by Mary Margaret Olohan
As a response to woke corporations incentivizing employee abortions, one conservative CEO says he will offer his employees a $5,000 “baby bonus” to help sustain their families.
PublicSq. Founder and CEO Michael Seifert believes “strong families make a strong nation.” But when the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer, he began witnessing a lot of companies grandly making “impassioned petitions to pay for their employees’ abortions.”
“I was shocked by that because it’s an immoral and egregious act for an employer to pay for an employee to terminate their children,” he told The Daily Signal. “That’s my opinion. But on top of that, it was also a very blatantly obvious move for just more productivity out of their employees. And it was a stifling of [employees’] potential desires to have families.”
At PublicSq., Seifert (pictured above) said, the company is only as strong as the families that have built it.
“I’ve been saying that for the past few months,” he explained. “And we thought, as we near the anniversary of the overturning of Roe v Wade, it would be a great idea to remind our community and our growing employee base that we are truly a company and a movement that is pro-family. And in order to do that, we wanted to put our money where our mouth was.”
The policy has been a big hit, he said.
While other companies like Target are paying for their employees’ abortions, we at @officialpsq are paying $5,000 to any of our employees who have a baby, or adopt.
We’re calling it the “baby bonus”.
Strong families make a strong nation.
— Michael Seifert (@realmichaelseif) June 14, 2023
“Funny enough, we’ve had like three announced pregnancies in the past two weeks,” the PublicSq. founder laughed. “So I think that’s a good sign that this is timely.”
His employees can use the bonus, which is $5,000 after taxes, for anything they want, Seifert said. Some parents who are adopting face exorbitant fees, and the baby bonus could help offset that. Other families with several children already may just “need some more diapers” or a babymoon, he joked.
“There’s no restrictions on it,” he explained. “And it’s also not limited to one child. So if you have multiple kids as an employee of our company, its $5,000 for the child, so if you have twins, you get ten grand. So, yeah, we want to make sure that we are supporting families and then giving them the agency to utilize these resources as they see fit.”
Seifert’s company, PublicSq., is both an app and a website “that connects patriotic Americans to high-quality businesses that share their values, both online and in their local communities,” according to a company press release.
The company’s goal: to help consumers “shop their values” and “put purpose behind their purchases.”
At the beginning of June, the company announced that its consumer member base had increased by over 300,000 from May 23, 2023, to the end of May, claiming its membership grew by more than 40% in a single week.
Meanwhile, major retailers like Target have controversially leaned into celebrating Pride Month and gender ideology — causing Target to lose $10 billion in market valuation over a 10-day period.
“In the same week that Target watched its market capitalization drop by $10 billion, our marketplace experienced exponential membership growth,” Seifert said at the time. “We’re now providing more than one million Americans with a commerce experience that connects them with the largest marketplace of values-aligned small businesses in the nation, and we’re just getting started.”
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Mary Margaret Olohan is a senior reporter for The Daily Signal. She previously reported for The Daily Caller and The Daily Wire, where she covered national politics as well as social and cultural issues. Email her at [email protected].
Photo “Michael Seifert” by Lottiez. CC BY-SA 4.0. Background Photo “Family” by Jessica Rockowitz.
