Uber Virtue-Signals About Abortion While Downplaying Sexual Assault Allegations

Victoria MarshallAugust 26, 2022

In post-Roe America, no corporation will miss a chance to virtue-signal about how committed they are to so-called “women’s rights” — even if they trample said rights in their everyday business practices.

Case-in-point: Uber, after promising to cover employee travel expenses for out-of-state abortions and the legal fees of drivers sued under Texas and Oklahoma’s abortion laws, is downplaying a lawsuit from many women who have been sexually assaulted by their Uber drivers.

According to the complaint, female passengers in multiple states “were kidnapped, sexually assaulted, sexually battered, raped, falsely imprisoned, stalked, harassed, or otherwise attacked” by Uber drivers.

“As early as 2014, Uber became aware that its drivers were sexually assaulting and raping female passengers; nevertheless, in the eight years since, sexual predators driving for Uber have continued to attack passengers, including the plaintiffs whose claims were alleged in today’s action,” the firm Slater Slater Schulman said of the lawsuit.

As a new ad campaign launched by conservative nonprofit Consumers’ Research reported, there have been 998 reported sexual assault incidents, including 141 alleged rapes. Furthermore, according to Uber’s most recent safety report from 2019-2020, the company “received 3,824 reports across the five most severe categories of sexual assault and misconduct,” which span from “Non-consensual kissing of a non-sexual body part” to rape.

Uber has not taken serious action against these issues, besides screening drivers, saying the company is not “responsible” for these crimes. Apparently, Uber hopes its abortion activism will be enough to gloss over these incidents and put the company in the good graces of women everywhere.

This is incredibly condescending, and as Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research, put it, “assuming that paying for abortion expenses is somehow going to make it all better is manipulative and extremely misguided.”

And therein lies the true motivation behind Uber’s woke virtue-signaling and unwillingness to address sexual assault allegations: the bottom line.

Just as it’s much easier for companies to pay for out-of-state abortions than to support working mothers, it’s also easier for them to virtue-signal about women’s rights than to ensure the safety of their female customers.

If companies like Uber are actively cutting back on paid maternity leave, adopting policies to keep women childless, and not covering up sexual assault allegations, they must not be interested in the rights of women at all. They are — as the culture is — anti-woman, anti-motherhood, and increasingly anti-anything that threatens the bottom line.

Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.