Companies are reluctant to speak their views publicly on Roe vs. Wade, but many are silently funding related health efforts for employees.
About 10% of companies have made public statements on the issue since the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, the decision that affirmed a constitutional right to abortion, according to a Conference Board survey. A majority—51%—have made or plan to make an internal response.
But in addition to making a statement to employees, many firms are adjusting healthcare plans to offer services related to women’s health. Most plans being established to ensure that benefits will include travel expenses to employees who need to go out of state for health services.
TriNet, a company that provides human-resource services for thousands of businesses, announced two new offerings that clients can add to their benefit plans. One provides tax-free travel reimbursement for employees to receive faraway medical care. The other will provide tax-free benefits for expenses related to the adoption process. By providing both, companies can preserve employee choice and avoid making a political statement, says Fortune Media CEO Alan Murray.
“Larger companies either already had travel covered in their existing health plans, or they quickly added it,” says TriNet chief legal officer Samantha Wellington. “Smaller companies are seeing what the large companies are doing. They want to make choices available.”
These companies aren’t retreating to the standard of a decade ago, when “no comment” was the default response for anything that didn’t directly affect the bottom line. But they are being more deliberate about when to speak out, Fortune’s Murray says.
Some of the larger companies that have openly added abortion travel re-imbursments into their benefit plans include Amazon, Bank of America, CVS Health, Kroger, The New York Times Company, Mastercard, Starbucks, Tesla, and Walt Disney.