Why fertility coverage is a benefit for everyone

Benefits professionals understand better than most people how important it is to keep up with the times. Employee expectations are constantly evolving, and a benefit seen as niche (or even unheard-of) may become a necessity if companies hope to attract and retain the best talent. Just three years ago, telecommuting was seen as a luxury for most employees, but after COVID, many individuals aren’t willing to go back to a full-time in-person mode of work.

This is especially true in the case of fertility treatment. Once seen as a private matter — and even stigmatized in the workplace — support to help employees conceive and bear children was not seen as a benefit that employers should be obligated to provide. Not only did many companies not fully understand their obligation to help their workers grow their families, but benefits professionals worried that requiring such coverage would drive up the costs of health insurance for employees with need for support.

Even as some workplaces began offering fertility coverage, these benefits were only extended to married female employees or the wives of male employees. Aid was often not available to single mothers, single fathers, queer couples, or others outside the so-called “mainstream” family structure. Yet without access to the same benefits as everyone else, talented workers in these categories will prove difficult to retain.

Thankfully, changing employee expectations, the adaptability of benefits teams, and the ingenuity of fertility health care providers have made these treatments more widely available over time. As the conversation about employee health care has shifted, benefits such as fertility treatments have become more and more common, with ambitious companies looking to hire and retain the best staff. These employers acknowledge work-life balance as a premium and inseparable part of a comprehensive employment package. In many cases, individuals whose workplaces do not provide the benefits they need to start a family will look for more forward-thinking employers that  do.

This has inspired benefits leaders to find inventive new ways to incorporate fertility treatments into competitive benefits packages, as well as to broaden the way they think about these programs. For example, in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and egg-freezing were once the primary fertility treatments available. While important, these procedures do not service the needs of cisgendered males with fertility challenges, some trans patients, or gay male couples. Even then, company insurance policies can deny coverage for such procedures without proof of infertility. Some patients must use IVF or egg-freezing procedures for health reasons and thus cannot acquire such proof.

Related: The next evolution of fertility and family-building benefits

The need for reasonable costs both to the individual employee and companywide remains a major factor when selecting fertility coverage programs. Workplace health insurance programs do offer fertility benefits, but as mentioned above, will drive up premiums across the board, and will discriminate (if not deliberately) against nontraditional families. Benefits teams and their advisors are best advised to choose a fertility care program that is modular and activates on a per-employee basis. Management pays only for those benefits used by individual employees as needed, rather than adding to their overall insurance costs. This also uncouples the needs of employees from the strict qualifications of insurance providers.

Today’s premiere employees demand a working environment that cares about more than just their 9-to-5 output. Thanks to the rising emphasis on environment, social, governance (ESG) metrics in portfolios, even investors will demand competitive benefits for their companies’ workers. By remaining flexible and considering the needs of their workers both in and out of the office, benefits teams can ensure they hire and retain the best staff, and maintain a positive image with capital and the public alike.

Dr. G. David Adamson MD, FRCSC, FACOG, FACS, is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of ARC Fertility. He is a globally recognized reproductive endocrinologist and surgeon, and is a Clinical Professor, ACF at Stanford University, and Associate Clinical Professor at UCSF.