"Hidden Value: The Business Case for Reproductive Health" makes explicit what was already implicit in equality arguments in Planned Parenthood v Casey: abortion is a cheap way to keep women fully engaged in the workforce and so doing their part to increase GDP and make shareholders wealthier.
The 2020 report by Rhia Ventures offers five reasons businesses should better support contraception and abortion for women (or rather, "anyone who can become pregnant"). Number three says it all: "Providing High-Impact Benefits with Low-Cost Investments." After all, "[c]overage of contraception and abortion requires minimal investment from companies."
Recognizing the contributions of women to the workplace and responding to societal demand, leading companies have invested significant resources to promote women’s advancement. Attention has focused on the gender pay gap, sexual harassment, and benefits, especially improvements to paid family leave, childcare, and fertility treatments that enable women and their partners to balance professional, personal, and family goals.
Despite these commitments and actions, one fundamental area remains largely overlooked: women’s access to contraception and abortion.
In light of the fact that relatively few businesses offer paid family leave or other supports for family life, it seems to me that abortion is still the privileged way we seek to enable women to "participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation." Our country's reliance on abortion for such participation has been especially devastating, in my view, on the poor.
Rhia Ventures concludes its report with the final reason companies ought to pay for abortion: "Preparing for Greater Scrutiny: Employees, customers, and investors increasingly expect the private sector to act on social issues—and reproductive health is no exception."
Employees are a significant source of support for reproductive health access. Employee giving platform Benevity cites reproductive health care provider Planned Parenthood as one of the top three beneficiaries of employee charitable giving for the past three years....
Pressure on the business community is coming from all sectors. San Francisco became the first major city to institute a procurement ban on companies headquartered in states with restrictive abortion policies. In the media, companies have received negative attention for campaign finance contributions to elected officials who sponsored restrictive abortion legislation, noting that the companies were acting contrary to their gender equity commitments. For example, a 2019 report by Equity Forward used publicly available data to detail financial support from 66 leading U.S. firms for legislators who have sponsored and passed abortion bans in states like Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Missouri.
Investors have also taken notice. Coverage for reproductive health is now included as a factor in both the Bloomberg Gender Equality Index (GEI) and the Equileap Global Gender Equality Index (EQUAL). In 2019, 39 institutional investors representing $236 billion in assets under management signed a letter to more than 30 major corporations to inquire about insurance policies and benefits related to reproductive health, as well as positions on public policy and
political spending that impact reproductive rights.
A widely-noted 2019 statement from the Business Roundtable, signed by 181 CEOs, proposed to redefine corporate purpose from delivering value exclusively to shareholders towards value for a broader set of stakeholders. This expanded vision will encourage higher expectations for companies across many areas—including reproductive health care. As Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan noted, “Our jobs as CEOs now include driving what we think is right. It’s not exactly political activism, but it is action on issues beyond business.”
So, take note Fortune 500, et al: don't just pay for your employees' contraception and abortion; publicize and lobby and "create a culture that encourages the use of reproductive health benefits," too. Isn't this the corporate responsibility we've all been waiting for!?
Tuesday, October 13, 2020
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to discuss what I call "dignitarian" feminism on NPR's On Point with host Meghna Chakrabarti and Fatima Goss Graves of the National Women's Law Center. Here's the audio. I spoke about a similar topic with the Catholic Association's lovely Grazie Christie on their podcast, Conversations with Consequences. Grazie and I also gushed for a bit about the brilliance, generosity, and humility of Judge Barrett. (By the way, if you haven't listened to the episode with Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen, I'd highly recommend it.)
And here's a very short piece I have up at CNN this AM on the first day of the hearings: "One cannot help but conclude by the actions on the part of the Democrats on Monday that the case against confirming Judge Barrett is a very poor one, indeed. Let's face it: Her qualifications are impeccable, her originalist philosophy now quite mainstream, and her dispassionate and self-possessed temperament the very best one could hope for in a judge."
Sunday, September 27, 2020
I have a piece at Politico today in which I argue that Judge Barrett embodies a new kind of feminism, one that builds upon, while remaking, RBG-style feminism. Read it all here.
Happy to announce that I have a book-length version of the historical, philosophical, and legal argument for this new feminism (which I take to have some old roots), coming out in 2021 from Notre Dame University Press.
Thursday, September 24, 2020
As Justice Ginsburg's lies in repose at the Supreme Court this week, I've published some reflections on her legacy at America. Here's a bit:
Well-intentioned interlocutors on both sides of the abortion debate often argue that women would not need to access abortion so frequently were our society more hospitable to children, our workplaces more accommodating, our government more generous in its support of families, our available housing and health care system more affordable. And it is true: These sorts of culture-wide changes would be transformative in the lives of women who find themselves unintentionally pregnant. As such, I support them, too.
But these arguments tend to neglect an essential reality about the pedagogical nature of law, well known to classical jurists and philosophers but widely forgotten today. The law shapes a culture, explicitly teaching it not only goods to be pursued and evils to avoid but even more subtly creating incentives and disincentives to action, channeling individuals to behave in certain ways. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, American law “[works] in secret upon its unconscious patient, till in the end it has molded it to its desire.”
When abortion is constitutionally protected, easily accessible and, in some jurisdictions, free of charge, as it has been in our country for nearly 50 years, that reality shapes individual and institutional behavior. Sexual partners take more sexual risks, leading to more unintentional pregnancies, more nonmarital births and more abortion; employers think less about how to accommodate caregiving and discriminate against pregnant women instead; the health care and pharmaceutical industries fail to make an investment in really understanding women’s fertility, preferring pharmaceutical quick fixes; and, perhaps most perniciously, governments fund private abortion while still making little allowance for the public good of caregiving. [visit article for active links]
Finally, and most relevant for our reflections, relatively easy abortion access too often relieves men of the mutual responsibilities that accompany sex and so has tended to upend the duties of care for dependent children that fathers ought to share equally. More than a third of children in the United States live without their fathers, even as social science has begun to isolate the essential contributions these men make to their children’s development. For although the connection between sexual intercourse and potential motherhood remains an unshakable biological reality, the connection between sexual intercourse and potential fatherhood—the connection that irresponsible men have always sought to avoid—has withered even further since Roe....
Of course, legal and cultural pressures like these are overcome by individual men and women all the time. But a culture-wide orientation in this direction harms far too many people, most especially poor women and children. Single mothers, who are disproportionately more likely to live with their children in poverty than anyone else, are hardly experiencing anything approaching “gender equality.” Rather, men who are deeply engaged in their marriages and the rearing of their children open up for their children’s mothers a whole range of possibilities and privileges unknown to mothers raising children without such paternal support. Without the investment and engagement of her husband in their children’s lives, it is hard to imagine Ms. Ginsburg achieving all that she did. Indeed, I think she would be the first to acknowledge that.
