Why big tech companies are so quiet on abortion rights - The Verge

Big tech companies offered new benefits to protect abortion access for their employees, but they haven’t made major product changes or taken outspoken stances against upcoming restrictions.

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on Friday, companies across the tech industry rushed out messaging on where they stood. Apple said its health plan had long covered travel costs for out-of-state reproductive health care; Microsoft said it would expand its health coverage to include travel costs for abortion; Google even said it would pay for employees to relocate in light of the ruling, no questions asked.

For the most part, they were quick, makeshift policies aligning these companies with the right to choose and granting benefits that supported that stance. But by and large, their responses weren’t full-throated repudiations of the Supreme Court’s ruling, let alone stands against any state that would seek to ban abortion.

There are plenty of firmer steps these companies could take. For the most part, companies continue to donate to anti-abortion candidates, and Uber, Match, and AT&T have, as recently as last year, funded a Republican group that pushed for Roe to be overturned, as noted by Popular Information. Regulators have called on Google to alter its Search products to avoid recommending anti-abortion clinics — but the company has broadly ignored the calls. More urgently, major tech firms across the board have yet to announce new steps or commitments to safeguard the data on our phones, which remain some of the biggest threats to abortion seekers.

“This is not a solution,” the Alphabet Workers Union, an organization representing hundreds of Google employees and contractors, wrote on Twitter about Google’s relocation offer.

And this does NOTHING to address the tens of thousands temporary, vendor & contract workers who are more likely to live in states w. abortion restrictions, more likely to be people who can become pregnant, more likely to be workers of color & paid low wages by Alphabet.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/30/23189810/abortion-rights-activism-big-tech-employees

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