Is Big Business trying to control a woman’s uterus?

Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, we started hearing about companies that were adding employee abortion costs to their list of benefits. 

The media, fanning the flame of fear to women, lauded this as nothing less than goodwill from the employer as they saw the injustice of Roe v. Wade being overturned and women’s choices being unjustly limited.

CBS reported that companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Walt Disney, Target, and more have stepped into the pool of providing abortion benefits — including travel costs, housing, or medical funding if abortion was not offered in the employee’s state.  

Sounds like they have the needs of the employee in mind… 

Or do they?

In 2016, Fast Company reported that Amazon offered 20 weeks of parental leave. Just seven years ago, Amazon and many of these same companies were coming up with creative ways to keep their employees with families because it was cheaper to bring in a temp for a short period of time than to recruit and train a new employee.   

Flex Jobs Company wrote an article about corporations subsidizing childcare, one of those companies was Amazon.

The article mentioned Amazon’s Family Flex program which provided resources to create the right balance between home and work life care options including financial resources and flexible scheduling arrangements.  

For years we had heard how corporations were embracing the family by including childcare incentives for employees or building childcare centers into their facilities. 

We saw these benefits as a way for women and men to continue advancing their careers while growing a family.  

In 2022 CBS reported, “Amazon has expanded the travel and lodging benefit to cover travel for a number of non-life-threatening conditions, including abortion if a provider is not available within 100 miles of the employee’s home.” 

CBS noted that some companies offer as much as $4000 towards an employee’s abortion experience.  

Less than a decade ago, Amazon, among others, was offering supportive parenting paths.  

Why have things changed so much? 

Do these abortion benefits support women and their right to choose, or is it really just a bottom-line financial decision to ward off increasing costs by encouraging abortions through the mask of endorsing women’s rights?

To answer these questions, we took a line from the Jerry Maguire movie: “Show me the money.” 

Let’s look at the employer costs of a pregnancy:

  • Insurance premiums paid by employers that include pregnancy (some policies allow you to exclude it so it’s a lower premium)
  • Increased time off for doctor appointments–pre-birth and post
  • Increased insurance for adding a family member
  • Time off for baby/child appointments
  • Parental paid or unpaid leave (unpaid causes businesses to temporarily increase staff by overtime or temporary help) 
  • Potential company assistance with childcare costs
  • Added sick days due to a child being homesick and mom or dad needing to be home with them 

Ask any parent and they will tell you it takes money to have a child, but our employers absorb costs, as well.  

When you compare these costs noted above to the $4,000 (highest noted) given to women to have an abortion, is this really to support the woman and her right to choose, or is it Big Business trying to control her decision and not have her baby, thus lowering their bottom line? 

From this simple cost analysis, you can see that if their goal is to lower business costs from anywhere they can, a woman’s uterus can become a target.  

Before accepting their short-term solution to parenting, remember their goal is to lower costs, at any cost.

 

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