Corporate America Wants To Delay Women Workers Having Kids

Nearly half of the Fortune 100 companies offer paid out-of-state travel for abortions, and many encourage options like egg freezing and in vitro fertilization in order to financially optimize their female employees.

A report from the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) shows that while some pro-family policies have been adopted at top corporations, the balance weighs heavily in favor of delaying or destroying families.

“In addition to offering praiseworthy parental-leave policies and assistance with the costs of adoption or child care, a significant number of these corporations have simultaneously begun promoting and incentivizing options such as surrogacy, in vitro fertilization, egg freezing, and travel for abortions — options that encourage female employees in particular to postpone or even forego motherhood in order to advance in their careers,” Alexandra DeSanctis, co-author of the study, told The Federalist. “Real support for women in the workplace would prioritize reincorporating female employees who have left the workforce for a time to care for children, offering greater flexibility to working fathers so they can be more present to their families, and making as much room as possible for mothers to take on flexible part-time or remote work.”

According to the report, at least 42 Fortune 100 companies have publicly touted their offer to pay for out-of-state abortion travel; two others “strongly suggest” they have the coverage. The report noted that not all companies are transparent with their offerings, and that the total number is “probably an undercount as coverage for abortion travel expenses is likely to become standard in many health-care plans” under general provisions.

The report notes that while companies might offer full coverage for abortion and travel, it will only offer a percentage of the cost for things like adoption.

Amazon, for example, will pay up to $4,000 for abortion travel expenses if it is not available within 100 miles of the employee’s home. That cost is more than enough to cover flights, hotels, and other accommodations on top of the roughly $600 it takes to buy an abortion.

Meanwhile, Amazon only offers $5,000 reimbursement for a single-child adoption, where costs could be anywhere from $30,000 to $60,000 through an agency, or $25,000 to $45,000 independently, the report noted.

“Strikingly, the companies that offer the most robust family benefits and that are most transparent about those benefits are also more likely to have announced coverage for abortion and abortion-related travel expenses,” the report states.

Corporations are apparently trying to attract female employees by offering a wide range of options for what they might call family planning and healthcare, the report notes, adding, “The corporate standard of generosity when it comes to parenthood and especially motherhood appears to be offering maximum flexibility: coverage for contraception and abortion when children are undesired, parental leave and adoption assistance when employees want children, and fertility coverage to assist those who want children but either cannot have them naturally or perhaps want to try to preserve their fertility via technology.”

It is ultimately a cheaper option, however, to simply pay for an abortion and travel, or for freezing eggs and the possibility of IVF when they are used, than for immediate cost of giving birth, child care, maternal and paternal leave beyond what is required by law, or adoption expenses.

“Other elements of the apparent flexibility these corporations offer reveal a misguided view of how to integrate parents, especially mothers, into the workforce in a way that respects human dignity and a proper understanding of human nature,” the report states. “Abortion, for instance, ends the life of an unborn child, and corporate support for abortion suggests that companies would prefer to pay only once — for the abortion than to pay in a number of other ways if a female employee chooses to give birth to her child.”

As the Washington Examiner reported, policies like abortion travel, egg freezing, and IVF are often more about extracting the most amount of work out of a female employee, while keeping them under the guise that they have signed up for a company that is protecting their ability to have children — as soon as they are ready for it.

University of Virginia sociology professor W. Bradford Wilcox told that outlet, however, that “as soon as they are ready” can often times mean never, adding that the policy’s “incentive is to maximize the worker’s time and commitment to the job and minimize their investments in their own family including when it comes to having family in the first place.”

“The employer is basically trying to get the employee to kick the can down the road so that in the moment they’re fully attached to the job,” Wilcox continued. “But the consequence of this is that the longer you wait to have kids, the more likely it is you won’t have them. These are the kinds of policies that are helping to explain why, you know, the fertility rate in the U.S. is at a record low.”

The EPPC report also notes a false sense of security with some of the options, especially with IVF, where women may learn “too late that these methods are unreliable and/or highly burdensome.”

Citing a New York Times report, the study added that “the efficacy of egg freezing and subsequent IVF procedures is uncertain, and the results are often disappointing — and that is in addition to the moral and ethical concerns involved in IVF and (possible) surrogacy.”

Live births from frozen eggs come at a rate of around 39 percent, the outlet noted, and those numbers change depending on the age of the woman seeking to use them. Egg freezing not only has a sub-par rate of success, but the fact that women are delaying families under the guise of security offered by it means their chances of success later in life are even lower.

“The rationale behind such policies is that maximum technological control over fertility is ideal — employees can have children, or not, if and when they wish,” the report states. “Women in particular are purportedly empowered by the capacity to postpone motherhood in order to advance their careers while relying on reproductive technologies lessen the risk of eventual undesired childlessness.”

Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.