Professor: Corporate America will soon be thrust amid culture war’s abortion battles

Nicholas Barry Creel is an assistant professor of business law at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville.

Abortion, a long-standing fault line in the culture wars, just experienced the fabled “big one” with the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

The aftershocks of that seismic shift in the legal landscape will continue to play out over the next several years, with both pro-choice and pro-life states set to pass possibly hundreds of new laws on the subject.

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The result will be a dizzying array of complex and oftentimes contradictory policies that virtually assures this conflict will intensify before it abates. Corporate America in particular stands to be on the front lines of these battles, whether it now intends to or not.

The primary reasons big businesses will be pulled into the fray are fairly simple, they have a lot of power and they usually operate in multiple states.

Corporate activism

As three big-screen versions of Spider-Man have taught us over and over again over the last twenty years, “with great power comes great responsibility.” With extreme sums of money at their disposal, corporations are undeniably a significant reservoir of power in America and they’ve increasingly come to believe they should use that power for what they view as the common good.

Some of the biggest companies have already begun to use their power to get involved in state-level politics. Georgians saw this first hand when Coke and Delta Airlines publicly criticized the state’s government for enacting a new voting law they felt was too restrictive.

Going even further, the MLB pulled its All-Star Game out of Atlanta in response to the Georgia voting law. These corporate shows of force were similar to how the NBA moved its all-star game out of North Carolina when the state passed a bill in 2016 that restricted what bathrooms transgender individuals could use. The financial pressure on the state from this boycott was no small part of what eventually led to the law’s repeal a year later.  

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We will no doubt soon see companies react to newly enacted state laws restricting abortion access, just as they did with the transgender bathroom bans and voting rights bill.

Conservative states like Texas and Georgia, which have been successfully “poaching” companies and other forms of business investment from higher tax states for years now, might well see that trend come to an abrupt end, or even reverse.

Democratic states are already outright using the issue for this very purpose. With 61% of Americans being widely supportive of abortion access in almost all instances, businesses will have more support from the public on this issue than they did when boycotting states over transgender bathroom bills. Red states should then prepare now for the economic hits they’re soon to take from this.

Corporate action is already underway

Beyond the fact that they have power, large corporations will be drawn into these battles if, for no other reason, they tend to do business in multiple states. Multi-state operations inherently increase the chances a company will have employees in states where abortion access is being severely limited or eliminated entirely.

Some companies are already being put in the position where they feel the need to act because of this. For example, we’re seeing a deluge of businesses say they’ll pay travel costs of their employees to go to pro-choice states to obtain an abortion. That, under some state laws, could get these companies into a world of legal trouble both criminally and civilly, further pulling them into the abortion access fight.

Leading the anti-abortion fight on this front is Texas, the Attorney General of which has explicitly promised to go after any companies that help Texas residents obtain an abortion with fines that could exceed $100,000 an incident.

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Pro-choice states like California are reacting by enacting “shield laws”, which will prevent lawsuits like those coming out of Texas from having any legal authority in their state as they seek to make abortion easier to access.

However, for a company that has any significant assets in Texas or any other state without a similar shield law, there remains a very real danger of having to pay those substantial fines on top of the mountains of legal fees they’ll incur fighting against them.  

The issue could easily even result in corporate officers begin charged for criminal offenses, up to and including murder.

Georgia is a good example of a state where this sort of company policy “aiding” women who get an abortion could soon trigger these sorts of criminal charges. The reason for this is that Georgia’s anti-abortion law, now officially in effect, gives a fetus legal personhood as soon as any cardiac activity is detectable, which is usually at about 6 weeks into a pregnancy.

A company that pays for a Georgia resident to get an abortion in another state could then conceivably see its managers indicted for felony murder as they would, under the law, potentially be as culpable for murder as someone who drives a get-away car for a hired hitman.

With such extreme possibilities ahead, it is nigh unthinkable that corporations will just sit on the sidelines and wait for the dust to settle.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Corporations need to take a side in fight over state abortion laws