2026

NEW YORK (AP) — Moments after his daughter Olivia was born, Marlon White felt his wife’s hand slacken as she fainted. The baby, born at 29 weeks weighing about 2 pounds, wasn’t making a sound as she was rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit. Terrified, he waited in the hall while the doctors stabilized his newborn and wife.

The next day, White, a welder, was back at work. Two days later, his wife, Farra Lanzer-White, was also back on the job, setting up a work station at the Denver hospital. For two months, first at one hospital then another, she kept up with emails and meetings as alarm bells went off each time Olivia stopped breathing, as she herself prepared for open-heart surgery for a condition discovered during her difficult pregnancy.

The Fort Collins, Colorado couple made a choice familiar to many parents with newborns in intensive care: Keep working while the baby is in the NICU to save any parental leave they might have for when the baby comes home. They are now part of a growing movement advocating for the adoption of NICU leave in the country’s patchwork of family leave policies, which differ between states, cities and companies.

In January, seven months after Olivia was born, 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 under the state’s family and medical leave program. A more modest policy will take effect next month in Illinois, guaranteeing between 10 and 20 days of unpaid leave to NICU parents.

While advocates want more states to adopt NICU leave, a major focus now is galvanizing support for a federal bill to add NICU leave to the Family and Medical Leave Act, the 1993 law that entitles eligible workers nationwide to take 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 in support of families.

“We think it’s promising in terms of bipartisan support, because as we’ve approached people, it seems that they intuitively understand it,” said Chettiar.

U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen, a Colorado Democrat who is drafting the federal bill 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 U.S. has no federal law mandating paid family or parental leave, an issue that has long divided Democrats and Republicans. While FMLA leaves out many workers who can’t afford to take unpaid leave, Pettersen said the goal is to win bipartisan support for the idea of NICU leave and bring it to the forefront of discussions surrounding parental leave.

The NICU leave bills passed in Colorado and Illinois offer mixed signals about the potential for bipartisanship. Colorado’s paid leave passed mostly along party lines, while the shorter, unpaid leave adopted in Illinois had overwhelming bipartisan support.

Unlike Colorado, Illinois does not already have a paid family leave program in which it could incorporate NICU leave, said Illinois state Rep. Laura Faver Dias, a Democrat who introduced the bill and whose twin boys were born at 27 weeks in 2014 and stayed intensive care for three months.

Several Republican lawmakers became co-sponsors, including state Rep. Nicole La Ha, whose daughter spent 45 days in the NICU in 2017 after her water broke at almost 30 weeks.

“Unless you have had this experience, you can’t fully understand why something like this is so meaningful,” said La Ha. “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.”

While Colorado’s bill lacked bipartisan support, Colorado State Sen. Jeff Bridges said “it was the quietest opposition you could hear,” with few Republicans or business groups publicly speaking against it. Bridges introduced the bill a year after his son Kit was born two months early and weighing just 2 pounds.

“I wanted to share stories that were so moving that the lobbyists would look like monsters if they opposed it,” Bridges said.

Nearly one out of 10 babies born in the U.S. are admitted to a NICU, according to the most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While in the NICU, newborns are still learning to swallow, breath on their own 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 down the baby’s heart beat, improves their breathing and helps the mother with milk production.

In recent years, a smattering of companies have adopted dedicated paid NICU leave, including Morgan Stanley, Pinterest and the organic baby formula company Bobbie, while others have extended the length of parental leave or added policies like caregiving leave, which could also help NICU parents.

But mostly, the plight of NICU parents has been a blind spot, said Sahra Cahoon, executive director Love for Lily, a Colorado-based organization that supports NICU families and advocated for Colorado’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, believing her daughter would survive.

“It’s probably one of my biggest regrets,” Cahoon said, though at the time she felt lucky to be able to work remotely from the hospital and didn’t feel she could afford to give up her income. “We did not know that our story was going to end that way.”

When Rebecca Herrera-Moreno learned about Colorado’s NICU leave law last year, it brought her back to her son’s time in the NICU six years earlier and she decided to leap into advocacy for a similar provision in her home state of California.

When her son Nico was born at 32 weeks in 2020, Herrera-Moreno was already on disability leave, having entered preterm labor weeks earlier. Her husband, Martin Moreno, was entitled to six weeks of paid parental leave under California law at the time, but they decided he would save that time for when Nico could come home, which ended up being three weeks later.

She struggled to enjoy moments with her tiny son while holding him surrounded by machines, monitors and nurses. She would say “I love you” every day before leaving him while guilt swelled inside her that she hadn’t developed that feeling yet. Weeks later at home, she opened to up to her husband, Martin Moreno, who confessed that he had felt the same way.

Moreno, a health director for a labor union, said he was consumed at the time with his job, which suddenly intensified as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the country. To this day, his most vivid memory of the period isn’t with his son in the NICU, but of a video he helped produce to show workers how to properly wash their hands.

When he came home, he felt unprepared to care for Nico, who had to be fed on his side to prevent choking. He had been oblivious to his wife’s emotional turmoil.

“I wish I would have had more preparation with the medical staff to really feel like I had everything set. And that’s speaking to the medical piece of it — not even addressing being absent for Becky during so much of this,” Moreno said.

Nearly 800 people have applied for neonatal care leave since Colorado’s policy took effect in January, according to Tracy Marshall, director of Colorado’s Family and Medical Leave Insurance Division.

Among the first were Chris and Stevie Madden, whose son was born almost eight weeks early on Jan. 11.

