris Madden said. He told every parent he met at the hospital about the program.
The push for federal legislation continues as advocates work to bring NICU leave into the broader conversation around parental leave policy. For parents like Rebeca Herrera-Moreno, whose son Nico was born at 32 weeks in 2020 and spent three weeks in the NICU, the memory of working through those weeks remains vivid. Her husband, Martin Moreno, a health director for a labor union, said he was consumed with his job as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the country. To this day, his most vivid memory of the period is not of his son in the NICU but of a hand-washing video he helped produce for workers.
“I wish I would have had more preparation with the medical staff to really feel like I had everything set,” Moreno said. “And that’s speaking to the medical piece of it — not even addressing being absent for Becky during so much of this.”