Technology company Microsoft will help offset costs for employees who are seeking “gender-affirming” health care and abortion. The news comes after the Supreme Court’s draft opinion in an abortion case leaked and showed that the Justices voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in 1973.
Microsoft confirmed in a statement to The Washington Post that the company “will continue to do everything we can under the law to protect our employees’ rights and support employees and their enrolled dependents in accessing critical health care — which already includes services like abortion and gender-affirming care — regardless of where they live across the U.S.,”
“This support is being extended to include travel expense assistance for these and other medical services where access to care is limited in availability in an employee’s home geographic region,” the statement continued.
Last month, online review and reservation service Yelp announced it would cover expenses for employees and their spouses who travel out-of-state to get an abortion. In March, multinational investment bank Citigroup announced a similar policy for its employees. Last fall, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told employees that he would relocate anyone who was concerned about access to “reproductive healthcare” in their state.
“Gender-affirming care” is a phrase used by leftists to refer to sex reassginment surgeries. In recent months, several states, including Alabama, Arizona, and Florida have created legislation or issued guidance against allowing minors to undergo gender-affirming care.
However, the United States Assistant Secretary for Health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service (HHS), Rachel Levine, who is a biological male living as a woman, recently stated in an interview with NPR that “there is no argument among medical professionals – pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, etc. – about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.”
Levine made the remarks in response to critics of new federal guidance promoting gender-affirming care for minors. The guidance was released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services the same day a parallel document promoting gender-affirming care was released by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's National Child Traumatic Stress Network, which I covered last month.