Cushman & Wakefield recently became the first among top commercial real estate brokerages in the U.S. to say it’ll cover the cost of travel for abortions. The Chicago-based firm said in a statement, “Believing that all our employees should have equal access to safe and consistent healthcare, regardless of where they live, the firm is expanding healthcare benefits to reimburse up to $2,000 of travel-related expenses for U.S. medical care, including reproductive healthcare, that is not available within 100 miles of an employee’s home.”
As far as we know, other top real estate companies have remained silent on the abortion issue since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Cushman & Wakefield is based in Illinois and bordered by other states in the Midwest that have already banned abortion or where the medical procedure is threatened, according to data from The Guardian.
Despite the flurry of corporate announcements related to abortion, the reality is most women seeking the procedure are poor and unlikely to have access to corporate health plans or subsidized medical travel. According to a 2014 study by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research organization, about 75 percent of abortion patients had incomes below the federal poverty level, a sobering truth for companies promoting abortion policies regardless of their stand on the issue.