We’ve all heard lip service about mothers from our political leaders.

And yet, America’s government treats mothers like dirt.

The cruelest trick is how women have responded to a system built to fail them. Instead of righteous anger, we’ve internalized guilt.

We’re the only high-income country in the world that doesn’t require companies to offer paid maternity leave. More than 50 nations provide six months of paid leave or more. Imagine that: Six months of paid maternity leave. In the U.S., only 14 percent of workers had access to paid family leave in 2016. Even those with access to paid leave worry about how long they should take off.

One in four U.S. mothers returns to work 10 days after giving birth.

One of them is Dr. Hina Sarwar, a psychiatrist in St. Louis, who remembers her panic before her medical residency began. She was nine months pregnant, and afraid to tell the program directors for fear of losing a residency spot she had worked so hard to earn. She asked if she could delay orientation due to family issues. She was told it was mandatory.

So, she found an obstetrician willing to deliver her baby early -- at 37 weeks. She delivered via C-section. After she was released from the hospital, she and her husband packed a car and drove 17 hours from St. Louis to Lubbock, Texas with their newborn and 5-year-old child so she could start her training.

She stopped taking her pain medication in order to stay alert. Eight days after surgically giving birth, she was sitting in her orientation. Then, she was working more than 40 hours a week and racing home during her lunch breaks to nurse.

“I didn’t want to lose my spot,” she said. “It was really very painful.”

When I heard Sarwar’s experience, I was horrified. Caitlyn Collins, a sociology professor at Washington University, was unsurprised. She interviewed 135 mothers in various countries who work outside the home for her book, “Making Motherhood Work.”

Sarwar is a highly educated white-collar professional, who still feared repercussions from taking a leave available to her. The situation for women in lower-income jobs is even worse, Collins said. But Sarwar’s experience reveals a cultural attitude that must also change.

Collins found a relationship between family leave policies in other countries and societal attitudes about parenting and work. In countries with robust paid family leave protections, time with one’s child is seen as a right rather than an obligation or privilege. There’s a cultural understanding -- backed by the protection of law -- that it’s good for mothers to be home after they give birth to a child.

Countries like Sweden have developed policies that have incentivized men into taking time off to care for their children. The cultural understanding is that men and women participate equally in child-rearing and breadwinning.

In America, where more than 70 percent of mothers of young children work for pay, society expects women to work without any legal protection for paid time off after giving birth, or for an illness or sick child, and with few affordable child care options.

“The system is stacked against them,” Collins said. The most pernicious -- and uniquely American -- response to this unjust system is the working mother’s tendency to blame herself. Collins heard mothers universally express feelings of guilt at the impossibility of being able to do it all, in regard to work and child-rearing. But it’s only in America that women internalize blame instead of looking at the role their partners, companies and government play in creating and perpetuating a system unfair to them.

“When I look them in the eye and tell them it’s not their fault, they usually start crying in the interview,” Collins said.

Why have American mothers accepted that we are worth less than the mothers in every other developed nation in the world? We should expect more.

When we hear stories like Sarwar’s, our response should not be to valorize the extreme sacrifices women have had to make in order to pursue their careers or feed their children. Our response ought to be: This is an unjust system.

Our own voices of self-doubt only serve to benefit the existing broken system.

Ditch guilt.

Get angry.

Anna Claire Schmidt felt slapped in the face.

She saw his words scrolling through Twitter. The video clip stopped her cold.

“The baby is born. The mother meets with the doctor. They take care of the baby. They wrap the baby beautifully. And then the doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby.”

President Donald Trump uttered that unbelievable smear against mothers and doctors to crowds at a rally in Wisconsin last week.

Schmidt, a critical care nurse who worked for years in the neonatal intensive care unit, knew about wrapping babies in warm blankets. She’s spent those last agonizing moments with at least 15 to 20 parents. Their grief is imprinted on her heart.

She responded on social media with a message for the president.

“I have wrapped a lot of babies in blankets. Some, beautifully, like you mentioned. Some, I just did my best because when you weight a scant 500 grams, there’s far more blanket than baby.

“I have stood next to my physician colleagues as we disconnected all the tubes, wires, pumps and equipment keeping these tiny people alive. Sometimes they live weeks, even months. Sometimes only hours. We spent the majority of that time keeping them alive with heroic measures, but the time would come to transition from the frantic pace of critical care and to dim the lights, make them comfortable -- and yes, wrap them in a blanket.

“I have taken footprints from people so small that they fit in the palm of my hand. I have cut curly, dark locks of hair from beautiful full-term babies. I have lifted them out of the only beds they have ever slept in, and handed them to their mothers for what was the very first and last time. I have given medication to ease any pain, and yes, I have wrapped them in a blanket.

