The Pill Turns 50

The Washington Post has an article today celebrating the 50th anniversary of the advent of the most famous form of birth control: The Pill. The conclusion of the article got my attention:

"But there is a bitter irony in the fact that the same pill that gave mothers the ability to combine childbearing and a career by controlling fertility has also led many women to delay childbearing so long that they jeopardize that fertility. Contraception makes it possible to postpone motherhood, but it doesn't solve the problem of how to combine caring for children with going to work. As a result, many women wait to have a child until they are financially secure enough to afford child care.

In some sense, the pill let employers and the government off the hook by giving women the means to juggle jobs and families. Sanger and Katharine McCormick hoped that the pill would allow women to control their lives, but they did not count on women being stuck with such hard choices. For while mothers' lives have changed over the past 50 years, the work world has lagged behind: Most jobs are still 9 to 5 -- or longer -- leaving little time to care for children. The cost of child care is, for many women, ruinously high. Paid parental leave is still too rare, and where it exists, usually too brief. For the most part, it is women who, aided by the pill, have adjusted to the demands of the workforce, rather than the other way around.

The pill may have been a gift to mothers. But 50 years on, it could use some new accessories. This Mother's Day, instead of jewelry, candy or flowers, how about some more novel presents: lengthy paid parental leaves, government-supported child care and flex-time."

Question: how are parental leave changes, subsidized child care or flex time going to fix the problem described?

Answer: they aren't. Such changes to benefits are only addressing the symptoms of the problem. These benefits are exactly the same as The Pill in the one sense she delineated earlier: they "let employers and the government off the hook by giving women the means to juggle jobs and families."

Which leads me to the second question: what is the real root issue here? (I have my hunches, but I'd love to know what you think!)