Stevie Madden, a mental health professional who had been rushed to the hospital after her blood pressure spiked and she began bleeding, said she panicked about how to handle the crisis and work when she realized she had planned to start her maternity leave much later.

A nurse at the hospital, however, told Chris Madden about the new NICU leave, which they both applied for.

Madden, an oil field mechanic, said he wouldn’t have been able to keep him mind on his risky job while his son was fighting for his life. He said he learned how to handle his baby’s delicate skin — press gently, don’t rub — and gained the confidence he needed when Roczen stopped breathing once after returning home and had to be rushed the hospital.

He told every parent he met at hospital about NICU leave.

“It was life changing not to have to think about money and stress and just be present with your baby,” Madden said.

_____

The Associated Press’ women in the workforce coverage receives financial support from Pivotal Ventures. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

source

WAIALUA, Hawaii (AP) — The reddish-brown mud that smothered Bok Kongphan’s Hawaii farm has hardened in the tropical sun. Irrigation tubes lie in a tangle where his lemongrass, cucumber and okra once flourished.

His niece, Jeni Balanay, lost her crops too — a mustardy green called choy sum, bitter melon, tomato. The leaves of her recently planted banana, coconut and mango have gone yellow, the trees unlikely to survive.

Across Oahu’s North Shore, an area famed for its big-wave surfing, the small farms that help supply the island’s food are struggling after back-to-back storms in March brought the state’s worst flooding in two decades. Officials are pleading with farmers not to give up, stressing that local agriculture is crucial for the isolated archipelago.

“In some cases entire farms have been wiped out,” said Brian Miyamoto, executive director of the Hawaii Farm Bureau. “These are farmers who were just days or weeks away from harvesting and now they have to start over.”

According to data collected by farming advocates, more than 600 of Hawaii’s 6,500 farms reported nearly $40 million in damage, including to crops, livestock and machinery. But Miyamoto said the farm bureau estimates that the full extent of the destruction is much broader — $50 million at close to 2,000 farms.

For most of the late 19th and 20th centuries, plantation-style agriculture dominated Hawaii, as companies like Dole and conglomerates founded by missionary descendants grew immense fields of sugarcane or pineapple for export. The operations drew large numbers of immigrants, primarily from Asia and Portugal.

But that large-scale monoculture faded by the 1990s amid international competition, and officials began to promote smaller farms — some, like Kongphan’s, just a few acres — with a wider array of crops that could be sold to local grocery stores or at farmers markets.

Worldwide shipping disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic reinforced the importance of having a local food supply in Hawaii, and the state in recent years has offered additional support to the farms. That includes money for infrastructure, a farm-to-school program and loans for those who have been denied credit from banks.

But they still face challenges. Unlike many of their counterparts on the mainland, Hawaii farms are often too small and diversified to be able to afford or qualify for crop insurance.

Many of the farmers are immigrants who were barely eking out a living even before the storms, Miyamoto noted.

The majority of Hawaii’s farms report less than $10,000 in annual sales, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The flooding, along with high winds and power outages, killed or stressed livestock and destroyed equipment, vehicles and infrastructure.

Without insurance, Kongphan, an immigrant from Thailand, has been trying to obtain government aid and figure out how to level earth moved by the floodwaters. His niece has been helping him and other Thai farmers navigate the process. Available help includes federal disaster relief, one-time $1,500 emergency grants and long-term loans from the state, and a charitable fund that raised about $850,000 in the weeks after the floods. Many farmers also have online fundraising pages.

In an interview interpreted by Balanay, Kongphan called the floods “very devastating,” but said he will continue working the 5-acre (2-hectare) plot he’s leased for five years, growing vegetables he sells at farmers markets, a swap meet, and at shops and stalls in Honolulu’s Chinatown.

Kongphan pointed to a faint, thigh-high line on a plywood wall showing where the water reached inside his home, which he built from a shipping container. Inside, there’s now a donated tent, but he usually sleeps outside.

Flies swarmed as he carried a dirt-caked generator he hopes to salvage. Nearby sat a Toyota Yaris, covered inside and out in the same dried sludge.

Balanay, who learned farming from her mom after the family immigrated to Hawaii, isn’t sure she wants to keep at it. She recalled the torrent rising to her waist in seconds and wiping out her crops in the middle of the night.

“Will it happen again?” she asked. “When you look at the land and it’s all destroyed, you want to give up.”

The flooding is the latest crisis for Hawaii’s farmers, on top of wildfires, pests and volcanic tephra — ash and debris ejected by an erupting Big Island volcano, said the state’s top agriculture official, Sharon Hurd.

“These are the farms that we really need to get started again,” Hurd said. “We cannot have them give up.”

Officials have been conducting tests to assure farmers that their soil is safe and providing them with seeds and plant starts, she said.

Some farmers have been unable to make it to farmers markets, a key source of their income. Many who do have less to offer, Miyamoto said.

Farmer Kula Uliʻi said her family has been bringing roughly one-quarter of their usual output. Instead of 200 pounds (90.7 kilograms) of tomatoes at weekend farmers markets, they might sell 60 pounds (27.2 kilograms).

They lost starts that were due to be planted this month and face months of limited harvest, she said. She’s unsure about the status of her farm’s contracts with grocery stores, given that it can’t meet demand.

Even the taro, which thrives in water, is lost, she said, after it was submerged in the contaminants carried by the floods.

“It’s all gone,” Uliʻi said. “We can’t use any of it.”

___

Associated Press writer Audrey McAvoy in Honolulu contributed.

source