When companies pay for artificial insemination – economy

People who want a child and cannot have one often suffer a lot, including financially. Various medicines, fertility therapies, artificial insemination, sperm donation – all of this costs money. The more attempts, the more money you need until it actually works. Or until you give up. And the health insurance companies usually do not pay anything or only a part of the sums.

Infertility is a major societal problem. According to the World Health Organization, more than one in seven couples is affected. Businesses in the US are now responding to this situation. According to the foundation International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans 40 percent of all companies there already offer their employees, and especially female employees, the option of paying part or all of the costs of fertility treatment. Large companies such as Apple, Facebook and Google have been paying the fees for their employees who want to put their eggs on hold in order to later become pregnant. That’s often tens of thousands of dollars.

Now, for the first time in Europe, an employer is offering its employees support of up to 40,000 euros in the event of an unfulfilled requirement desire to have children at. According to its own statements, the American consulting firm Kearney, which has branches in Berlin and Munich, among other places, also pays the same amount for adoptions. Kearney has just launched a new bonus program for employees in Europe which, among other things, provides high subsidies for childcare and allows a six-month fully paid break after the birth of the child – i.e. more than the statutory parental allowance in Germany.

Employers want to present themselves as social and modern

One thought behind this is that in times of skills shortages, employers need to think of new ways to get and keep the best people. Younger people in particular can often no longer be lured with money alone. Employers therefore want to present themselves as social and understanding and aggressively present programs that are intended to promote work-life balance – and gender equality. The new fertility and family support is driving social change, specifically: “equal treatment of both parents – regardless of gender or the way they became parents,” says Marc Lakner, the head of Kearney in Germany, Austria and the Switzerland.

One US company that is particularly generous in supporting the costs of such therapies is Starbucks. Michigan’s Autumn Lucy is one of the women who has benefited. She worked three mornings a week for the coffee chain for a few months. In return, the company paid her for artificial insemination and health insurance that covered more than her previous one. Their son Lordy was born in November 2022. At Tik Tok she reports on her journey. She doesn’t think the best system is to have to look for a second job in order to be able to bear the costs. Actually, affordable health care is needed for everyone. “But at the same time I have to work with the broken system that we have.”