John Oliver just had this segment a few days ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIhKAQX5izw
If paid maternity/paternity leave is important to you, you should work for a company that offers it. If you can't get hired at one of those companies, you should save enough money to cover your unpaid FMLA leave or be able to live off your partner's income. Failing that, take care not to create another human. Why is that last part so difficult?
Because most birth control doesn't work reliably even when used correctly.
I know too many people who have gotten knocked up using Depo-Provera, the Pill, a diaphragm, condoms, and sometimes two or three different methods at once. Even when used correctly, those things have a failure rate. The IUD is the most reliable of all, but many insurance companies won't cover it. When it comes to female reproductive health, therefore doctors frequently refuse to give you access to anything not covered by insurance, even if you pay out of your own pocket.
(This is routine with many medicines relevant to women: if your particular insurance policy won't cover a treatment, or if most policies don't, women's health clinics generally refuse to provide medicine or tests for female related problems at all, even if you are a cash customer. For whatever reason, the same standard never seems to apply for elective surgeries like face lifts or boob jobs... just the things that are related to our reproductive organs. If you don't believe me, call around trying to get a Gardasil vaccine for a 30-year-old female who doesn't want cervical cancer.)
The much-touted "abstinence" concept, so well beloved by reactionaries, has a failure rate too. You see, it's possible to get Mickey Finned, outnumbered, attacked from behind, or just plain overpowered. Females don't always get to decide whether they have sex. Sometimes, when a woman is in a relationship, if she wants to have a place to sleep at night she simply has to put out regardless of whether she wants to. This is a fact of life: sometimes you have to go along to get along. Hopefully the birth control doesn't fail... but sometimes it does. Chemical birth control, in particular, is an inexact science.
There are further consequences when birth control fails, at least in the United States. Abortions are being restricted more and more aggressively by all levels of government, and morning-after drugs are becoming difficult or even impossible to come by. In fact, women who are suffering miscarriages are often unable to fill their prescriptions at pharmacies: pharmacists now have a religious entitlement to deny these women service, because the medicine that helps speed up a miscarriage and avoid sepsis is sometimes used to help induce an early abortion. In a small town with a lot of religious people feeling a yen to go into pharmacy, sepsis is pretty much mandatory. If your child is stillborn and you can't get to a hospital in time, you run the risk of being charged with, and convicted of, some combination of feticide, murder, or child abuse.
In a perfect world, a person could get driven to the hospital, or cared for, by a partner. But there isn't always one in the picture. Just because you're pregnant doesn't mean that the person who put you in that condition can necessarily be persuaded to help pay for an abortion, much less child care. Sometimes they can't even be found or picked out of a lineup, which is probably just as well: if you carry the child to term, the father has rights regardless of how the child was conceived or whether the father was tried, convicted, and incarcerated for it. In fact, if you succumb to social pressure to carry the child to term and keep it, you may have just given an abuser or rapist a lifelong invitation into your life.
Only a complete imbecile would want to be pregnant, or risk pregnancy, unless she actually wanted children.
Having noticed which way the country was going, I paid through the nose for a tubal ligation when I was 24. Two of my friends talked doctors into performing hysterectomies on them at about the same age. But that kind of surgery is out of reach for many women. It's not just for financial reasons: doctors routinely refuse to perform sterilization surgery on women who aren't already married and burdened with children. Vasectomies are available to single, child-free men who want them, but there's a double standard when it comes to tubal ligations for women of the same age, marital status, and reproductive status. It's because of a pervasive myth that women are too stupid to understand whether they want to give birth. This means that, for most women in the USA, pregnancy is pretty much inevitable sooner or later.