The new abortion law in Texas is roiling the business community, prompting some firms to directly interfere with the controversial enforcement mechanism and putting pressure on others to publicly denounce the measure.
Texas-based dating platforms Match and Bumble set up relief funds to help people affected by the law, while ride-hailing platforms Uber and Lyft decried the statute and said they would cover all legal costs for any of their drivers who get sued for driving a customer to an abortion clinic.
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“This law is incompatible with people’s basic rights to privacy, our community guidelines, the spirit of rideshare, and our values as a company,” Lyft wrote in a message to drivers, adding that it will also donate $1 million to Planned Parenthood.
Web hosting company GoDaddy dropped an abortion tracking website that was launched to help enforce the six-week abortion ban, saying it violated the firm’s terms of service. The anti-abortion activists moved the site to another web hosting company, Epik, which promptly shut it down as well.
The Texas law, considered the most restrictive in the country, bans abortion as early as six weeks, before most women know they’re pregnant. Under the law, individuals can sue anyone who provides or “aids or abets” an abortion after six weeks for up to $10,000 plus legal fees, a provision that has drawn widespread criticism, including from Republican lawmakers.
Still, as of Tuesday afternoon, only a handful of companies have spoken out against the law. Corporate America has mostly remained silent, despite its vocal opposition to Texas’s restrictive voting bill that was signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott (R) Tuesday.
“It’s not surprising because this is harder than a number of other issues,” said Sandra Sucher, a professor of management at Harvard Business School. bans off our bodies Abortion is particularly contentious because we know that it relates to people’s religious views, which is kind of a no-go zone for companies.”
Some major companies with large workforces in Texas, including American Airlines, Dell Technologies, AT&T, Google and Amazon, have not publicly commented on the abortion law after speaking out against the voting bill. Those firms criticized the GOP-backed voting bill, which Dell CEO Michael Dell slammed as undemocratic.
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