Column: With a noxious family leave proposal, GOP pretends it’s still pro-women despite antiabortion laws

Having achieved its long-held goal of eviscerating women’s reproductive health rights, the Republican Party is now hard at work pretending that it’s about to enter a new era of pro-women and pro-family policy. — Kathleen Romig, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, on Sen. Marco Rubio’s New Parents Act After the Dobbs ruling was leaked in May, a fellow at the Koch-funded Ethics and Public Policy Center asserted that allowing states to outlaw abortion “compels a greater claim on public resources to support expectant mothers facing crisis pregnancies and to seek to make all parents’ lives a little easier.” Mississippi Gov. “This country desperately needs paid leave, not just for new babies, but when workers get sick or to care for family members who get sick,” says Kathleen Romig, an expert on Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The leave proposal, wrote Carrie Lukas, the advocate, “could even be designed to improve Social Security’s financial conditions by requiring people to give up retirement benefits of greater value than the parental leave benefits they use.” She’s right about that, though it’s obviously a drawback, not an improvement. “The very people who are most likely to need paid leave,” says Vicki Shabo, senior fellow for paid family leave policy and strategy at the think tank New America, “are the same people working in low-paid jobs without retirement benefits and where their primary retirement security in old age is going to come through their Social Security payments.