Over 650 workers at Google are demanding the company offer “abortion benefits” to contractors, suspend donations to politicians who are pro-life and protect users from abortion “disinformation” and police investigation requests.
The demands were sent in a petition to executives at Alphabet, which owns Google, Reuters reported Thursday. In addition, the workers demanded that Google should remove search results from pro-life pregnancy centers that do not provide abortions.
Alejandra Beatty, a technical program manager at Alphabet subsidiary Verily, co-led the petition. She told Reuters that she is looking for a “comprehensive response” from Google on their plans to protect access to abortion.
“Beatty said Alphabet should consider protecting reproductive rights an existential battle, like it did COVID-19, and convene a task force to oversee product changes,” the report stated.
Bambi Okugawa, a data center technician for Google, told CNBC that many of the company’s contractors are “scared” of losing access to abortion in their state and “have been seeking sterilization options because they know there won’t be access to abortions in the state.”
CNBC published parts of the petition.
In order to align with Google’s core values (go/3-google-values), we demand that Alphabet acknowledges the impact this Supreme Court ruling has on all its workers and to immediately do the following: Protect all workers’ access to reproductive healthcare by setting a reproductive healthcare standard in the US Wages and Benefits Standards (go/alphabet-tvc-benefits-standards) including: Extending the same travel-for-healthcare benefits offered to FTEs to TVCs.
Google unveiled “abortion benefits” after the Supreme Court ruling in June overturning Roe v. Wade. This included options for employees to relocate to states with lenient abortion laws and assistance with "abortion travel."
"$50 is NOT a viable reimbursement for a hotel stay in most states, and does not address childcare or lost wages,” the petition reportedly states, regarding the company's current abortion travel benefits.
After the Dobbs ruling, a slew of companies, including Yelp, Citigroup, Microsoft, Salesforce and Starbucks unrolled policies to help their workers obtain abortions.
A poll from USA Today-Suffolk published in June found that 23 percent of Americans believe that corporations have a responsibility to speak out supporting abortion rights on behalf of workers. Sixty-seven percent said corporations should not take a stand on the issue. The same poll found that 52 percent of Americans support employers providing assistance to workers to travel to other states for abortions. Thirty-six percent oppose companies providing this kind of benefit for workers.
Leah covered Aug. 10 how a Nebraska mother allegedly helped her teenage daughter carry out an illegal abortion, after 20 weeks, then burn and bury the baby. However, mainstream media outlets were focused on the fact that tech giant Facebook provided the mother and daughter’s messages to police and that they were being prosecuted for an abortion.
A mother performed an abortion on her 23-week pregnant daughter at home.
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 9, 2022
They burned and buried the body.
They then talked about the horrific crime they committed over Facebook dms, which were obtained by a search warrant.
This is how the liars in the media frame the story. pic.twitter.com/Zwfi8nqZ6S
This is how news outlets decided to headline the story of a mother who killed her daughter's 23-week-old baby at their house, burned and buried the body, talked about it in Facebook dms, had them seized by a search warrant, and were charged with multiple crimes for it. pic.twitter.com/SIJNatjfoE
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 10, 2022
Google employees who signed the petition wrote that user searches concerning abortion on the platform "must never be saved, handed over to law enforcement, or treated as a crime." CNBC noted that Google said last month it would work quickly to delete users' location history after going to an abortion clinic or other medical site.