Why don't companies stand up for abortion rights?

Women are half the workforce, but restrictions on our rights are met with silence.

Photo by Timon Studler on Unsplash

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Over the past decade or so, corporate America has gotten increasingly political. Companies have taken righteous stands on a series of important issues, from same-sex marriage to racism. They have pledged billions of dollars to fight injustice; they have boycotted states, demanded changes in venue, and taken their business elsewhere to protect their employees.

On abortion, though, they are overwhelmingly silent.

That’s true even when they’re asked directly. Fast Company surveyed nearly 200 of the country’s largest corporations about their stance on abortion access, and what they heard back was largely… nothing. Only 15 replied at all. From Fast Company:

Perhaps the most striking outcome of the survey was that so few companies were willing to talk on the record about their policies, even though we began outreach in early March, and businesses have likely long been aware that the Court was considering this case. Overall, 26 companies declined to participate, while a staggering 150 others did not respond to repeated queries over several months. (None of the Big Tech companies—namely Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix—took the survey; of the 100 largest U.S. companies by revenue, only Cisco and Johnson & Johnson responded.) 

The excuse is that abortion is “divisive.” Abortion, though, isn’t all that divisive — strong majorities of Americans support its legality and do not want to overturn Roe. And on many important social issues that companies have rightly stood up for in the past, American public opinion is badly divided, including on racial justice and trans rights. But these are also issues on which there is a side of fairness and decency and a side of bigotry and fear; many companies have identified that and acted accordingly, both in big public statements and in deploying their lobbying might.

And they’ve acted in their own interests. If you aren’t able to recruit from a diverse pool of applicants, you wind up with a worse workforce. And let’s be straightforward here: Given the stark partisan educational divide, with college-educated Americans being much more likely to vote for Democrats and support liberal politics, these companies are likely calculating that many of the workers they want the most are politically progressive and want to live in open-minded and diverse places. Companies will have trouble recruiting and retaining young skilled workers in states that actively discriminate against, say, LGBT people, and so they fight bills that discriminate against LGBT people. Many companies also struggle to recruit and retain workers of color; corporate America’s support for issues that disproportionately impact their Black workers and customers has been largely symbolic and those that were not symbolic proved largely insufficient. But at the very least, some effort was made.

On abortion? Crickets.

To be fair, a tiny number of companies (hi Yelp!) have been out front on this issue. But they’re a stark minority.

In the meantime, many of the same companies that claim to champion their female workers are funding anti-abortion politicians. And at least one major PR agency, which trumpets the importance of women’s empowerment, is advising its clients to stay quiet on abortion rights.

It’s a little confusing as to why. After all, there is little that determines a woman’s life trajectory more, including her career trajectory, than whether she can prevent and plan pregnancies. Women who don’t have the ability to decide whether and when to have children — who get pregnant unintentionally and give birth, and particularly who get pregnant unintentionally and don’t want to continue the pregnancy but are forced to — wind up worse off by a whole slew of measures. Chief among them is financial: Being forced into childbirth and raising (often another) child consigns many women to poverty; it keeps many more from thriving and achieving their goals.

So where are the companies demanding that states lift restrictions on private insurance companies covering abortions, so that companies can compensate their employees with the packages they see fit?

Where are the companies threatening to pull their headquarters, operations centers, and conferences from states that ban abortion?

Where are the companies lobbying for abortion rights or for the wide availability of medication abortion?

Abortion is fundamentally an economic issue. If half of your potential workforce and half of your consumer base cannot control their reproductive lives, that’s pretty bad for business. It means a great many talented women are pushed off track in their educations and career trajectories; it means a less-educated and less qualified workforce; it means a workforce in which many members will drop out (or, more accurately, be forced out). It means a poorer nation and consumers with less disposable income and less social mobility.

And this isn’t just feminist handwringing. From the Fast Company piece:

Last week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen emphasized that curbing access to legal abortions would be a major setback for women. “I believe that eliminating the rights of women to make decisions about when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades,” she said. Beyond the impact to individuals, state-level abortion restrictions also reportedly cost the U.S. economy about $105 billion each year, due to women leaving the workforce, reducing overall earnings, and increasing turnover. 

None of this is good for business.

But maybe it reflects who corporations believe have value.

The reality is that, owing to tremendous inequality in both economics and health care access, abortion is a method of controlling one’s reproduction that is disproportionately relied upon by lower-income women. Don’t get me wrong: Women across the economic and educational spectrums have abortions. But wealthier and better-educated women tend to have access to the kind of long-acting contraceptives that are incredibly effective at preventing pregnancy, and so wealthier and better-educated women have far, far lower rates of unintended pregnancies than poorer and less-educated women. This divide has widened over the past few decades.

Are these companies looking at the segments of their workforces that are highly paid and require higher levels of education and assuming that the female employees in them largely won’t need abortions, and if they do, will have the resources to procure them? Are they looking at the lower-paid jobs in their workforce that don’t require higher education and assuming that the people in those roles are replaceable?

Maybe that’s being too conspiratorial. Maybe the reason so many companies have been so shamefully silent on abortion rights is the same reason we’re in a moment of crisis on abortion rights: Because the American right has so successfully stigmatized abortion, spread a wholly false narrative of divisiveness, and convinced politicians and the public alike that abortion is a uniquely moral and sensitive issue and not a question of women’s rights and abilities to fully participate in society.

Maybe the reason for this silence isn’t calculation, but cowardice — and run-of-the-mill misogyny.

xx Jill

p.s. This is the weekly free edition of this newsletter. If you’re enjoying it and if you’d like to support feminist-minded journalism, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. This entire newsletter is supported by readers like you, and I am so grateful for your support.