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Personal and Confidential
Female FSOs and Childbearing by Patricia Linderman
Dear Personal and Confidential:
I'm a young female thinking about a career in the Foreign Service.
Worries about family are already creeping up. I have heard many stories
of FS wives being medevac'd to the U.S. (often for many months) to complete
their pregnancies and deliver their children. However, how does this work
for pregnant female FSOs?
Is there an unusually long maternity leave? Do all female FSOs deliver
at post? Do they wait for a D.C. post or just decide not to have children
at all? Does a pregnancy at post cause major problems/annoyances?
I know that this varies wildly from country to country but is it possible
to receive fertility treatment abroad and is it possible to get egg/sperm
donations?
In respect to single women who plan to become single mothers in the FS
(is there such a thing?) or homosexual FSOs who decide to become pregnant
(in both of these cases, the women would probably need to go to great
lengths to conceive), would such obviously highly planned pregnancies
reflect poorly on the FSO?
Please help!
Dear Prospective FSO and Mom:
Being a female Foreign Service Officer is quite compatible with bearing children, but it's true that there are a few complications, as you note.
If you choose to give birth in the U.S. rather than abroad, you'll face a stay of at least three months before returning to post. The airlines don't want you to fly later than 45 days before your due date, and after the birth, securing paperwork such as a Social Security number, passport, visa, medical clearance and official travel orders and airline ticket for your baby takes quite a lot of time, mainly because one step has to be completed before another begins. A female officer I know (let's call her Lynne) tells me that she took about four and a half months of leave from a posting in Eastern Europe to give birth in the U.S.
There is no special maternity leave in the Foreign Service. You must use your annual and sick leave, and then take leave without pay (LWOP) for the remaining time. Lynne reports that about half of her four-and-a-half-month maternity stay ended up being paid leave, and half LWOP. The State Department medical office (MED) will provide your ticket back to the States, to a location of your choosing, as well as per diem for up to 6 weeks before the birth and 6 weeks afterward. If you have small children, their flights are generally paid for too, but your partner is on his or her own.
Another option if you don't have much accumulated leave is to take a temporary assignment in Washington D.C. and have your baby there so that you can work for some of this time, especially during the 45-day period before the birth.
It's obviously much less complicated to give birth at post: another female FSO I know recently had a baby in Germany and was back at work two weeks later. Of course, you must make your own decision about the quality of medical care at your post and your acceptance of the risk involved. But fortunately, even relatively less-developed countries often have world-class clinics, patronized by the country's wealthy classes and sometimes offering lower-cost and friendlier care than you'd get in the States.
As you suspected, the availability of fertility treatments and egg/sperm donations will depend on the general level of medical care in the country as well as cultural factors. Most posts have a Health Unit nurse who will have this kind of information.
However, the choice made by most of the single FSOs I have known who have started families has been the one that avoids the issue of pregnancy altogether: adoption. The adoption process in many other countries is much simpler than it is in the States, and the need for adoptive parents is great in many places. A mixed-ethnic child or one with a mild birth defect (such as a cleft palate) might be hard to place with a host-country family, spending months or even years in an orphanage until someone like you comes along.
Giving birth or adopting a child will not reflect poorly on you as an FSO. Within its constraints (international moves every few years, no part-time jobs for FSOs overseas, "unaccompanied" posts where partners and children are not allowed for security reasons), the Foreign Service strives to be a family-friendly organization.
However, the organizational culture can be another matter. Lynne writes:
It is the right of the woman employee to take this leave. MED encourages it and the LWOP part is federal law. However…the employee should anticipate pressure (spoken and unspoken) from bosses and colleagues to keep the whole thing as short as possible. I just tuned it out, and made sure that my pregnancy and baby were as little of a disruption as possible to the workplace. A woman who chooses to take this leave has to understand that she may be leaving her post in a tight position. It happens all the time for a lot of different reasons, but it is just something to be aware of and sympathetic to if you have a baby while posted overseas. I never considered not taking as much leave as possible when I was expecting my baby, and looking back it really was just a blip that I was gone. But it did seem like a really big deal at the time.
After the maternity leave itself, you will continue to face a workplace environment that pressures officers to work long hours. Many jobs also require travel and/or regular attendance at receptions and other events during evenings and weekends. As the single mother of a baby or young child overseas, you would definitely need a live-in helper, probably a nanny from the host country or a third country, or perhaps a relative who is willing to live with you overseas. It's especially advantageous if this person is willing to move with you from country to country, because she will help provide continuity for your child during the upheaval of the move (while you avoid the rush and stress of arranging immediate more-than-full-time child care upon arrival in a new place).
But speaking of live-in helpers…you don't mention the prospect of finding a life partner who is willing to join you in this adventure of overseas work and family, but I hope you will not give up on the idea. Lynne notes that she is "very lucky to have Super Stay-At-Home Dad" to support her family and career. As I've noted in a previous column, the number of men (or gay women, if that's the case) who are happy to take on the role of accompanying partner and at-home parent may be limited, but they are out there. If you're looking, you might want to avoid the guy who is determined to be CEO of a big corporation or the country's greatest trial lawyer, and look instead for a more creative, contemplative type-perhaps a novelist, artist, linguist, or philosophy major? Of course, your fellow officers will also present possibilities for romance (and tandem couples have an easier time affording that live-in Mary Poppins!).
If you do choose to remain single and raise a child or children during your Foreign Service career, I encourage you to focus on developing long-term relationships for your children with your extended family and other adults and children. Children of single moms who stay in one place can easily develop long-term friendships with neighbors, aunts, uncles, grandparents, friends' parents, coaches, and other role models, while Foreign Service kids find their whole world-including all of their friends and the entire cultural environment-changing completely every few years. Regular visits to and from the same set of people can help counterbalance this instability, which of course also has its positive side: helping your children develop cross-cultural awareness, understanding, and flexibility.
I wish you all the best with your career as an FSO, if you choose to pursue it, and with your mobile family life!
-Personal and Confidential
Longtime AAFSW member Patricia Linderman is co-author of The
Expert Expatriate: Your Guide to Successful Relocation Abroad, with Melissa
Hess, and co-editor of the AAFSW book Realities
of Foreign Service Life, likewise with Ms. Hess. She is also Editor-in-Chief
of Tales from a Small Planet.