Trending:
Sen. Mallory McMorrow is reflecting on the tricky tightrope she walked while balancing her job as a legislator with her pregnancy during the pandemic.
In an exclusive excerpt from her new book Hate Won’t Win: Find Your Power and Leave This Place Better Than You Found It, which was released on Tuesday, March 25, from Hachette Book Group, McMorrow delves into what is was like to be a senator during a time when the Michigan state legislature (like many governments) required in-person sessions even as the rest of the world was in lockdown.
The excerpt is just one part of McMorrow’s political journey, which she details in her book. She previously told PEOPLE that her hope is for her story to inspire others to advocate for positive change in their own communities.
“This book is the culmination of it all — how I got here, what I’ve learned and a step-by-step guide for anyone on how to find your own voice, find your people, get involved and make real change to create the communities and the future we want to see,” she previously said.
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
Read on for an excerpt from Hate Won’t Win: Find Your Power and Leave This Place Better Than You Found It below.
I would become only the second sitting senator in Michigan history to give birth while in office. The first was Senator Stephanie Chang, and that “first” wasn’t exactly some well-established precedent. It had happened just one year prior when Stephanie gave birth to her second daughter after winning election to the state senate the same year I had. She and her husband had timed both of their pregnancies to coincide with legislative session breaks, ensuring Stephanie would be able to take leave time after birth without missing votes.
I, on the other hand, had not made such a plan, not entirely sure how easy or hard it would be to get pregnant once we started trying. My due date was January 21, 2021, just days after the start of session and a full ten weeks before the first legislative break.
Being a pregnant legislator presented challenges unique to the job. As the rest of the world had pivoted to remote work in any professions in which working remotely was possible, our state legislature, like many governments, still required in-person participation. This requirement was not out of necessity — with modern technology it is, of course, possible to hold committee hearings and cast votes via video conference and encrypted systems. But, because of a stubborn adherence to the way things had always been done — a stubbornness led largely by older men traditionally holding these positions — remote work was not allowed, and any missed vote or committee hearing would be marked and available publicly. The Capitol was also almost one hundred miles away from our house, not exactly a quick commute for someone with a newborn who would require constant rotations of sleeping, eating, and being changed just about every hour around the clock.
At the outset of 2020, Governor Whitmer announced that her administration would guarantee twelve weeks of paid family leave to all state employees. While that might seem like auspicious timing for our new pregnancy, state legislators are technically not state employees, and as such, had no official leave policy to follow. Despite the IRS viewing us as employed by the state of Michigan, legislators exist in a strange space outside of the standard classifications of other state employees. We are bound by our own rules — yes, we oversee ourselves — and our bosses, in a sense, are the voters who elect us. The thinking is: Do a good job, the voters will keep you. Do a poor job, they’ll find your replacement. Govern yourself accordingly.
As it turns out, you, dear reader, wield a vast amount of power and influence over what happens to these people and, by proxy, their families. Consider that next time you flirt with the idea that voting doesn’t matter. This stubborn in-person government-work conundrum wasn’t just my issue, it turns out, but also a national security threat.
A few months earlier, as COVID-19 swept through the nation and shut down schools, governments, businesses, restaurants, offices, and just about every aspect of our normal daily lives, Norm Ornstein penned a piece for The Atlantic titled “Congress Desperately Needs a Contingency Plan” (Ornstein 2020). Ornstein recounted the five-alarm fire raised by the systemic weakness of our system of United States government following the 9/11 terrorist attacks: because the rules of Congress required members to be present in person, it left open the horrifying possibility that a terrorist attack, cyberattack, or other such mass disruption event could render the government unable to function, therefore unable to respond to those same emergencies. It turns out this stubborn adherence to tradition created a vulnerable target for terrorists and bad actors by handing them a (completely preventable) surefire way to render the US Congress inoperable.
Ornstein detailed the extensive work that went into developing contingency plans for Congress to adopt to ensure continuity throughout the three branches of government, to prepare not only for potential acts of terrorism, but for other mass disruption events such as natural disasters and, yes, pandemics.
He felt compelled to raise the alarm again, in March of 2020, because (and given how laughably ineffective Congress is, this will not surprise you) the plan and its recommendations were never adopted. Nearly twenty years later, Congress was just as exposed in the throes of COVID-19 as it was in the days after 9/11.
The same was true of state governments around the country. At the out-set of the pandemic, one of Michigan’s House representatives, Isaac Robinson, died from the virus. By the end of that first year, the work of the legislature was all but ground to a halt as positive cases of COVID-19 swept through the chamber every time we’d reconvene. Prior to the release of vaccines nearly a full year after the initial outbreak, legislative leadership left themselves no choice but to cancel session and committees.
While many jobs — such as those in manufacturing, construction, retail/grocery, healthcare, or the service industry — couldn’t be executed from behind a computer screen at home, ours could, if not for a refusal to adopt any measures to allow for remote work. Given that our travel from every corner of the state to the Capitol and back created a hotbed of germ transmission, one journalist called the Michigan Capitol “the most dangerous workplace in the state,” and an occupational hazard complaint was filed by a number of House staffers with the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration (MIOSHA) over leadership’s refusal to adopt public health officials’ workplace safety protocols (Oosting 2020).
In this moment, at my job, it seemed like quite possibly the worst time to get pregnant.
Excerpted from Hate Won’t Win: Find Your Power and Leave This Place Better Than You Found It by Mallory McMorrow. Copyright © 2025 Mallory McMorrow. Used with permission of Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. New York, NY. All rights reserved.
Hate Won’t Win: Find Your Power and Leave This Place Better Than You Found It is available now, wherever books are sold.
Read the full article here
