How can one abuse maternity leave? I'd love to hear this. Also, "less work" ? Really? It's less work if the mother chooses to be irresponsible.. The restless nights, fussing, screaming, feeding, cleaning and other responsibilities.. You're serious? Not to mention the potential of medical issues.
Probably would want to be a different topic but going here for now.
From certain perspectives there are those that companies would ideally not have if they care for best returns on investment. In this case it has been seen for people to more or less get fully trained up*, pop a sprog out (if you can go on leave at 6 months, and stay off for a while after that, possibly longer on half pay) and then come back for a few months only to repeat it all over again. Time frame wise this can happen for several years, and be on your wages for several of those years.
Compare that to a dude that might never take anything, or maybe take a few months paternity, and then a load of overtime to pay for things, and the cost - benefit ratio skews far in their favour.
*it being fairly noted in medicine - 5 years in school plus another 8 to become a consultant means about 30 for most (assuming you do Uni at 18 like most people) which is when those biological clocks start ticking (something medics are typically rather aware of, seemingly unlike the population at large. For those wanting some numbers --
https://www.babycentre.co.uk/a6155/your-age-and-fertility ). I have also had discussions about it for those in finance, amusingly as it is not uncommon to bounce in and out of departments every 8 months or so it can lead to "long term employees" either not being known by or not knowing people that have put in, relatively speaking, a fair bit of time.
Similarly if you are playing the long game then someone doing the above is by simple "not enough hours in the day" going to be out gaining clients, doing jobs/improving their skills... and generally becoming a more and more valuable employee. Career earnings and pay rates (and increases thereof) when comparing women with and without children being a fun one here.
What to think about it all is complicated from where I sit. For one I don't want to move away from "if you do the work then you get the pay" but at the same time I am quite OK with the general idea of maternity leave, and find the lack of a mandated thing in the US to be very odd. Going beyond that there are a lot of poor old women out there (projections given levels of debt among those set to be old are also not great), and the areas under graphs if magically equalised would alleviate something there. Some of it might be spending habits as well but if we look at the typical training-earning-retiring diagrams and what each stage is supposed to represent...
Discussions of birth rates (them being rather low, indeed below replacement among native populations for a lot of places) is also a popular subject of discussion these days and while I am generally OK with it being as such** if you did care to increase them then as "finances" tend to be the top answers when asking the fertile people of today "why so few kids" then ensuring a measure of security there goes somewhere.
**the concerns with it are very real if things do carry on, however I would opt for a change in models used and technology to cover the gaps rather than propping up old ones made on faulty assumptions.