"Looking around me, my future seemed bleak," Leon wrote.
"One evening I peered into the office of a partner, a young mother, who was passed out on her desk. On a client call one evening, I listened to another partner, this one a single mother, pleading with the client to push an arbitrary deadline to the next morning, as she needed to be home by 9 p.m. to relieve her babysitter. Her pleas were briskly dismissed."
The needs of mothers in the workplace are often overlooked by employers who only value workers when they are the most productive. This causes many employers to encourage the use of abortion for working women who become pregnant. It can easily be seen by them as a "quick fix" to the lower productivity a woman might have while pregnant or caring for a child.
"This situation seemed preferable to the alternative: the partners who lived in the land of deep regret," Leon continued.
"There was the woman who kept an apartment in the city and only saw her kids on weekends. After her kids grew up, she moved across the country to where one of them lived, so she could at least be present for her grandchildren. One woman regretfully told me that she would never have kids. She worked too hard to either meet a man or to do it on her own. Another spoke about how she waited too long to have children and ended up needing numerous rounds of fertility treatments."
Leon described how she received a call from a partner at the law firm while she was experiencing spotting from her pregnancy. He wanted her to complete a letter for the firm, but she was unable to do so at that moment. The next day, Leon heard from a friend at work that the partner who called her was saying that she "flaked again for some pregnancy-related excuse."
Leon wrote,
"I had given so much of myself, my time, my sweat, my tears and my pregnancy to this man. "But the second I expected some basic human consideration, I was thrown away like a dirty diaper. If I couldn’t give them everything, I was nothing. I had fallen into the stereotype of a woman whose priorities had shifted and my baby hadn’t even been born.I knew there was no choice. I had to leave."
Leon ended her piece by pointing out that her mother, who was also a lawyer, similarly felt the need to quit her job after Leon was born. According to her, very little has changed in those 35 years.
