You're blaming the wrong person for your woes. If your employer decides to redistribute the new parent's workload amongst existing staff without compensation rather than hire maternity cover then they are the problem.

Society needs no children! Only workers! Hustle is good, life is bad!

Yeah, it's awesome for the society and leads to increased health, happiness and workers who enjoy working for their employer.

/Swede

The stupidest take I have read today, and I even read OP comment here too.

Yeah, why encourage people to have more children when you can instead have other countries pay for them and we pick and choose the best to lure in as immigrants?

medical leave is quite the concept, you choose to get a surgery, so the company then needs to cover your responsibilities by assigning your duties and tasks to other workers, increasing their work load, so you can stay home and recover, and at the end of that leave, you, the worker whose been forced to increase your workload, gets no additional compensation or paid leave, but should simply enjoy having been a small unpaid part of others medical care, while the company still makes as much profit, and pays as many bonuses to their management as they always have. sure, sounds fair.

Ideally a temp would fill the position while the parent is on leave. At least that's how my company handled it recently. We still couldn't wait for our coworker to come back because she was really good at her job, but the work got done regardless of any hiccups due to the temp learning her position.

I don't have kids by choice, so this has zero effect on me, but parental leave is kinda important and companies that shove the workload onto everyone else is what causes this resentment.