Big business has a child issue. Precisely, many of America’s largest companies have a problem with infants and thus with working parents — particularly working mothers.
The Ethics and Public Policy Center just released a report on the Fortune 100’s family policies, led by Alexandra DeSanctis and myself. After the Dobbs decision, these business behemoths made a place of announcing that their worker health care plans may include pregnancy hospitality for workers who reside in states that forbid ending human lives in womb. We found that about half of these behemoths advocate pregnancy for their employees.
As part of uniform health care plans, there is no doubt that many more businesses will cover the costs of abortion journey. However, the businesses that promote abortion tourism as a key benefit are sending a message to their workers: Babies are dangerous for our lower line, our life, and our careers.
For fervent business support for contraception suggests a C-suite mindset that favors paying for abortions over paying for labor charges. The implicit premise is that workers (especially women ) need to carefully time their careers ( and, of course, the company’s profits ) and that babies are a potential problem that needs to be managed rather than people to be welcomed.
Compared to the reluctance some employees displayed when it came to publicly revealing the benefits they offer, this commercial eagerness to announce that employees pay for their offspring’s deaths. Although some businesses are role models for transparency in family benefits like parental leave ( Walmart, the largest private employer in the country, was notably outstanding ), the majority are not. We ranked 38 businesses as having great accountability, 45 as mediocre, and 17 as bad.
Employees who want to examine the advantages packages offered by possible companies before applying for or accepting a position are prone to confusion due to this lack of quality. When combined with quiet support for abortion, this opaque sends an anti-family information. We discovered at least 17 businesses that had announced plans to expand pregnancy hospitality but had only offered mediocre or perhaps mediocre clarity regarding their home benefits. For instance, prospective Nike employees may not know what kind of maternity leave they can get, but they will be aware that they can get abortions for a fee.
Well, the Fortune 100 covers many different businesses with different laborers, and some of their officially posted advantages plans are, on paper at least, very good, as seen in companies promising broad paid parental leave. However, some of this generosity actually does n’t seem to be as generous as it first appears. For instance, the adoption aid that many businesses offer typically covers only a small portion of the costs of an average implementation. Contrary to claims of complete abortion coverage, this limited coverage is not present.
Even when businesses are generally open, this openness seems to be expressed in terms of mobility, frequently with an inherent desire for properly timed children, who may be treated as disposable if desired and as assets if they are. Some Fortune 100 companies support and celebrate the monetization of children through surrogacy, which treats children as high-end goods rather than individuals. Some of the biggest companies in the United States are keen to take part in this baby buying and selling process. For instance, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, will give up to$ 40, 000 for surrogacy costs. By subsidizing males who want a child to be incubated in a rented womb before being raised without a mother, this also serves as a way for some businesses to burnish their La credentials.
As this illustration demonstrates, gains are not matched with the products that are intended to be promoted by corporations. Businesses frequently emphasize the value of relatives and work-life stability, but they frequently view children as burdens to be left over or as recommended luxury items rather than as people to be embraced, valued, and loved by, and valued in and for themselves. The unwavering link between business posturing over buying children via surrogacy is this disregard for the well-being of kids.  ,
In both cases, the corporate approach to family benefits is fundamentally inconsistent. Corporates claim that family is an essential component of human flourishing when they promote family benefits, but they also act as if family is either an expensive but optional extra that businesses support when hiring and retaining employees. A thorough understanding of family and human flourishing is required to ensure that businesses can avoid this incoherence. Instead of paying to have babies either be destroyed or purchased, a good place to start is by valuing and welcoming them as individuals.
Nathanael Blake is a member of the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a senior contributor to The Federalist.
