Are there any countries where employers are legally obligated to pay a significant amount (>=80% salary) for a significant time (>=3 months) for maternity leave? It's my (highly ignorant) understanding that European employers do not; European governments do.

I agree fully on the gender gap and non-discrimination issues. I'm going to disagree somewhat on the benefit of encouraging reproduction past a certain point.

There is a limit to the number of people this planet can sustain. There is a limit to the size our societies can grow to before they start fundamentally changing, and not for the better. Those issues should be considered before making policy decisions that reduce the burdens of reproduction beyond the replacement rate. In my opinion, couples should have support in the form of parental leaves, daycare, and such for the first two children. After that, you are on your own.

UN population projections indicate that the population will peak later this century and fall back substantially before resuming a much more modest growth rate.

Most developed countries are today only maintaining growth through immigration, if at all, and China is set to peak and start contracting in the next couple of decades. India is lagging, as is many African countries, but even that is unable to prevent the world population from peaking towards the end of the century.

That is with encouraging reproduction this way in large parts of the developed world, and with substantial easing of restrictions in countries like China.

Ironically, the US, with the worst maternity leave policies in the developed world, has one of the highest reproduction rates of the developed world, while most European countries today are below replacement rate.

Policies to limit support beyond the first two children may sound sensible, but would likely have a negative effect: The countries which today have extensive maternity or paternity leave for the most part will run into substantial problems of aging populations unless they manage to push reproduction rates up and/or increase immigration numbers over the next few decades. Given the political resistance to high immigration rates most places, that's not likely to fly.

The "payoff" of holding back of maternity leave to limit reproduction rates would also be minimal because the countries with good maternity leave for the most part have a low enough reproduction rate that budging it some small percentage rate further down would not really do much.

More and more countries are making the transition to low reproduction rates, and if it continues we will eventually be in a situation where population decline will be the major problem.

Yes, that's a good point but I don't think it is 'encouraging reproduction' so much as that is is making sure that there is some balance.

Society has entered a coffin corner where we need to increase the numbers to sustain the previous generation, obviously that isn't going to be a long term viable strategy and some very clear headed thinking will be required to see if we can still work our way out of that. But that's a different issue altogether than the one at heart of the debate here. Not entirely unrelated, but unrelated enough to be seen as a separate item.

Yeah, I was wavering on whether to even make the point because it does start down a path that branches away from leave policies. I think it is useful to keep those concerns in mind when discussing them, though.

Point taken, it's a problem and a very serious one and one that we will likely have to face in the relatively near future.

The fast reproducing countries are developing countries. Most developed countries reproduce just a little bit over or under replacement rates.

Make birth control cheap or free, have some sort of family planning education and humanity will reproduce below replacement rates very quickly. See Iran for an example.

What happens if you have one child, but your second pregnancy is a multiple?

Not going to happen any time this century, but relaxing the restrictions on immigration or adoption could also effectively achieve "getting the next generation of workers". It is somewhat naïve to imply that reproduction is a strict necessity for getting new workers in developed countries, when thousands of children are dying of malaria and dysentery elsewhere in the world.

With the Earth's population way larger than it ever has been before, reproduction at the current rate is not particularly important or desirable. However, lots of parents will usually participate in it as a choice.