Report reveals what Fortune 500 companies REALLY think about families

A new investigative report from Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) scholars Nathanael Blake and Alexandra DeSanctis delves into the policies of Fortune 100 companies regarding things like abortion travel, parental leave, adoption benefits, and more. While many corporations include some pro-family policies, abortion is increasingly being paid for by employers — a contradictory notion that incentivizes abortion.

What the report shows is that many Fortune 100 companies are not fully transparent about the pro-family benefits they boast of having. While most do have parental leave policies, nearly twice as many companies are willing to pay for abortions, but not child care — illustrating that there is still a long way to go for corporations to enact true family-friendly policies. In addition, corporations often fully cover abortion for employees, even if it involves travel expenses, while they only partially assist employees with adoption expenses and maternity leave.

The authors note:

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. 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.

An employee’s choice to have a child may require corporate expenditures on prenatal and maternal health care, parental leave, and childcare costs, as well as the potential loss of the employee to full-time motherhood. Covering 100 percent of the cost of an abortion, even if it involves travel, is much cheaper than funding maternity leave and these other costs.

Likewise, even seemingly generous family-building benefits, such as adoption assistance, may cover only some of the total cost to an employee, in contrast to full coverage for an abortion and potential coverage for abortion-related travel costs.

Numerous companies, including Amazon, Starbucks, CitiGroup, CNN, Comcast-NBC Universal, and Netflix, have openly spoken of choosing to subsidize abortion; the Wall Street Journal, however, pointed out in 2022 that only 35% of companies at that time offered paid maternity leave to their employees. Disney subsidiary Hulu even reduced its maternity leave to just eight weeks, while promoting its decision to subsidize abortion for employees.

Countless allegations of pregnancy discrimination have cropped up across the country — some involving companies featured in the EPPC report. Former employees have accused Walmart, Amazon, Google, Walgreens, UPS, Nike, and many other corporations of pregnancy discrimination or mistreatment. Yet little to no action has been taken to remedy this; instead, it has become trendy to offer female employees abortion benefits instead of providing a truly family-friendly work environment — quietly pressuring women to choose between their careers and their children.

“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,” DeSanctis said in a statement.

Read the full report here.

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by Live Action News.]