Wife's Employer Asking For Repayment For "unearned Wages."

My wife and I had a baby girl at the end of December. She has been on her 12-wk FMLA absence unpaid from her job. Her employer took all of her future PTO (what she would have accumulated for 2025) and paid that out to my wife in the first weeks of January, stating that this is company policy. This wasn't at our request, and was presumably to prevent my wife from extending her FMLA with pay after her 12 weeks, or from utilizing any vacation time later in the year since she "already took her time off."

After doing our budget and considering child care costs, we decided it doesn't make sense for my wife to return to work. We informed her employer of our decision, and now they are telling us that we owe over $1700 back to the company for "unearned wages."

We simply cannot afford this. We have thousands of dollars in medical bills from the hospital, and our taxes went very poorly for us- we owe the IRS $2200.

We are located in Pennsylvania. Is this legal/enforceable? What happens if we refuse to pay? It just seems unreasonable to me for an employer to force her to use her PTO while on her FMLA, then ask for it back when she decides not to return to work.