Will President Trump's DEI ban affect reproductive benefits?

As organizations all over the country attempt to figure out what the executive orders on DEI mean for them, employees are left with important questions regarding their ability to start a family. 

Out of the 46 executive orders President Donlad Trump signed on his first day, two directly targeted workplace DEI efforts. Together, they ended DEI offices and initiatives across the federal workforce, as well as affirmative action enforcement for federal contractors relating to women and minorities. Will the Trump administration go after reproductive benefits next? 

While the full extent of the ramifications of DEI  actions is yet to be determined, family building and reproductive benefits are safe — and may actually find more support in and out of the workplace, says Dr. Roger Shedlin, CEO of fertility benefits provider WIN. 

"We view family building and reproductive benefits as medical treatments akin to cancer treatments or broken bones," he says. "Just like those benefits wouldn't change with changes to DEI, we have not seen any sort of pull back on either existing customers who offer the benefit, or potential new customers. In some ways, to us, this is yet another accelerant to the trend to offer more and be more generous and more inclusive." 

Read more: What Trump's executive orders mean for DEI

Since COVID, the outlook on reproductive benefits of all kinds — including family building support through IVF, adoption and foster support, as well as menopausal benefits — have been on a steady incline. According to a 2023 survey from Business Group on Health and Fidelity Investments, 86% of employers said they wanted to offer more family-forming and reproductive support by 2025. And while there have been significant challenges throughout the years, a change in leadership is not the most pressing. 

"Due to the Dobbs case and the overturn of Roe v. Wade, complexity already existed in the legislature in each state around this kind of care," Shedlin says. "And the trend we saw come out of that is employers in states with restrictions wanting to level the playing field for employees, and that was already the case before the inauguration, not just after." 

It helps that candidates on both sides leading up to the election were largely supportive of IVF and other reproductive rights, according to Shedlin. Even the Trump administration talked about a national fertility mandate that would make IVF treatments legally covered by the government or insurance companies. Should that come to pass, it would add a layer of insulation to those benefits not only for the next four years, but for the foreseeable future.

Still, employees everywhere are still concerned about even the smallest changes a DEI ban could bring and whether their employers will be able to support them. But getting support from their organizations may not be as big of an issue as they think, according to Shedlin. 

Read more: Gen Z may save DEI in corporate America

"Employers are finding ways to signal that they are still supportive of recruiting and retaining as diverse and talented a workforce as possible," he says. "To that end, we're seeing increased calls from our employer clients for employee engagement campaigns and education campaigns, webinars and other types of communications about the availability of these benefits." 

Shedlin and his team have also seen forums where other employees who have accessed these benefits and successfully gone through their own family building journeys share their stories as well, in an effort to reinforce what is available and what can be done. But the reproductive benefits landscape is a delicate one, Shedlin says, and feeling anxious is only natural. 

"What I would say to intended parents who are looking at this as yet another obstacle is that employers and their benefit teams are really stepping up to meet these needs," he says. "When we look at WIN, our book of business and our pipeline of clients seeking to offer these types of services is the largest it's ever been in our history. So, to me, that signals that benefit leaders are still responding to demand."