How many women do you know...

Not many. A unusual woman like Michelle Duggar is an extreme case that makes the point obvious. What employer would consider hiring her with a 12-month maternity leave benefit, reasonably expecting that she will collect a salary without ever coming to work?

More realistically, imagine a young, poor woman, the sort of person we would like to help, or at least not hurt. She is applying for a job, perhaps a job that does not come with the kind of benefits wealthier, more professional job hunters expect.

The hiring manager may be willing to offer a job to the woman, knowing that she may take unpaid leave to have a baby. But if the company is required to pay her salary while she is on leave, that additional cost may be enough for them to look for a different employee, or else reduce the compensation of the job offer to offset this additional cost.

Is it not worth greatly improving the lives of working families a good trade for POSSIBLY impacting the bottom line of businesses in a very small way?

That's is the kind of cost/benefit analysis I am looking for, rather than simply reading the label on the package that says "Helps Working Families" and assuming that is what the product delivers.

Some working families will enjoy the benefit, that is good and easy to see.

Some businesses will bear the costs of the benefit, that may be bad (or if not, they can offer the benefit without being forced).

Are we certain at this point that the benefit is greater than the cost? Should we consider the many small businesses that are operated by working families? Companies go out of business all the time, will more fail because of this policy? It won't be easy to detect if it happens.

How do we measure the balance? Does it make sense to assume that this change will cause "great improvement" on one side yet merely "possibly" "very small" harm on the other side? What about working families who can't have or don't want additional children, might they be harmed by having to accept a maternity benefit they won't use, instead of perhaps an education-related benefit or greater salary?

Answering these questions requires evidence which is difficult to gather. I do not trust the "Helps Working Families" label to give me the whole story.

We have left out another important cost that will be hard to detect after this policy goes into effect. If the business chooses to hire a man, or an older or wealthier woman, instead of the poor young woman in our example, believing that these people will be less likely to take advantage of a required maternity benefit, then the poor, young, and now unemployed woman is the one who bears the heaviest cost of this policy.

It's not like we're forbidden from attaching conditions to the deal

Someone might argue that when two people make a voluntary agreement, it is not our business to attach conditions to the deal.