Five Reasons Why Comprehensive Fertility Benefits are So Important to Your Employees

While challenges with pregnancy and childbirth are often highly visible, fertility challenges tend to go unseen. For the roughly 13.1% of women who experience infertility in the U.S., their challenges are rarely covered comprehensively: about a third of U.S. employers offer fertility benefits today, but most are narrowly focused on reimbursement for treatment. Employers need to consider fertility benefits that support the physical, emotional, and financial health of their workforce, regardless of their path to parenthood. 

Fertility treatments are stressful and expensive

For many people going through infertility challenges, it's an incredibly intimate, personal, and sometimes painful process that can be difficult to share with close family and friends, much less managers and coworkers. But it's an important issue to pay attention to, as the use of assisted reproductive technology (ART) doubled between 2007 and 2017 and approximately 12.7% of women have sought out and received infertility services.  

Additionally, 63% of LGBTQ people expect to use ART, adoption or foster care to become parents. Fertility interventions often total tens of thousands of dollars, so it's not difficult for them to see the appeal of an employer willing to assist them in their family planning financially.

By expanding your benefits packages to include more aspects of the family-building journey, you can help promote inclusivity and drive healthy equity and better outcomes for your employees. If you're looking to educate your team or achieve leadership buy-in, here are five reasons why you should offer expanded fertility benefits to your employees.

1) Keep Up With Shifting Employee Priorities 

In the wake of the pandemic, corporate America has gone through a period of reevaluation, and long-standing priorities have taken on a new urgency. Talented employees have new standards for the support and benefits they receive from employers, fertility has shot to the top of that list. Not only are employees demanding them, employers are starting to see the opportunity to leverage fertility benefits to improve their diversity and inclusivity goals.

For the 31% of companies providing fertility benefits, the most common approach by a wide margin is reimbursement: helping cover the cost of fertility medications (76%) and in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments (77%). More than 80% of the best workplaces offer reimbursement for fertility care, and nearly half of these organizations have recently expanded their coverage to appeal to employees and job seekers. Almost 70% of millennials would change jobs to ensure they have fertility coverage. 

So, it's not just about offering basic healthcare packages that employees can use to get by anymore. If you want to attract and retain top talent, you need to meet employees where their priorities are. 

2) Promote Inclusivity at Your Organization

Fertility care contributes widely to inclusivity by giving everyone—regardless of gender, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, or marital status—the opportunity to start a family. As millennials and Gen Z employees and job seekers demand real action from employers to improve diversity and inclusion, HR benefits programs present a significant opportunity to close gaps. 54% of millennials say they would feel more loyal to their employer if they extended fertility benefits to LGBTQIA+ employees. 

• 80% of millennials believe inclusion is essential when choosing an employer.
• 39% of millennials would leave their current organization for a more inclusive one.

More than 60% of LGBTQIA+ people planning families expect to use assisted reproductive technology, foster care, or adoption to become parents. Unfortunately, most fertility benefits leave them fending for themselves. Suppose your fertility benefits require a medical diagnosis of infertility to qualify to use them, for example. In that case, your aspiring LGBTQIA+ parents are excluded entirely, along with single people choosing to parent alone.