Maya Warren sat in a hospital bed, clutching her stomach. Through the contractions, she tried to focus on the baby. But she thought instead of her bank account.


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“Hand me my backpack,” Warren told her mother, crouched at her bedside. Earlier that November day, she had paid a dollar for a scratch-off card, worth up to $777. Now she scraped away the silver.

“Oh, damn it,” Warren said, wiping sweat from her forehead. “I didn’t win.”

“How you gonna be in labor and scratch on a scratch-off?” her mother teased.

Warren laughed, blinking back tears.

She wasn’t supposed to give birth to her first child with no money. She had held the same full-time job in Washington for five years, living paycheck to paycheck. She’d wanted to stash away some financial cushion, and now . . .

“We needed that,” she said, flinging away the worthless card. “We needed that.”

Like an estimated quarter of working mothers in the United States, Warren will return to work less than two weeks after childbirth, whether she’s ready or not.