Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato didn’t want to announce her pregnancy right away. She turned 40 this year, which makes her pregnancy higher risk.
She didn’t experience morning sickness but she was tired during the first trimester. Between big events at the NFL Draft, she snuck away for naps.
“What surprised me most about pregnancy was not necessarily the physical changes, but the mental load that you have as a pregnant woman walking around in the world where you know you’re pregnant but really no one else does,” she said.
Three weeks after the draft, Innamorato announced a proposal that would establish 18 weeks of paid parental leave for everyone who is employed within Allegheny County. If passed, it would be one of the most generous in the country.
In mid-July, about 20 weeks into the pregnancy, she had an ultrasound that showed a healthy baby. Innamorato decided to break the news during her quarterly address to County Council on July 14 and make it part of her efforts to persuade more people.
“I will be so disappointed in myself as the first county executive who will give birth in office to not be able to provide parental leave for other families who are struggling every day and just want that time to recover and to bond and to build their family,” she told council.
The good news didn’t dampen fierce public debate about the proposal. It received more than 1,400 submitted comments, a majority of them positive, but including 400 staunchly opposed and around 150 seeking changes before they could support it, according to an analysis by Pittsburgh’s Public Source.
The fierceness of the opposition, even if it is just a vocal minority, suggests that Innamorato may need to make changes to the proposal to get something passed. Doing so could require some difficult choices about which workers get left out to reduce the costs.
The high visibility of Innamorato’s pregnancy and the parental leave proposal could now come to define her first term, as she pushes the boundaries of what kinds of progressive policies are possible. But if some version of the policy passes, it could give her a signature issue — to go along with a portable new campaign companion due in November — as she begins her 2027 reelection bid.
“I’m going to have one child and my partner has three. Yeah, I’m going to continue to run for this role.”
Allegheny COunty executive Sara innamorato
And the implications may expand well beyond Allegheny County’s borders. This kind of proposal could catch on, said Chris Borick, a professor of political science at Lehigh University. Local leaders tend to borrow ideas from each other, he said. And parental leave is popular enough that it could catch on in cities like Memphis, Houston or Kansas City, where liberal leaders have to contend with conservative state legislatures.
“You have some very blue islands in some very red political seas,” Borick said. “And those islands, they’ll be watching.”
A local proposal with national implications
Innamorato’s support for parental leave is not new. She pushed for a paid leave proposal in Harrisburg as far back as 2019. In 2024, she said she implemented a 12-week parental leave proposal now in place for the roughly 6,000 county employees. “We had to walk the walk first as an employer,” she said. “And we actually had no universal paid leave policy.”
Innamorato has seen parental leave proposals wither in Harrisburg and get tossed aside in Washington and she thinks that’s one of the reasons many people are so disillusioned with politics. “We have these wildly popular programs like parental leave that the nation wants Congress to take up, but they do not,” she said. “And so that erodes trust in the long term.”
But there is no precedent for what Innamorato’s Health Department has proposed — a county requiring businesses to pay for parental leave by themselves. There are 14 states and Washington, D.C., that have mandated paid leave, but they all have legislatures that were controlled by Democrats. Pennsylvania’s legislature, by contrast, is divided. And the county isn’t allowed to institute a payroll tax to pay for parental leave, as states have.
The novelty of this policy idea is a product of Innamorato’s political calculus: She believes voters want politicians who will find a way rather than make excuses. “You can come up with a million reasons why you shouldn’t do something. But as Democrats, as progressives, we need to think about how we can move what is popular amongst the communities that we represent and do it in a way that builds a coalition that allows it to become reality,” she said.
Samuel Chen, a Republican strategist in Pennsylvania, doesn’t think every form of parental leave is as popular as Democrats suggest. Typically, Chen said, progressives try to fund their proposals with taxes on millionaires and billionaires, which can be popular. But Innamorato’s version of parental leave could backfire, he said, because it is asking so much of small business owners who make up a large voting block in Allegheny County. “Republicans are going to jump all over this,” he said.
“The challenge that this wave of progressive office holders has is not that their policy agendas are too progressive or too radical for the electorate, it’s that they’re hard to get done.”
Jake Pawlak, former deputy mayor of Pittsburgh
But if a more moderate version of the policy passes, Chen said he could see some Republicans trying to pass parental leave policies. “I think you’re going to see a lot of other cities think about trying this,” he said. “They’re going to see there’s an opportunity to not have to wait for their state or for the country to act.”
The biggest risk Innamorato faces is not pushing for a policy that is too progressive for voters, but failing to pass any policy at all, according to Jake Pawlak, the former deputy mayor of Pittsburgh. “To me, the challenge that this wave of progressive office holders has is not that their policy agendas are too progressive or too radical for the electorate,” he said. “it’s that they’re hard to get done.”
Last year, Pawlak’s former boss suffered the first electoral loss of what had previously been a steady rise of progressive politicians in Allegheny County. “Mayor Gainey’s loss had a lot more to do with the challenges we ran into in executing on his policy agenda than they did that agenda being too aggressive,” said Pawlak, now the Pittsburgh-based director of strategic policy initiatives at the Keystone Research Center.
“Republicans are going to jump all over this.”
Samuel Chen, Republican strategist
So the biggest challenge for Innamorato now is to get at least eight members of the county council to vote for some version of the policy, Pawlak said. “Then that is what her re-election campaign gets to talk about, which is the achievement of this historic reform.”
