Big business has a baby problem. Specifically, many of America’s largest corporations have a problem with babies and therefore with working parents — especially working mothers.

Alexandra DeSanctis and I recently published a report for the Ethics and Public Policy Center documenting the family policies of the Fortune 100. We found that about half of these corporate behemoths champion abortion for their employees; after the Dobbs decision, they made a point of announcing that their employee health care plans will cover abortion tourism for workers who live in states that restrict ending human lives in utero.

No doubt many more companies quietly cover the costs of travel for abortion as part of standardized health care plans. But the corporations touting abortion tourism as a major benefit are sending a message to their employees: Babies are hazardous to your lifestyle, your career, and our bottom line.

Such enthusiastic corporate support for abortion suggests a C-suite culture that would rather pay for abortions than cover the costs of workers having babies. There is the implicit premise that babies are a potential problem to be managed rather than persons to be welcomed and that workers (especially women) need to carefully time having babies to optimize their careers (and, of course, the company’s profits).

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. Though some companies are models of transparency when it comes to family benefits such as parental leave (Walmart, the largest private employer in the country, was notably excellent), a majority are not. We ranked 38 companies as having good transparency, 45 as middling, and 17 as poor.

This lack of clarity is a problem for workers who want to compare the benefits packages offered by potential employers before applying for or accepting a position. When combined with loud support for abortion, this opacity sends an anti-family message. We found at least 17 companies that had announced coverage for abortion tourism while providing only middling or even poor transparency regarding their family benefits. To take one example, prospective Nike employees may not know what sort of maternity leave to expect, but they’ll know they can get abortions on the company dime.

Yes, the Fortune 100 encompasses many different companies with different workforces, and some of their publicly posted benefits plans are, on paper at least, quite generous, as seen in companies promising extensive paid parental leave. However, some of this generosity turns out to be less than it initially seems. For example, the adoption assistance many companies promise will often cover only a fraction of the costs of a typical adoption. This partial coverage stands in contrast to promises of full coverage for abortions.

Even when companies are broadly generous, this open-handedness seems to be defined in terms of flexibility, often with an implicit preference for carefully timed children — who may be treated as disposable if not wanted and as commodities if they are. Many Fortune 100 companies fund and celebrate the commodification of babies via commercial surrogacy, which treats children as expensive products rather than as persons. Some of America’s biggest companies are eager participants in this buying and selling of babies. For example, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, will pay up to $40,000 for surrogacy expenses. 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.

As this illustrates, corporate spending on benefits is disconnected from the goods those benefits are meant to promote. Businesses talk about the importance of family and work-life balance, but they often treat children as either a burden to be discarded or as optional luxury goods, rather than as people who should be welcomed, loved, and valued in and for themselves. This disregard for the well-being of children is what unites loud corporate support for abortion with corporate preening over buying babies via surrogacy. 

In both cases, there is a fundamental incoherence in the corporate approach to family benefits. 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. If corporations are to avoid this incoherence, they will need a right understanding of what family and human flourishing are and how they fit together. 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.