By Sarah Casteel, Clayton High School senior, St. Louis MO

While our society still faces sex-based workplace discrimination — clearly most often targeted at women — one would still think that enough progress has been made to accommodate mommies-to-be.

However, recent evaluations reveal that an outbreak of workplace discrimination complaints has occurred among pregnant women.

SEE THIS:  Bobbi Bockoras, Breastfeeding Mom, Allegedly Forced By Employer To Pump On Dirty Floor – via  Huffington Post last week.

Despite our celebration just weeks ago of the 35th Anniversary of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, a law which prevents employers from “treating a woman (an applicant or employee) unfavorably because of pregnancy, childbirth, or a medical condition related to pregnancy or childbirth,” women are still very much at risk of being forced to take unpaid leave, or even of being fired, because their employers will not accommodate for their relatively temporary circumstance.

Under the PDA, an employer who allows temporarily disabled employees to take disability leave or provides them with any other disability benefits must consider pregnancy to fall within these qualifications.  Yet, regardless of what the law says, pregnancy discrimination persists.

Members of Congress were prompted to construct this pregnancy protection Act by two Supreme Court decisions in the 70’s:

Geduldig v. Aiello (1973) Carolyn Aiello, a California resident, was temporarily disabled due to pregnancy — but the state’s Unemployment Insurance Code denied benefits to females in this predicament.  Aiello came together with other women who had been denied the same benefits and challenged this section of the Code as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.  Ultimately, in a 6-3 decision, the Court upheld the statute, claiming that adding pregnancy to disability insurance would be “extraordinarily expensive.”

General Electric Co. v. Gilbert (1976) Similar to the previous case, this case was about whether or not employers could legally exclude conditions related to pregnancy from employee disability, sickness and accident benefits.  Disregarding the several lower court decisions holding that excluding pregnancy from a health plan violated the gender discrimination section the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Court ruled in favor of General Electric.  Justice Rehnquist pointed out that — get this — pregnancy differs from other conditions because it is often “voluntarily undertaken and desired.”

Of course, this makes sense, because we know that nearly every pregnant woman consciously chose to become pregnant and desires to have a child at that point in her life.  Just kidding.  According to the Guttmacher Institute, between 37-70% of pregnancies in the United States are unintended.

Women complaining of this sex-based discrimination should have just gotten cosmetic surgery — at least that would have been covered by the plan.  Yeah, right.

The question now is, what can we do to stop this ridiculous, antiquated discrimination from continuing?

Well, we could always move to Germany — their maternity leave plan guarantees mommy AND daddy (or, you know, mommy and mommy) a 3 year job-protected leave following the birth of their child.

Unfortunately, such a policy will most likely never be taken up in good ol’ America.  However, Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania has got our backs, ladies.  He introduced (and re-introduced after it died last year) the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which would “… eliminate discrimination and promote women’s health and economic security by ensuring reasonable workplace accommodations for workers whose ability to perform the functions of a job are limited by pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition.”  Essentially, the law would close any loophole, induced by court decisions, allowing employers to discriminate against pregnant women.  The goal is not only to ensure the woman’s job safety, but to ensure reasonable accommodations while working and while on maternity leave.

So, while some of you ladies may jump at the sight of pink, our goal right now is to make sure the pink slip disappears from our country forever.

 As the This Is Personal campaign claims, “No woman should have to choose between endangering her pregnancy and keeping her job.”  

Click here to tell your members of Congress to support the PWF now. 

Republished, by permission, from Progress Women.

The post What to expect when you’re expecting appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Dear Congressman Akin: When a man and a woman love each other and decide that the time is right, they call the stork. Nine months later, a little bundle of joy arrives on the happy family’s doorstep. That’s how pregnancy occurs when two consenting adults engage in intercourse, right?

No, Todd Akin, that’s not how it works. Your unfounded remarks about how conception takes place are exactly the reason why politicians should not make medical decisions about a woman’s body. It is extremely disconcerting that somebody like yourself, who clearly has no knowledge about the women’s life cycle, or how pregnancy even occurs, is attempting to legislate my medical decisions.

Let’s talk sex, Mr. Akin. Each month a woman ovulates, meaning that her ovaries release an egg. For a span of approximately 24 hours, that egg, if exposed to a sperm, can be fertilized. The catch is that sperm can live up to a week in a woman’s body. So if a man and a woman have sex, and a sperm enters the womb within a week of ovulation, there is a chance that the intercourse could result in conception. That chance is the same whether the sex is consensual or not.

It would be great if our bodies had some magical emergency valve where if we didn’t want to get pregnant, we wouldn’t. That would likely result in far less abortions than any type of anti-choice legislation conservative law-makers could ever cook up.

However, the female body does not have such a safety mechanism. The stork doesn’t skip over rape victims.

