In today’s edition: a lawsuit against Match Group, Gov. Whitmer’s meeting with Trump, and how one progressive company benefit has survived the second Trump era. – Still going. For months now, I’ve been wondering about something. Remember all the employee benefits companies instituted in 2022 after the reversal of
Roe v.
Wade? In the Trump 2.0 era, have businesses quietly sunset those benefits? If they haven’t, how on earth have they been able to keep them going when even some
women’s ERGs haven’t been able to survive this presidential term?
My colleague
Lila MacLellan
looked into that question for Fortune. She found that most companies that said they would cover travel costs for out-of-state abortions still are, on paper, paying those costs. That mostly has to do with how they structured the benefits.
The key is that these benefits are no longer just for abortion. Companies have written these policies to cover travel costs for any health care procedure that is not available in an employee’s home state. This makes these policies less of a target—and means employees could get costs covered for other procedures with an uncertain political future, like fertility treatments or gender-affirming care.
Another reason these benefits haven’t been a target, however, is that they may not be used that much—so anti-abortion activists have invested their efforts elsewhere. Employees, understandably, may be reluctant to turn in receipts and records to their employer or a third-party provider for something that could make them a legal target.
Lila did some great reporting on this. She found that 20 major companies confirmed their commitment to covering costs of abortion-related travel in 2022. Five—Citi, JPMorgan, HPE, Levi’s, and Yelp—definitively still have those benefits in place, while the other 15 won’t confirm one way or the other. I encourage you to read her full story
here.
Emma Hinchliffeemma.hinchliffe@fortune.comThe Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’
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