Reproductive health is a business issue—this is the message that a new campaign wants companies and investors to know and to act upon.  The effort is led by Rhia Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture firm specializing in contraceptive and maternal health investments.

In September 2019, Rhia Ventures sent a letter signed by 39 institutional investors to over 30 major Fortune 500 companies requesting dialogue in four areas where corporations can take a positive role in ensuring their employees’ access to full reproductive health services: insurance, benefits, public policy, and political spending. Signatories included the Office of the New York Comptroller Scott Stringer, SEIU, the Presbyterian Church (USA), Amalgamated Bank, JLens, and other investment management firms and foundations, representing an aggregate $236 billion in assets under management. This is the first sustained, multi-investor effort to influence corporate behavior on this topic.

The overture has led to dialogue with a number of companies, as well as the filing of five shareholder proposals at Coca-Cola, Home Depot, Delta Airlines, Progressive Corporation, and Macy’s. These proposals call attention to the challenges companies can encounter due to the highly differentiated state legal environments in which they operate. The proposals note: 

In the first six months of 2019, states enacted 58 abortion restrictions…. At the same time, other states enacted legislation that protects these rights and advanced measures to increase access to contraception. A similar patchwork of state laws regulates the coverage of abortion by private insurance plans. Eleven states ban abortion coverage in all state-regulated private insurance plans, whereas six states require private insurance plans to cover abortion. 

To better educate companies and investors on this topic, Rhia Ventures published Hidden Value: The Business Case for Reproductive Health earlier this year. Hidden Value draws from interviews with nearly 40 companies (over half in the Fortune 500) and a survey of 1,377 college-educated, employed Americans aged 18-64. 

The report argues that businesses cannot afford to overlook the bottom-line impact of access to reproductive health services, noting that 99 percent of women use contraception and 24 percent have had an abortion by age 45. It identifies five motivators for companies to strengthen reproductive health policies: widening the talent pipeline; supporting and retaining existing talent; providing high-impact benefits with low-cost investments; delivering on diversity and inclusion commitments; and preparing for an increase in public scrutiny, which began to emerge in the spring of 2019 after the passage of a wave of state laws effectively banning abortion.  All the new laws are being challenged in court.

Hidden Value found that companies are frequently unaware of the benefits they provide for reproductive health and often may unintentionally limit their offerings as a result. It also found that the vast majority of women in their child-bearing years say they would want their employer’s insurance to cover the full range of reproductive health care and that majorities of both women and men say restrictive state abortion laws would factor into whether or not they would accept a position in that state.

Shelley Alpern
Director of Shareholder Advocacy, Rhia Ventures