“Baby killers, infanticide -- if that’s how you boil down providing palliative care at the end of life for babies that will not live to take their first steps, to feel the sun on their face, to take a single step outside the hospital -- so be it. If you want to call me and the nurses and physicians I work with executioners for providing a warm, comfortable, peaceful death for dying children, go for it. But don’t talk to me about wrapping babies in blankets.”

Schmidt, 30, who lives in St. Louis, said she realizes the president was trying to rally his base against so-called late-term abortions and likely has no clue how rare and difficult such cases are. But claiming that a mother would conspire with a doctor to “execute” a newborn has nothing to do with abortion. Perhaps some are immune to yet another lie from a man who has told more than 10,000 lies during his presidency so far. But this deserves greater attention than his run-of-the-mill falsehoods. This gruesome lie reveals an exceptionally dark and twisted view of women.

“I just keep thinking about the mom who handed me her baby after he died and made me promise that I wouldn’t put him down until I put him in the morgue -- and then came back (to find me) 10 minutes later, long after I thought she was gone, to make sure I kept my promise,” Schmidt wrote on Twitter.

The president’s heinous lie hurt her on behalf of the families she has seen through this kind of life-changing loss.

“He was deliberately attacking them,” she said.

He used the word “execute” to describe mothers whom Schmidt has held while they sobbed, grieving the life their child was supposed to have.

Trump told a dangerous lie designed to agitate his supporters.

He told a slanderous lie against physicians who dedicate their lives to saving others.

And most reprehensible of all, he called mothers who have lost their babies murderers.

Hollywood actors and wealthy West Coast parents embroiled in college admission scandals, step aside. The Midwest is here to represent.

The latest episode of Parenting of the Rich and Connected takes place in the Missouri Legislature. You might think us simpletons stuck in flyover country, but our power players don’t mess with bribes and lame Photoshop to “help” their kids.

Black Hawk-level helicopter dad and lobbyist Richard McIntosh took it to another level after St. Louis’ Washington University expelled his son last year. He was kicked out after a Title IX investigation found him responsible for sexual misconduct severe enough to warrant expulsion.

Here’s some context on how often a rape allegation leads to expulsion. According to the university’s Clery statistics, 122 rapes were reported on campus from 2013 to 2017. Since 2013, only seven students have been expelled for Title IX violations, according to Lori White, vice chancellor for student affairs.

McIntosh’s son is in rare company indeed.

But back to the real star of our story. After power dad McIntosh’s son was kicked out, he didn’t try to grease hands at the university. That’s so amateur hour. Instead, he began lobbying to change the law for every college and university in the state! He started a dark money group called Kingdom Principles (an ironic flourish for you, Hollywood), dedicated to gutting Title IX protections for those who report sexual misconduct and assault. He got St. Louis billionaire David Steward to help fund his mission. In another made-for-TV-twist, Steward is on the board of trustees for Wash U. The dark money group bought polling and ad time, and hired 29 lobbyists, some of whom passionately framed the agenda as a way to protect the civil liberties of black men.

Nary a word was said about who else the law might help. The Kansas City Star helpfully dug up the hidden personal connection.

There’s another plot twist.

Not only did McIntosh want this law to go into effect immediately, he pushed for it to allow accused students to appeal the results of Title IX hearings to the state Administrative Hearing Commission. Guess who is the presiding and managing commissioner of that commission? McIntosh’s wife, Audrey Hanson McIntosh. His son could appeal his expulsion to his mom’s commission.

A move like that takes more cojones than delivering bags of cash to a lacrosse coach.

The state’s colleges were against these changes, which they said would discourage students from reporting rape and sexual misconduct on campus. Plus, the original language of the legislation seemed more than a bit vindictive. If that legislation had passed, students who were cleared on appeal by the commission (again, a commission led by an expelled student’s mother) could sue their former universities, the campus staff and their accusers for damages. It allowed lawyers to cross-examine sexual assault survivors about their drinking and past sexual history.

Making the law retroactive was an especially nice touch. Those conditions were later stripped.

The fact that paid guns claimed that the law was designed to protect black men -- not the son of a wealthy white lobbyist -- is just Missouri being extra. During the debate, a Democratic legislator challenged fellow lawmakers, who claimed to be awfully concerned about protecting the due process of the accused, to guarantee lawyers for students who couldn’t afford them.

Missouri Republicans essentially said “hell to the naw” on that one.

The Senate version of the bill ran into a filibuster last week from Democrats, and the legislative session is winding down in a few weeks. McIntosh and his army of lobbyists will need to shift into overdrive to make good for his son.

In hindsight, maybe buying the Harvard fencing coach’s house has a better return on investment. Harvard is investigating a possible conflict of interest in that case. Missouri Republicans pushing McIntosh’s pet project seem far less concerned about conflicts of interest.

In some circles, McIntosh may win father of the year.