Everything has consequences elsewhere. Make paid maternity/paternity leave compulsory and you make it riskier for employers to hire. So you increase the probability that your father gets three months off after you're born, but you also increase the probability that your father is a long-term unemployed bozo living in a housing project on the outskirts of Paris.
The family values line of "mothers should stay at home" espoused by Pat Robertson et al. probably is better than both parents working, however much childcare you can afford.
I agree.
No reason it has to be the mother though.
It doesn't have to be, but this seems to be the natural way things go if left to their own devices. Most human societies have the other taking on the vast majority of childcare duties -- it seems to be part of the way our minds are put together that mothers want to do a lot more childcare than fathers do.
Employers wouldn't hire more than they need anyway. Even if that was the case, the flip side would be job insecurity. You can theorize all you want about these tradeoffs, but the experience shows that these measures do work in Europe, and more so in Scandinavian countries. Never have I seen so many child carts as in Iceland, and despite the crash their unemployment is 8% and going down.
Breastfeeding.
I don't lactate.
Now that our youngest is >1yo (as with his elder brother) then we're back to sharing labour and child care + chores 50-50 (in a way that's probably not open to most people). We've chosen this lifestyle and are below the official poverty line in our country because of it.
However, the little one is still not completely weaned and so needs contact with his mother at times during normal working hours.
Yes it's possible to pump and bottle-feed but breastfeeding is more than just nourishment.
Here in France the approach is well-funded child care that's available for very young babies -- this is a boon to mothers maintaining their careers, but it's certainly bad for breast-feeding more than a couple of months.
The family values line of "mothers should stay at home" espoused by Pat Robertson et al. probably is better than both parents working, however much childcare you can afford.
No reason it has to be the mother though. And the actual family values line is in conflict with Republican views on work. This conflict is partly historic (Protestant work ethic), but partly an interesting indictment of the hypocrisy of the religious rights' support for the Republican party. Their focus on only a few moral issues does a great disservice to the actual morality of the nation. They say mothers should stay home, but support a party who's economic policies make that impossible.