Miyoshi Lee, a director and U.S. head of real time payments at Bank of America, never expected she would have trouble getting pregnant. But after she and her husband spent several years trying to have a baby on their own with no success, she realized it was time to get some help.
One of the first places Lee turned? Her employer. Bank of America has a generous family planning benefits program that provides guidance, support, insurance coverage for fertility treatments and up to $20,000 in reimbursements. All of this helped Lee adopt her two children: a daughter in 2019 and a son whose adoption was finalized just in time for Thanksgiving of 2021.
“I didn't worry about [getting pregnant] until a few years of us trying to go it alone, and leaving it to chance didn't yield results,” Lee says. “But my primary care doctor and my sister-in-law both gave me a wake-up call that sent me off to see a specialist. It wasn't until I really started learning about the world of infertility that I realized how great my benefits really were.”
But navigating this world was a herculean task for the Lees and the many other families on this journey — accessibility and cost are just a few hurdles prospective parents have to clear. While infertility impacts between 10% and 15% of couples in the United States, coverage for IVF and other fertility treatments are only offered by 19% and 18% of employers, respectively, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. The average cost for IVF in the U.S. is between $11,000 to $12,000 per cycle, according to the Advanced Fertility Center of Chicago.
Read More:
Lee and her husband decided to first try fertility treatments to see if pregnancy was still in the cards for them. Bank of America offers employees insurance coverage for infertility and in-vitro fertilization, and the Lees quickly realized how lucky they were as the bills racked up.
“We started to realize these benefits were really allowing us to make those choices without dipping into our life savings to cover it,” Lee says. “The family planning reimbursement program took a weight off of the decision that we had to make, because with every new level of treatment or possible solution that we were looking at, we just heard that cash register sound in our ears. It was just an awful feeling to think about having to choose between retiring comfortably, or having a child of our own.”
After several years of tests, treatments, and even surgeries to help Lee and her husband have a biological child, the couple shifted their focus to adopting a child in need of a loving home. However, the process unleashed a new set of worries, both financial and psychological, Lee says.
Read More:
“Infertility is not something that most women know to plan for ahead of time, so when you are faced with it, it's a gut punch,” she says. “Once we decided on adoption, there was still all of this mental exhaustion. So, in addition to the adoption, I had to work on my mental health.”
Lee turned to her employer once again and got counseling for herself through an EAP, while pursuing adoption for their family. Finally, their patience and persistence paid off: in February 2019, the Lees began fostering a 3-year-old girl, eventually adopting their daughter, Faith Savannah Lee, eight months later.
During Christmas of the next year, little Faith excitedly wrote a letter to Santa asking for a baby brother. Her daughter’s Christmas wish came true, when the Lees got a call on Dec. 23, 2020 about fostering a little boy in need.
Read More:
Eight months later, Zion officially became a member of the Lee family when his adoption was finalized. Lee says the support from her employer was pivotal, and has nurtured a sense of gratitude and loyalty to her company.
“The benefits Bank of America offers have evolved from when I first started 17 years ago to now, but we have used every offering we could all the way through this journey,” she says. “Had someone made an offer to me to leave in the middle of all this, there was no way that I could have left my employer, because it's not just about money any longer.”
