At least 42 companies in the Fortune 100 pay for employees to travel for an abortion in states where it isn’t available, according to a new report from the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Forty-two companies is likely an undercount because coverage for abortion travel is becoming standard in many health care plans for procedures not available nearby, according to the EPPC report from Alexandra Desanctis and Nathaniel Blake.
Two other corporations suggest they also provide abortion travel coverage.
Most of the companies that publicly affirmed coverage for abortion-related travel don’t provide public information on their child-care benefits.
The cost of covering abortion is much cheaper for a corporation than paying for maternity leave, prenatal and maternal health care, child care, and the possibility of losing the employee, the report says.
“If corporations are going to cover 100% of abortions and abortion travel while covering none or only a fraction of other costs, such as adoption, that really shows an anti-child and anti-family attitude,” said Blake, a fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, many major corporations added abortion travel costs to employee benefits.
Amazon announced in May 2022, following the leak of the high court’s draft opinion overturning Roe, that it would pay up to $4,000 in travel expenses for elective abortions if the procedure isn’t available within 100 miles of an employee’s home.
Amazon offers up to 20 weeks of paid parental leave for women, whom the company refers to as “birthing parents,” including four weeks before birth. Amazon allows up to six weeks of paid leave for “supporting parents” and adoptive parents.
Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, announced Aug. 19, 2022, that it would expand health care plans to cover abortion travel expenses.
Apple’s medical coverage plans include “fertility treatments” and egg-freezing as well as a lifetime maximum of $20,000 for in vitro fertilization.
Apple’s existing benefits package allows employees to travel out of state for medical care if it is unavailable in their home state. This policy extends to travel for abortions, an Apple spokesperson told CNBC in 2012.
“There was a tendency, in tech in particular, to treat [abortion] as somehow essential to women’s equality,” Blake told The Daily Signal. “It seemed like tech was really unanimous on not just funding abortion, but loudly saying that they fund abortion tourism.”
UnitedHealth Group, the fourth-largest company in the United States by revenue, announced it would cover abortion travel expenses following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe and abortion on demand, sending the abortion issue back to states and state lawmakers.
Drug store giant CVS pledged in 2022 to “continue to provide colleagues, clients, and consumers with the flexibility to choose medical and pharmacy benefits to best suit their needs.”
“This includes, subject to plan terms and customer direction for self-funded plans, making out-of-state abortion health-care services more accessible and affordable,” CVS said in a statement.
CVS has announced it will sell the abortion pill in states that allow it.
The pharmacy company offers financial reimbursement or access to specialists related to fertility, egg-freezing, in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, and more.
“They should not be funding commercial surrogacy because that is buying and selling babies literally, and it is also exploitative of women who are renting their wombs,” Blake said. “We’re constantly inundated with imagery from ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ but this is literally renting women for reproduction and corporations should not be doing that.”
Though many corporations include abortion as a health care benefit, abortion isn’t health care, said Dr. Susan Bane, an OB-GYN and vice chair of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, or AAPLOG.
“Central to the field of obstetrics and gynecology is the care of two patients—a maternal and fetal patient,” Bane told The Daily Signal. “This duty to care for both patients is evident in almost all we do in our clinical practice, except induced abortion—an intervention intended to terminate a pregnancy and that does not result in a live birth.”
“The purpose of medicine is for health and healing,” she said. “The direct and intentional killing of one of our patients accomplishes neither of these and is not health care.”
