Businesses may say family is important, but the abortion tourism promoted by big corporations reveals they see children as either “a burden to be discarded or as optional luxury goods,” according to a fellow of the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
In an op-ed titled “U.S. Corporations Love Abortion Tourism Because It Means They Don’t Have To Pay For Parenthood,” which The Federalist published on November 19, Nathanael Blake criticized the growing trend of major United States corporations promoting abortion tourism for employees while providing insufficient family benefits.
Drawing on a report he co-authored with Alexandra DeSanctis for the Ethics and Public Policy Center, titled “Corporate Family Policy How Fortune 100 Companies Stack Up on Abortion Travel, Parental Leave, and More,” Blake argued that many corporate policies reflect an anti-family bias, prioritizing profitability over the well-being of families and children.
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Nearly half of Fortune 100 companies publicly support abortion access and, in the wake of the Dobbs decision, announced policies to fund abortion-related travel for employees in states with restrictive abortion laws, according to Blake. He noted that this practice sends a troubling message of, “Babies are hazardous to your lifestyle, your career, and our bottom line.”
He wrote, “This corporate eagerness to announce paying for employees to have their offspring killed contrasted with the reticence many displayed with regard to publicly sharing the family benefits they provide.”
While some corporations offer generous family benefits on paper, Blake pointed out significant transparency issues, which make it difficult for employees to evaluate their options. The Corporate Family Policy report ranked 38 companies as having “good transparency,” 45 as “middling,” and 17 as “poor.” Blake singled out Nike as an example, noting that prospective employees may struggle to find clear information about maternity leave but will easily discover that abortions are covered.
Blake also criticized the disparity in corporate support for abortion versus adoption. While many companies pledge full abortion coverage, their adoption benefits often fall short of covering the substantial costs involved.
Another alarming trend, Blake argued, is the corporate commodification of children through surrogacy. Some companies, such as Alphabet (Google’s parent company), provide up to $40,000 for surrogacy expenses, which Blake characterized as treating children as “expensive products rather than as persons.”
He also tied this practice to corporate efforts to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) credentials.
“For many businesses, this is also a way to burnish their DEI credentials by subsidizing men who want to order a baby to be incubated in a rented womb and then raised without a mother,” he wrote.
Blake accused corporations of fostering a fundamental incoherence in their approach to family benefits. While they promote family and work-life balance in their public relations, their pro-abortion, pro-surrogacy actions suggest a wholly different view.
This contradiction unites corporate support for abortion and surrogacy, both of which disregard the inherent value of children, he argued.
“When promoting their family benefits, corporations speak as if family is an important, even essential part of human flourishing, but they act as if family is either an impediment to personal well-being and corporate profitability or an expensive but optional extra that businesses support as a matter of employee recruitment and retention,” Blake wrote.
To address this incoherence, corporations should embrace a more coherent and humane understanding of family and human flourishing, according to Blake.
“A good place to start is by valuing babies and welcoming them as persons rather than paying for them to be alternatively destroyed or purchased,” he concluded.
The Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center advocates for pro-life policies across the U.S., aiming to protect unborn children by pursuing legislative, regulatory, and legal measures at both state and federal levels. It also promotes cultural solutions and public policies designed to support families and provide aid to women experiencing unplanned pregnancies.
LifeNews Note: Louis Knuffke writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.
