From The New York Times authored by Vanessa Grigoriadis:
“A little over a year ago, Haley Burns, 29, was trying to get pregnant and was also becoming restless in her job. An information technology specialist for Sharp HealthCare in San Diego, she began searching for another position (while trying to get pregnant), and checking out the benefits of Sharp’s competitors (while also trying to get pregnant).
The last time she had been on the job market, Ms. Burns said, “I wanted the ability to work remotely, and of course I wanted the biggest paycheck I could get.” Now she had a different priority: fertility coverage.
Ms. Burns had prepared well for a baby, even moving to a master-planned community in San Marcos, Calif. “We moved to this neighborhood specifically for the great schools and the extra bedrooms to put the kids in,” she said. “It’s completely suburbia.”
But as time ticked by without a bundle of occasionally shrieking joy tucked into one of those extra bedrooms, she felt discouraged. She cut out caffeine, took long walks with her rescue dog, Blu, and focused on reducing her stress, which was hard to do because the main reason she was stressed was that she couldn’t get pregnant.
The way this story, euphemistically called a “fertility journey,” usually goes is that Ms. Burns would dig into her savings in pursuit of her goal. Conceiving the unnatural way has never been more widespread, with around one in 65 babies in America born after fertility treatments. Michelle Obama recently revealed that neither Sasha nor Malia came into this life after just a romantic date with Barack.
But in 2019, perhaps surprisingly given the general attenuation of benefits like vacations and pensions to the American worker, more employees at the country’s largest and most prominent companies are finding that their companies’ health care plans include fertility coverage.”
