Finally tonight, on this Mother's Day, we explore how government policies and society's expectations

shape the experience of new moms. Ali Rogan spoke with journalist Abigail Leonard, whose new book,

Four Mothers, follows the ups and downs of the first year of motherhood around the world.

Abigail Leonard, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me.

You yourself became a mom while you were living overseas in Japan,

and in this book you profile women mothers from there, from Finland, Kenya, and the United States.

What inspired you to write this book?

So I moved to Japan when I was six months pregnant, which in retrospect was sort of a bold move.

So I was sort of navigating all the challenges of early motherhood and also the challenges of

sort of getting used to a new place, new culture, and a new sort of approach to parenting

than one that I had been raised with.

And then I came back to the U.S. after seven years, I had two more kids in Japan,

and I sort of got to understand the American system of parenting

and how it presented its own challenges.

And I just wanted to think about whether any countries sort of got this right,

whether they supported mothers in an effective way and sort of what we could learn from them. And there are a lot

of similarities among the experiences that these mothers describe as they're going through. But there's

also a lot of things that set each experience apart. Can you tell us about some of those top-line

similarities and differences? I thought it was really fascinating to see how just in the first

sort of few moments of being a mother, it hit them in sort of the same way. I mean, the woman

in Nairobi, Kenya, and the woman in Salt Lake City, Utah said almost verbatim the same thing,

which was, I can't believe I'm someone's mom now. And so there was this sort of universality

...