Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo
Abortion rights activists gather outside the Supreme Court in Washington, June 24, 2022.
Since the Dobbs ruling taking away a woman’s right to determine her own medical care, a handful of large corporations have stepped up to provide up to $4,000 in travel expenses for employees who need an abortion but have no access to one in their states. This movement began with Yelp last fall, after the Texas abortion ban was cleared by the Supreme Court, and it grew after the leaked draft in the Dobbs case was released.
The stance from these companies—mostly big financial companies, movie studios, entertainment conglomerates, tech firms, and a few large retailers—has led to various questions. First, is this just greenwashing-style PR to look socially conscious in public, while funding the politicians who pushed to overturn Roe v. Wade behind the scenes? Is this yet another corporate benefit that will have to be consistently bargained, and used by companies like Starbucks as a perk only for those workers not uppity enough to want a union? Is just the idea of having to ask your employer about obtaining an abortion another example of the insanity of tying health care to your job?
These are all worthwhile questions. But the attention paid to the decisions of a sliver of employers is outsized compared to the real problem for those who need to obtain an abortion and don’t have access in their home state: A large portion of them don’t have paid medical leave, and therefore may have to choose between an abortion and their job.
It’s certainly nice that PricewaterhouseCoopers and Google and Salesforce and other Fortune 500 companies are offering a travel benefit. But the staff of this kind of company has very little overlap with the typical universe of women seeking an abortion. About three-quarters of all women who obtain abortions are low-income, and half subsist below the federal poverty level. They are by and large not in the C-suites. Moreover, most of the companies that have announced this policy are headquartered in states that still have access to abortion.
Some of the companies do have branch employees making modest wages across the country, whether retailers like H&M or Dick’s Sporting Goods, banks like Wells Fargo or JPMorgan Chase, or companies like Amazon with a lot of warehouse workers. There, the question is how the benefit intersects with a company’s existing paid leave policies. Amazon has been criticized for consistently mishandling its paid leave policies for its lowest-paid workers, and message boards note that Dick’s Sporting Goods has no sick leave for frontline retail workers and only a handful of personal days—and even that only as long as the employee is full-time. If a worker didn’t have any time off left, would they be able to leave the state to get an abortion?
Dick’s and Amazon didn’t reply to a request for comment about how their travel benefit would connect with their time-off policies.
The larger point is that the companies that have stepped forward thus far represent no more than a small fraction of overall workers. “Most workers in this country work for smaller employers who cannot afford to pay on their own for paid family and medical leave, let alone a travel benefit,” said Josephine Kalipeni, executive director at Family Values @ Work, which advocates for family-friendly workplace policies. For example, the one federal leave benefit, the Family and Medical Leave Act, is not only unpaid but isn’t operative for businesses with fewer than 50 workers.
About three-quarters of all women who obtain abortions are low-income, and half subsist below the federal poverty level.
Younger, lower-income women who disproportionately need to terminate unwanted pregnancies are far likelier to be among the tens of millions of workers who don’t have access to a single paid sick day to travel for an abortion, let alone longer-term paid medical or family leave. Kalipeni is a good example. As a sophomore in college, she had to work to pay for tuition and books. When she got pregnant, she kept working up until the moment that she passed out on the job and had to go to the ER for an ectopic pregnancy. “Because every hour at work counted to my ability to stay in school, I went to the hospital, had an abortion, took a three-hour nap, and went back to work,” Kalipeni said. “These are such real issues for all of us.”
That was in a world where Kalipeni could obtain that abortion in her home state; in many states, which have eliminated the possibility of abortion in the case where the health of the mother is threatened, that may no longer be a reality. And the states that are expected to ban abortion correlate with states that have terrible family policies at work.
None of the states with a statewide paid sick leave law are expected to ban abortion; a few cities in Texas mandated sick days through local laws, but all of them have been blocked by the courts. Many of the abortion-ban states also have not expanded Medicaid, which is a primary insurer for many abortions. The state minimum wage is incredibly low in abortion-ban states, and we know that about three-quarters of women who get abortions cite affordability issues among their reasons for terminating a pregnancy. And abortion-ban states correlate with states with long wait lists for child care and stingy subsidy policies; most women seeking abortions have kids, and need to have them cared for if they need to travel for the medical procedure.
This is the box that millions of workers of childbearing age have now been stuffed into. They cannot get an abortion in their home state. They might be able to travel to get an abortion if they can access national networks of abortion funds. But there is no guarantee they will have a job to come home to if they don’t have the ability to take a sick day. They may be forced to carry the pregnancy to term even if their low pay makes it unviable to support another child.
Federal workers needing an abortion are in a special circumstance. They have been granted sick days to travel for abortion services, but getting any workplace cash assistance for that could run afoul of the Hyde Amendment, which blocks federal funding for abortions.
“It feels like hit after hit,” said Kalipeni. “Without the ability to have paid leave and to travel, it has such a domino effect.”
Many Democrats recognized the damage to basic economic justice from a lack of paid leave, and sought to include it in their overall Build Back Better plan. But the Rube Goldberg proposal that came out of negotiations, relying on private insurers, was problematic from the start, and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) eventually struck paid leave out of the still-incomplete legislation.
With the Dobbs ruling, we’re now seeing the tragic costs of that mistake for millions of women. “I really think about the undercurrent of reproductive justice and the care movement fighting for paid leave as really about our autonomy over our bodies and our time,” Kalipeni said. “It means being able to take the time to care for our bodies.”
There isn’t really a fix to the problem without a national program. Pregnant workers wanting to make their own life decisions will have to scramble, scrape, and fight to figure out how to get time off to get an abortion while still having a job to come home to.
