Women are pulling graveyard shifts in backbreaking jobs to pay for IVF. angelinachapin reports
Illustration: Maxwell Erwin By the time Rebecca Bell applied for a job at Amazon, she was willing to do “literally anything” to get pregnant. The problem was money. After four miscarriages, she and her husband had already spent more than $10,000 on donor embryos, medication, and a few IVF transfers.
After doing the math, their only option might be to take a job — often a second job — at one of the growing number of companies with fertility benefits. While Silicon Valley behemoths like Apple and Meta were at the forefront, offering these perks to their white-collar workers who often pull in six-figure salaries, a growing list of corporations, including Wayfair, Target, Starbucks, and Amazon, now offer them to lower-wage workers.
Despite the danger to their bodies, many of the women I spoke with said they felt handcuffed to Amazon. It often seemed like the best option in a country that doesn’t treat the desire to give birth, or the choice not to, as a basic reproductive right worthy of coverage. Instead, infertility has historically been seen as a personal defect, says Johnston. “If you break your leg skiing, you will get help,” she says. “If you don’t have functional fallopian tubes, you will not get help.
A system that relies on the whims of corporate America to provide infertility coverage only exacerbates inequality. More than 40 percent of large companies with at least 20,000 staffers now cover IVF, and almost 20 percent cover egg freezing, a number that has almost quadrupled since 2015. But the vast majority of U.S. employees still lack any access.
Last April, she had a miscarriage, and after taking a series of medical leaves related to COVID and a pulmonary embolism, she quit Amazon. “There’s a never-ending supply of desperate people in the United States,” says Audrey, who now works part-time at Tractor Supply. “They’re fine with just rolling them in and rolling them right back out.”
This winter, while Bridget* was checking returned packages at an Amazon warehouse in Kansas, she started taking a drug to prevent miscarriages that also causes diarrhea, along with other gastrointestinal issues. The 21-year-old ran to the bathroom three times within ten hours but says she was reprimanded by managers for “cutting down on production.
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