It's pretty easy to miss some details in the scene(which takes place after Babs gets caught and confesses to her Dad) because it's superfucking crowded and infodumpy, because I guess Miller or Lee miscalculated the number of pages and had wasted too much space on the Big Panels. But go back and look. The issue, I believe, ends with Gordon calling Essen. On his daughter's specific insistence.
It's Babs I really don't get. We're given no basis that her mother abused her or anything like that. At worst from what we have to go on, to her, her mom's an embarrassment. And yet she actually tells her dad to go find another woman, one with which he has a history, a history that doomed her mother and father's marriage. It's weird, and it's cold, and it's hard to watch. The mother, meanwhile, prior to ending up in the hospital, sounds nothing like the woman Miller introduced us to, but rather the wife of TRANSMET's Spider Jerusalem, who was a loudmouthed, aggressive, drunken and violent whore. Not that we ever see her firsthand in this boy's fantasy.
And Miller taking forever to do the next one only makes it more glaring.