Conservative Social Engineering

In the "Week in Politics" segment of yesterday's All Things Considered, the Washington Examiner's Tiana Lowe says, "women bear 100 percent of the economic burden [sic] of all paid parental leave programs because disproportionately women are the ones to take time off,” and that “a lot of these programs disincentivize [sic] women from staying in the workplace.”

What convoluted reasoning! Paid leave isn’t a “burden”; it relieves a burden and, by doing so, removes a coercive incentive to stay in the institutional workplace when someone would rather prioritize caring for her children. So what if women more often make this choice than men? Isn’t that their individual choice, whatever the reason -- be it cultural, biological, or a combination of the two? What gives Lowe the right to try to force women to make a different choice? And how ironic is it that this advocacy of “social engineering” comes from someone calling herself conservative!