Yelp will cover travel expenses for abortion access, but there's still progress to be made

From next month, Yelp will cover expenses for employees and their dependents who have to travel out of state to access abortion services.

The business aggregator company says it already covers abortion care in its health insurance policy but is now expanding its services as reproductive rights are being placed in peril across America. Announced Tuesday, travel benefits for U.S. Yelp employees who need to access abortion services by traveling can now use their health insurance to cover such charges. This will extend to employees who aren't able to procure abortions due to any current or future action that would come in the way of accessing the procedure.

The action comes as a response to Texas banning abortion procedures after six weeks of pregnancy, a bill that was put into effect in September 2021.

“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," Yelp's chief diversity officer, Miriam Warren, said in a statement to Mashable.

"As a remote-first company with a distributed workforce, this new benefit allows our U.S. employees and their dependents to have equitable access to reproductive care, regardless of where they live.”

The Supreme Court decision in Texas has since prompted other major tech companies — like Apple, Match Group (Tinder's parent company), and dating app Bumble — to implement similar travel reimbursements for employees. Uber and Lyft said they will pay legal fees for any drivers who are sued under the Texas abortion law. Software company Salesforce has gone further, offering employees help to move out of the state. More recently, Citigroup became the first major financial institution to cover travel costs for their workers who are affected by the ban in Texas.

Yelp, which is headquartered in San Francisco, has over 200 employees in Texas. The company has offered the benefit to employees in other states that restrict abortion access, such as Oklahoma. This past week, the latter's governor Kevin Stitt signed a bill that makes performing an abortion illegal except in medical emergencies, with punishments of up to $100,000 in fines and 10 years in prison.

Yelp has also made efforts to remove any misinformation or redirection on their own website when it comes to abortion care. In 2018, the company's User Operations team manually reviewed over 2,000 Yelp listings including businesses and clinics, to ensure that abortion services and crisis pregnancy centers would fall under the correct category, and weren't deceiving anyone with alternative practices. Think: the crisis pregnancy centers trying to steer women away from abortion, as John Oliver outlined in a 2018 episode of Last Week Tonight.

These efforts from tech companies such as Yelp are welcome as America's laws on reproductive health move in a terrifying direction. However, Jezebel points out that some of these corporations extending their healthcare benefits are often the same companies donating to politicians and groups behind laws to restrict reproductive rights. According to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit research group charting money in U.S. politics, Citigroup, Uber, Lyft, and Yelp are among these companies. Yelp, for instance, is listed as having donated to Republican politician Benjamin Sasse, whose campaign against reproductive rights is well-documented.

It should be noted that Yelp and Citi have also donated to Democratic groups and candidates.

So while these employee benefits are fundamental for women and pregnant people to have autonomy over their reproductive rights, to truly ensure and expand abortion access will take more progress. Corporations making promises to employees should support only those in power who align with their rhetoric — if they must donate all.