I want people to be free to make the tradeoffs that they prefer. If someone wants to choose family over work, they should be free to do so (that doesn't mean that they should get the same rewards as the person who prioritizes work over family). Similarly, those who prioritize family over work should be free to do so.

It is an awful injustice to restrict someone's individual freedoms on the basis of their gender (and no, it's no consolation that it's in service of some arbitrary desire to prevent differences in distributions for some trait between the genders).

this works both ways. if a couple is expecting a child but can't afford to take time off for childbirth, is it freedom or justice?

I don’t understand. Optional parental leave would allow both parents to take work off. We’re debating whether or not parents (specifically fathers) should be forced against their will to take time off in order to satisfy an arbitrary desire to unify the distributions of work experience between men and women. In this debate, there is no dichotomy between freedom and justice; taking away one’s individual rights in the basis of gender is injustice—it’s neither freedom nor justice.

if it's optional, employers can and will make the median worked not take it - again, i know people who were told that they better not take the optional leave or it'll make further business difficult.

This is false, and we know it's false because in every country with optional maternity leave, more than 50% of women take their leave. Even in the US which lacks legal requirements for employers to offer paid maternity leave, over 70% of women took maternity leave--presumably the remaining 30% is largely a subset of the 33% of women who were not offered paid maternity leave. That you know people who were pressured into foregoing their leave is anecdotal.

[0]: https://mchb.hrsa.gov/whusa11/hstat/hsrmh/downloads/pdf/233m...

Somewhat off topic, but yikes, is this what using Twitter is like? Letting anyone from a global audience see your posts seems optimized towards fight picking.