America wants women to stand on equal footing with men at work but also wants babies cared for by their mothers at least in the first weeks of their lives.

These sensible desires are sometimes hard to square with economic reality. Some people on the Left want to fix the problem by expanding government or suspending the obdurate realities of economics. But conservative scholars and lawmakers say the solution that actually works is not the creation of new federal programs but the loosening of restrictions on existing ones.