Jeff Stein, Washington Post, August 7, 2022

In the early 2010s, Abby McCloskey was one of only two female economists on her team at the American Enterprise Institute, one of the most influential think tanks on the right. Her mostly older, mostly male colleagues were focused on the policy issues that have dominated GOP circles since before the Reagan revolution: tax cuts, regulatory reform, reducing government spending.
But McCloskey pored over data showing that mothers in the United States earn less after childbirth than fathers do, and she thought it revealed a problem in need of a government response.
The vast majority of conservative scholarship about paid-leave programs then argued they were unnecessary. Convulsed by the tea party movement, Republican lawmakers were focused on cutting, not creating, government programs for the poor. And there were no GOP-backed bills to create paid leave or child-care benefits.
The lack of progress has been bitterly disappointing to conservatives like McCloskey, who argues that Republicans should seize the opportunity to respond to the seismic shift wrought by Dobbs.
“If not now, with this huge change in what it means to be pregnant in this country,” she said, “then when?”