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Commentary

What If Companies Chose to Be Pro-Child?

July 29, 2024

First Tractor Supply Co., then John Deere, now Harley-Davidson. Corporate wokeness is being exposed in companies from the heartland, and as customers speak out, these companies have begun retracing their steps.

In June, filmmaker and social commentator Robby Starbuck posted a series of videos and screenshots on X exposing a workplace culture at Tractor Supply Co. that was widely out of step with the values of their customers, leading the company to issue an apology and change course. Last week, John Deere came out with a similar letter, although questions remain on how committed the company is to a true change. It remains to be seen how Harley-Davidson will respond to recent scrutiny.

The other outstanding question is whether either company has changed its internal policies. It is one thing for the company to stop promoting ideologies that fly in the face of their customer base’s values and sponsoring events that encourage child-harming practices. This is an excellent first step. However, many companies offer benefits packages that result in harm to children. From Apple to Zillow, large, prominent companies have embraced and marketed benefits that violate children’s rights in an effort to attract employees.

For instance, a growing number of companies have begun offering coverage for transgender treatments. According to a 2019 study, 19% of insurance plans covered cross-sex hormone therapy, and 31% covered puberty blockers, preventing the normal, healthy development of children. Both interventions violate children’s right to an intact body. Research shows that the majority of children who struggle with gender dysphoria will outgrow those feelings as they enter adulthood. Transitioning them needlessly inflicts irreversible harm on their healthy bodies.

The children of parents who transition also suffer, often facing the loss of a relationship with a parent or a dramatic change in that relationship. For the kids involved, a parent’s gender transition is a major upheaval that often feels like a death in the family.

In addition to gender transition benefits, industry leaders from tech to finance to retail have touted fertility benefits in recent years. While it may seem pro-child at a glance, the fertility industry is not in the business of protecting human life and dignity. More often than not, the industry is built on child loss and the commodification of human life. Every life created by the fertility industry deserves to be protected and treated with dignity. Sadly, what many people do not see are the over 90% of IVF babies who did not survive the process, were not chosen, have been donated to research, or have joined the roughly 1.5 million human lives being kept on ice with little to no chance of being born.

When a company offers coverage for assisted reproduction, they do not get to specify that they only want to cover IVF when it does not result in the freezing or destruction of human embryos. To fund IVF is to fund an industry that results in a loss of life that keeps pace with the abortion industry.

The fertility industry also facilitates the creation of motherless and fatherless children. While exact numbers are not tracked, it is estimated that 30-60,000 donor-conceived children are born each year. These children lose their mother and/or father at the moment of conception, are cut off from their family history, their medical history, and countless half-siblings.

Additionally, 4.7% of IVF cycles were for the purpose of surrogacy, which divides the role of mother between up to three different, optional women, forces the infant to go through maternal separation moments after birth, and treats children like a commodity.

Some or all of these practices are covered under “inclusive” plans. Gender and fertility benefits gain companies points toward the Human Rights Campaign’s (HRC) Corporate Equality Index score. HRC’s index is published every year, and high-profile companies work to achieve perfect scores. Out of 100 possible points, 30 are focused on “inclusive” benefits. As already seen, many of these benefits involve direct violations of children’s rights. Starbuck has pointed out that John Deere made no commitment to abandoning the HRC’s CEI scoring.

Even companies that are not pursuing a high CEI score may find themselves covering child-harming practices under their benefits packages. These options are increasingly standard in insurance plans as the demand grows for coverage of gender transition, abortifacients, and fertility treatments that result in the destruction of human life and the creation of motherless and fatherless children. Many companies opt for an “off-the-shelf” product when selecting insurance plans that cannot be customized, even if there are specific treatments the company may wish to opt out of covering.

What many companies do not realize is that, while it may be challenging, there are ways to serve and support their employees without victimizing children. Will it include resisting bad corporate policies, challenging bad regulations, and navigating a complex insurance world? Yes. But companies can and should push back.

Pro-child and pro-family benefits are not only possible but attractive. Imagine if workplaces decided to craft their leave policies in a way that recognizes the importance of maternal-child bonding in the early days after birth, offered paternity leave in a manner that recognizes the crucial role of dads, embraced flexibility for working parents, and offered incentives for opening one’s home to vulnerable children through adoption or foster care.

What if instead of fueling the IVF machine, companies offered benefits to target and resolve underlying fertility issues so parents could pursue pregnancy without being dependent on a technician? What if instead of subsidizing trauma-inducing surrogacy, companies funded trauma-redeeming adoption? What if instead of providing divorce benefits, companies funded premarital, mid-marital, and whole-family therapy? That’s exactly the kind of benefits a company would offer if they sought to both support employees and pursue justice for children.

Especially among Millennial and Gen Z workers, benefits play a crucial role in employee acquisition and retention. As Starbuck’s work has demonstrated, many employees are not looking for corporate wokeness. Nor, for that matter, are consumers. While these two companies have certainly been dramatic and public examples, they are not the only companies losing interest in woke policies.

If the corporate world aligned with both employee needs and customer demand, they would ditch CEI scores in favor of pro-child policies.

Patience Griswold is the engagement coordinator at Them Before Us, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting children’s rights.