County Council has scheduled a public hearing on the proposal on Thursday, even though it hasn’t yet passed the Board of Health, whose vote comes first.
Progressive tradeoffs and pragmatic vision
Innamorato has been clear that the Board of Health’s initial proposal would likely require “edits” and that they still had to “work out the details.”
But the outcry from local business leaders, nonprofits, educators and many others who have to make their books balance, has made it increasingly likely that changes to the initial proposal could be substantial. “How do we get a policy that strikes a balance between the economic impact and the public health impact?” she said.
Because this was the first parental leave policy brought under a public health framework, Pawlak said, it made sense that it was more generous and universal than state policies. “The people who are or don’t have access to leave now are more likely to be lower income,” Pawlak said. “They are also the ones who are more likely to bear the individual and public health consequences of the lack of leave.”
This puts Innamorato’s administration in a bind: The more trade-offs she makes — exceptions for small businesses, a longer period to become eligible, fewer weeks of leave — the more vulnerable people will be left out. Low-income workers fill many of the jobs that small businesses hire; and low-income workers will be less likely to take time if the generosity of the pay is reduced. “A 50% or even 20% reduction in your wages or income means a lot more to someone who’s living paycheck to paycheck than someone who is comfortable and has savings,” Pawlak said.
Dan Grzybek, a county councilor from Bethel Park, said on Facebook that he supports parental leave in principle but doesn’t think small businesses and nonprofits can afford what is currently proposed. So he’s asked Innamorato’s administration to consider exemptions for small businesses and a requirement that employees work for more than 30 days before they are eligible. “The goal here is to get families this benefit while making sure we don’t unintentionally hurt the small employers who are the backbone of our communities,” he wrote.
Innamorato is listening to ideas from businesses about how to modify the policy, but not ones that want to scrap it, she said. “If you’re a business and you support the concept, but you’re worried about the implementation and the cost, we can work from that because we fundamentally agree that new parents deserve that time to heal and to bond.”
At the end of the day, she said, the policy that will come before the Board of Health will “still be generous, it will still be data-backed and it will also take into consideration the realities that businesses are facing,” she said. “That’s what governing is: It’s constantly taking these multiple competing interests and saying how do we actually come up with a path forward where maybe everyone loses a little bit, but overall as a society we win.”
A young woman vs. the old boys
Being a young woman was central to Innamorato’s political identity when she first took on the old boys club of Allegheny County politics and unseated state Rep. Dom Costa in 2018. She ascended amid a wave of female anger during the first Trump administration, which led many women in Pittsburgh’s northern suburbs, like Ross Township in her district, to shift their support to Democrats.
She joked with Congresswoman Summer Lee, who also won a seat to the state House that year, that they had achieved “white men named Dan” parity. Allegheny County’s state-house delegation at the time included only men, two of whom were named Dan.
Then, in 2023 she narrowly beat a moderate Republican to become the first female county executive, in part by highlighting her support for abortion rights the year after Roe v Wade was overturned.
“She was able to appeal outside of her base of typically younger and more progressive or left-wing voters into a broader swath of the electorate — through women,” according to Pawlak. Moderate women supported her, in part, because they wanted to see a woman hold the office, Pawlak said.
Now her identity and ideology are converging. The parental leave policy could receive a vote at the Board of Health’s November meeting — the same month she is due to deliver.
Moms in charge
Innamorato has begun looking for daycares near her Downtown office, so she can walk over to breastfeed. She said she’s been asked whether she’s going to run for reelection next year – a question, she said, men in her position have not been asked. She has responded by noting predecessor Rich Fitzgerald’s eight kids. “I’m going to have one child and my partner has three,’” she said. “Yeah, I’m going to continue to run for this role.”
Innamorato’s pregnancy is part of a larger life change. Last year, she moved away from Lawrenceville, where she had lived for more than 15 years, to a suburb. Most of her friends have kids now and she doesn’t go out as often, allowing her to establish a consistent 9 p.m. bedtime.
Having a child fits her life now, she said, and it’s something she’s always wanted. When Innamorato’s mom asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she said she would tell her mom, “a mother.”
“When you’re a child, who’s in charge? Who’s running the household? Who’s managing the schedule? Who’s setting the roles? It’s the mom,” she said. “I actually think I just wanted to be in charge.”
Innamorato’s pregnancy has given her a new appreciation for her mother’s resilience. When Innamorato was a teenager, her mother moved her and her sister away from their father, who was struggling with opioid addiction. Despite having no savings and not having worked full time for years, she took adult education classes, worked multiple jobs and supported the family through frequent moves.
“We struggled with the destabilizing effects of having a parent who was struggling with addiction,” Innamorato said. But she never “felt like I went without,” and her mother “never gave up despite having everything stacked against her.”
Innamorato said the work her mother did raising her deserves as much respect and support as the work of any Pittsburgher in a hard hat. In the end, the county’s paid parental leave policy may not reach every parent in circumstances like her mother’s. But Innamorato sees it as one way government can recognize caregiving as work worthy of public support.
“When we sign up, whether it’s to be a parent or whether it’s to lead a county of 1.25 million people, it’s what I have to do: Every day you get up, you figure it out, you surround yourself with good people … and you just keep moving,” she said. “That’s the character of Pittsburgh, of this Rust Belt, Appalachian-like work ethic of just we got to get up and we got to keep going because there’s no other choice.”
Oliver Morrison is the health and environment reporter at Pittsburgh’s Public Source and can be reached at oliver@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Rich Lord.
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