Multiple woke companies have launched a race to effectively refund Roe v. Wade, chiefly by declaring they will cover all the costs for employees who travel out of state to terminate pregnancies in the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling.
These companies predictably include numerous big tech companies, among them Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft, alongside big banks, such as JP Morgan Chase. The companies have opted to add abortion to their health care coverage packages in light of the Court’s decision.
Contrary to media-fueled disinformation, the ruling does not implement a federal ban on abortion; instead, the ruling is based upon the 10th amendment, which asserts that any rights not specifically renumerated in the Constitution fall within the domain of states.
However, in the spirit of the same misrepresentation of Georgia’s voting integrity laws, media outlets have opted to portray a more hysterical, albeit false, scenario instead, which has predictably led numerous organizations to proclaim that they will fund abortions.
Disney, which has recently graced headlines for its outrage over banning LGBTQ curriculum for kindergarteners in Florida, immediately criticized the Supreme Court’s most recent decision, raging that the Court allegedly delivered “a crushing blow to reproductive rights.”
However, in spite of the companies’ predictably mass media-friendly outrage, they may find themselves in an uncomfortable legal situation, given the potential repercussions that may arise in light of their short-sighted adjustments to healthcare policies.
According to legal scholar Robin Fretwell Wilson, who is a faculty member at the University of Illinois, “if [someone] can sue me as a person for carrying your daughter across state lines, [they] can sue Amazon for paying for it.”
However, given that the majority of large companies fund their own healthcare plans, federal legislation regarding employee benefits will likely provide companies with the cover necessary to address any civil lawsuits that may arise from their willingness to fund abortions.
Specifically, the Employee Retirement Income Security ACT (ERISA) disallows individual states from dictating which employee benefits large companies can and cannot cover, which means that lawsuits raised in response to companies’ refunding of Roe v. Wade will likely not achieve success.
However, approximately one-third of the American workforce is covered by state law, rather than federal law, which means that ERISA cannot be cited in their defense.
