Michael Seifert, CEO of a company called PublicSq., has offered his employees $5,000 to have babies. He announced the new incentive last week in a tweet.
"While other companies like Target are paying for their employees’ abortions, we at [PublicSq.] are paying $5,000 to any of our employees who have a baby, or adopt,” he said, adding that the company is calling this new program the “baby bonus.”
In response to someone asking why the company couldn’t also help employees with abortion costs, Seifert said “because a company paying for an employee to kill their baby is immoral and egregious.”
He describes himself as a “Christian, Husband and Father” in his Twitter biography. Public Sq. was also described as “the nation’s largest values-aligned marketplace” in a press release earlier this year. A June 1 press release said that the company was the “#2 shopping app and the #3 free app in Apple’s App Store last week, ranking above other shopping apps such as Shopify, Target, Amazon, and Walmart.”
Seifert told The Daily Signal that the move to offer $5,000 to employees who have children was also a move based on productivity.
“And we thought, as we near the anniversary of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, it would be a great idea to remind our community and our growing employee base that we are truly a company and a movement that is pro-family,” he told the outlet. “And in order to do that, we wanted to put our money where our mouth was.”
Last summer, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the unpopular Dobbs v.
Jackson Women’s Health ruling that overturned decades of protection to abortion access established by Roe v. Wade. Before the decision was officially announced, it was leaked in POLITICO.
Around that time, Target said in a memorandum to employees that it would help them pay to travel for abortion procedures, per a CNBC report. With the overturning of Roe, trigger laws in a number of states made getting abortions all but impossible, said the Guttmacher Institute.
In the wake of these changes, Audacy reported on a 10-year-old girl who was raped, impregnated and forced to leave her home state of Ohio to get an abortion in Indiana.
“For years, our healthcare benefits have included some financial support for travel, when team members needed select healthcare procedures that weren’t available where they live,” Kremer said in the memo, according to CNBC. “A few months ago, we started re-evaluating our benefits with the goal of understanding what it would look like if we broadened the travel reimbursement to any care that’s needed and covered – but not available in the team member’s community. This effort became even more relevant as we learned about the Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion, given that it would impact access to healthcare in some states.”
Other companies, including Amazon, Apple, Bumble, Citigroup and more, also said they would help employees access abortions. Seifert has also singled out Target in the past for controversy over its Pride collection.
“In the same week that Target watched its market capitalization drop by $10 billion, our marketplace experienced exponential membership growth,” he said, referencing a figure reported by the New York Post.
According to The Daily Signal, Seifert said that there had been around three PublicSq. pregnancies announced during the previous two weeks.
“So I think that’s a good sign that this is timely,” he said of the “baby bonus” project.
The outlet explained that Seifert’s employees can use the bonus for anything they want. Parents who have more than one child – for example, twins – get a bonus amount for each child.
“We want to make sure that we are supporting families and then giving them the agency to utilize these resources as they see fit,” he said.
According to Gallup polls, public opinion regarding abortion restrictions has been getting more and more unpopular since the Dobbs decision. As of this month, a record-high 69% think first-trimester abortions should be legal. Most Americans still oppose abortions later in pregnancy.
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