More disconcerting is your bizarre notion of “legitimate” vs. “illegitimate” rape. No means no. I understand that consent can sometimes fall within a gray area, especially when drugs and alcohol are involved. However, when a man or a woman is forced to have sex, against his or her will, he or she has been raped. End of story. The question of legitimacy has no place in this discussion.

Please tell me what an illegitimate rape looks like. “I’m sorry ma’am, it doesn’t seem that you were traumatized enough to make your rape legitimate.” “I’m sorry sir, it seems that the rape you endured wasn’t violent enough to meet our strict standards of legitimacy.” Victims of violent crimes need not be further victimized by our legal system.

Now, how to proceed? I think you should apologize, and acknowledge that you did not merely misspeak but that your remark was completely divorced from fact or science. If you truly want to atone for your remarks, you should back off, and leave our vaginas to the gynecologists. No other medical decisions are legislated. If masturbation or Viagra were illegal, we’d be having a different conversation. People who do not understand the female body should not create legislation that affects it.

The post The truth about sex and pregnancy, as told to Todd Akin appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The recent, manufactured controversy over insurance coverage for birth control coincided with receipt of my copy of a small book with facts about my Irish ancestors on my mother’s side of the family.  I have an 8 x 10 photo of a prim and proper looking family of nine children and their father taken in the living room of one of their homes, the lace curtains stained with oil lamp smoke.

Set off to the side of this grouping is a large photo of the missing family member,  Anna Murray Loftus.

Married at age 25, Anna Murray Loftus delivered her first baby before her first wedding anniversary.  She gave birth to nine more babies in the next 18 years and died in her 40’s along with the 10th baby. I can only wonder what her everyday life was like.  Her husband was a farmer and then a carpenter, so I’m sure they didn’t have much money.  I suspect she delivered all those babies at home without medical attention.

I had never given much thought to how much a pregnancy takes out of a woman until I got involved in the puppy mill controversy last year.  I learned appalling facts about the damage done to the females by overbreeding.  They lose most of their teeth early on.  The muscles and bones deteriorate to the point that many of them can barely stand up.  I heard that some breeders actually hang the female in a sling to inseminate her although I find this really hard to believe.

My great-aunt Mary, the oldest daughter, raised her siblings.  She was only 17 when her mother died.  She put off getting married herself until later so she could raise her brothers and sisters. One of the brothers had meningitis and lost the use of both legs.  She took care of him as well as the youngest brother who was, for some reason, not able to function very well on his own.  Aunt Mamie, as we called her, never had children of her own, probably because she married late in life.

One of the younger sisters was my grandmother, Josephine Veronica Loftus Rockwell.  Her husband died in an accident and left her with two small children.  Times were tough.  “Nana” cleaned houses to earn enough to feed the kids and, after they were grown and married, she came to live with us.   I have no doubt that, if her husband had lived, she would have had many more children.  That’s just the way it was back then.

When I was married in the Catholic church in 1962, I assumed I would have a baby every year.  My older sister was already on the 3rd of her 8 pregnancies when I married.  In fact, any married woman who wasn’t pregnant by her first anniversary was the topic of worried gossip.  Maybe something was “wrong with her.”  Not to disappoint, I delivered my first baby almost exactly nine months after the wedding.  Then a 2nd one 16 months later and a 3rd one 20 months after that.  The second baby, a boy, was born with a serious heart defect, possibly because I was teaching school during the last major German measles epidemic in 1964-65 and many of my students contracted the disease.

In 1966, my husband was assigned to Grand Forks AFB in North Dakota, and the birth control pill was just becoming a common form of contraception.  Knowing that my son would need heart surgery soon, I talked to the Catholic chaplain on base about using the pill.  He had just returned from duty in Vietnam and had much more important things on his mind than birth control.  Keep in mind, this was back when there were pamphlets in the back of the church saying that babies who died before being baptized went to “limbo” as well as all the “potential babies” who never had a chance to be born because of birth control.  Limbo was not quite hell and not quite heaven and there was no getting out.   The chaplain, a priest, told me my decision was between God and myself.  I decided God would want me to be with my son after his surgery in a hospital 400 miles away, so I chose the pill.

Long story short, I stopped taking the pill after my son’s successful heart surgery and got pregnant again.  Sadly, John Christopher died four months after surgery because his lungs couldn’t manage the increased oxygen supply.  He suffocated at home in his own bed.

So I know what it’s like to have multiple pregnancies and to lose a young child.  When I read stories of pioneer women dying in childbirth, I can “be there” with them.  When I read about them burying their babies and young children along the trail westward, I feel their pain.

I can’t imagine why any compassionate person would want women to return to those days and that kind of suffering.  I question whether men should even have the right to make those decisions for us.  Prior to the women’s movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s, I never would have questioned a man’s decision.  Now I question them all the time.

The post Keeping us barefoot and pregnant appeared first on Occasional Planet.