I need some advice and let me start by saying PLEASE do not comment if your only input is going to be along the lines of “you chose to have kids, why should your work pay for it?”

My company has no specific maternity leave policy; instead they choose to let it fall under short term disability which means i only get 6 weeks off, the first two are unpaid and the remaining four I only get 60% of my normal pay. I relayed my concerns with this policy to our HR department who told me there is nothing else that they offer to compensate and I asked if i could speak with someone higher up about what other options I might have to help us out while I’m gone for 6 weeks and will basically only receive one paycheck during that time. Our company owner and CEO called me the next day and said he wanted to discuss my concerns so I explained to him that I felt there was room for improvement in our maternity leave benefit and that even my husband gets 8 weeks with full pay for paternity leave from his job. Now two of the “core values” my company claims to operate by are that they are people-focused and that they are always looking to improve to better suit employees and customers, so here i am thinking that since he reached out to me we could come up with a compromise that might help me with my upcoming leave. To my surprise he basically just told me that the company thinks this is a fair policy and that’s the end of it and there is nothing else anyone is going to do. I am really shocked and truly disappointed in this response especially from a nation wide billion dollar a year business that claims to be focused on their employees first. I explained it feels as though I am being punished for wanting to start a family and that I’m being forced to choose between having a child and continuing to receive a paycheck. I’m not sure what to do now because I really do not want to let this go but I don’t know how else to try and address it. At this point it’s more about the unreasonable response I got from our CEO than it is about their crappy benefits. What is everyone else’s maternity leave policy like so maybe I can understand better and see if there are any other ways around this?