Laurel Duggan
A Yelp executive said women need access to abortions to be successful at work as the company announced it would fund travel expenses for employees traveling out of state for abortions.
“The ability to control your reproductive health, and whether or when you want to extend your family, is absolutely fundamental to being able to be successful in the workplace,” Miriam Warren, Yelp’s chief diversity officer, told The New York Times.
The company will begin to cover travel expenses for employees and their dependents who go out of state to get abortions beginning in June, a Yelp spokesman told the Daily Caller News Foundation, and will treat abortion access as an essential part of women’s workplace equality. Yelp already pays for employees’ abortions through its insurance program.
I’ll always be thankful to work for @Yelp but never more so than when I get an email with the subject line: “Travel Coverage for Reproductive Health” – as an Oklahoman, I feel especially thankful to get that email today. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
— J Po (@jpokc) April 12, 2022
“We’ve long been a strong advocate for equality in the workplace, and believe that gender equality cannot be achieved if women’s healthcare rights are restricted,” Warren said in a statement shared with DCNF.
Yelp has previously been a vocal proponent of abortion, and the Yelp Foundation matched employee contributions with double the original donation to pro-abortion organizations including the Center for Reproductive Rights, NARAL Pro Choice America, Lilith Fund, Planned Parenthood and Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas in 2021, the spokesman told DCNF.
Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppleman came out against a Texas abortion law banning abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected in a statement to the NYT in September.
“The effective ban on abortions in Texas not only infringes on women’s rights to reproductive health care, but it puts their health and safety at greater risk,” he told the NYT. “We are deeply concerned about how this law will impact our employees in the state.”
The company also made a point of manually reviewing about 2,000 abortion clinics and crisis pregnancy centers to make sure they were accurately categorized after Yelp’s CEO saw an episode of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” in which Oliver claimed crisis pregnancy centers were deceiving women by steering them to options other than abortion, the spokesman told the DCNF.
Yelp is the latest of several corporations to go out of its way to help its female employees get abortions, joining Citigroup, Apple and Match, all of which are funding employee travel costs for out-of-state abortions.
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