Some of the nation’s largest companies are reimbursing employees who travel out of abortion-restricting states like Texas and Oklahoma to end their pregnancies.
Amazon, Disney, Citigroup, Lyft, Yelp, Uber, Bumble, Apple, Levi Strauss & Co. and Salesforce have all said they will reimburse employees who cannot terminate a pregnancy within driving distance of their homes as anticipation mounts for an expected Supreme Court decision that could return the power to restrict abortions to the state level.
None of the companies responded immediately to requests for comment from The Washington Times.
Sen. Marco Rubio introduced a bill on Wednesday that would prohibit companies from using tax deductions to cover the employee travel for abortions and gender-transition operations.
“Our tax code should be pro-family and promote a culture of life. Instead, too often our corporations find loopholes to subsidize the murder of unborn babies or horrific ‘medical’ treatments on kids,” the Florida Republican said in a statement.
A spokesman for Mr. Rubio told The Washington Times the bill is not about the government telling owners how to operate their businesses, it’s about promoting responsible tax policy.
“Companies can still offer that benefit,” the spokesman told The Washington Times. “We’re just saying taxpayers should not subsidize that benefit.”
But Walter Block, an economics professor at Loyola University New Orleans, said Mr. Rubio’s actions defy the logic of small-government conservatism.
“From this perspective, it is illicit for government to meddle in private firms’ decisions as to how to run their employee benefits program,” Mr. Block told The Times. “Lefties are not the only cancelers.”
The professor said that while some Texans have traveled to his home state of Louisiana to wait in line at abortion clinics, it’s unlikely that large numbers of pregnant women would drive to states where abortions are accessible.
“This is just more woke virtue signaling from corporate America,” Mr. Block said.
Mr. Rubio and seven other Senate Republicans on Friday asked Sergeant-at-Arms Karen Gibson in a letter to “immediately terminate the U.S. Senate’s existing contracts” with Citibank as the Senate’s credit card provider over parent company Citigroup’s decision to fund “abortion tourism.”
So far, the companies have not backed down.
On April 12, San Francisco-based Yelp defended its decision to reimburse out-of-state abortions. The company has more than 200 employees in Texas, which has banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.
“As a remote-first company with a distributed workforce, this new benefit allows our U.S. employees and their dependents to have equitable access to reproductive care, regardless of where they live,” Miriam Warren, the company’s chief diversity officer, told Bloomberg in a statement.
Reuters reported on Monday that Amazon, the nation’s second-largest private employer, will pay up to $4,000 in annual travel expenses for nonlife-threatening medical treatments like abortions that are unavailable within a 100-mile radius.
Among abortion-restricting states, Texas passed its six-week ban in September and a ruling is pending before the Supreme Court on a 15-week ban in Mississippi.
In October, the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute said 26 states are “certain or likely” to ban abortion if the Supreme Court upholds Mississippi’s law as a state prerogative — a scenario that looms closer this week after a leaked draft ruling suggested the justices will vote 5-4 to do so.
Kristi Hamrick, chief media and policy strategist at Students for Life of America, said Wednesday that pro-life activists will boycott any companies that resist the ruling by financing abortion travel.
“For customers, it’s always good to know the values of a company so that you can make choices with your own money and fund businesses with life-affirming business models,” Ms. Hamrick said in an email.
Meanwhile, economists said the corporate travel reimbursements could splinter the consumer market along with the nation’s abortion laws.
“Companies that brand themselves with political affiliation will both lose and gain customers, but their fate is tied to political whims,” said Allen Mendenhall, associate dean of the business school at Troy University in Alabama. “The politicization of everything is bad for civil society.”
Mr. Mendenhall said U.S. companies have gotten more involved politically and trended leftward as “the wealthy are leaving blue states like California and New York for red states like Florida and Texas.”
“Conservative populism is on the rise around the globe, so adopting left-leaning views or policies is risky for business. For every Starbucks or Ben & Jerry’s, there’s a Chick-fil-A or Hobby Lobby,” he added.
But Angelica Gianchandani, a marketing professor at the University of New Haven, believes companies will profit from giving women “more control of their bodies and greater autonomy for upward mobility in the workforce” by financing abortion travel.
“Championing reproductive freedom is smart business,” Ms. Gianchandani said in an email.
• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.
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