....0 AT&T
13%0
16:56
Aulearn.jwu.edu
Writing Assignment 4: Protecting the Unborn at Work
Due: Sunday
Directions: Read the following case study: “Protecting the
Unborn at Work” (Case 9.4, pp. 348-350 in your textbook).
Once you have finished reading the article, write a 2 page
paper in which you respond to question #5 under
“Discussion Questions” on p. 380: Evaluate fetal protection
policies from the egoistic, utilitarian, and Kantian
perspectives. What rights are involved? What are the likely
benefits and harms of such policies? Make sure you
explain why an egoist, a utilitarian, and a Kantian would
reason as they did.
It is all right if you slightly exceed the 2-page limit.
However, no paper should be more than 5 pages in length.
Do not waste space retyping the question or summarizing
the article. Use the space allotted to answer the question.
This paper should be written entirely in your own words. If
you must quote from the article, quotations should be kept
short (no more than 10 words in length). There should not
be more than two quotations in this paper. Quoted language
must be placed in quotation marks and followed by a
citation. Failure to do so is plagiarism. Plagiarized
assignments will receive a 0.
No outside sources of any kind may be used when
writing this paper. People using outside sources will
receive not receive credit for this assignment. All the
information that you need to answer the question is
contained in your textbook.
Papers should be double-spaced with standard margins. Use
12-point Times New Roman type (the same size and font
used in these directions). Pages should be numbered.
Make sure that your last name is included as part of the
document name before submitting it. All papers must be
submitted via the dropbox. Upload the paper. Do not copy
and paste the paper in the dropbox window unless you
absolutely cannot upload it. Do not email papers to me. No
late papers will be accepted.
2
CASE 9.4
Protecting the Unborn at Work
THE UNOBTRUSIVE FACTORY SITS BEHIND A
hill-side shopping center in the small college town of
Bennington, Vermont. Inside, the men and women make
lead automobile batteries for Sears, Goodyear, and other
companies. However, until the 1990s, none of the women
employed there was able to have children. The reason was
simple. The company, Johnson Controls, Inc., refused to hire
any who could. 119
Why? Because tiny toxic particles of lead and lead oxide
fill the air inside the plant. According to the company, the lev-
els of lead are low enough for adults but too high for children
and fetuses. Numerous scientific studies have shown that
lead can damage the brain and central nervous system of a
fetus. Moreover, lead lingers in the bloodstream, which
means that fetuses can be affected by it even if a woman
limits her exposure to lead once she learns she is pregnant.
Because of this, Johnson Controls decided that it would
exclude women at all fourteen of its factories from jobs that
entail high exposure to lead—unless they could prove that
they couldn't become pregnant. The company made no
exceptions for celibate women or women who used contra-
ceptives. The company's position was simple: “The issue is
protecting the health of unborn children."
Johnson Controls's stance was in line with the national
Centers for Disease Control's recommendation that women of
childbearing age be excluded from jobs involving significant lead
exposure. Because by law its standards must be "feasible,"
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regula-
tions permit chemicals in the workplace that are known to cause
harm both to fetuses and to some adult employees. But OSHA
holds that employers have a general duty to reduce the hazards
of the workplace as far as possible. On this basis, employers
such as Olin Corporation, American Cyanamid, General Motors,
Monsanto, Allied Chemical, Gulf Oil, and B. F. Goodrich also
adopted policies excluding women from chemical plant jobs
judged to be hazardous to their potential offspring.
Unfortunately, there are relatively few scientific studies of
the effect of exposure to toxic manufacturing chemicals on
workers' reproductive health. Only a small percentage of the
workplace chemicals with a potential for damaging reproduction
have been evaluated, and each year many new chemicals are
introduced into factories. Although employers are obviously
dealing with many unknowns, no one doubts that they have a
moral and legal obligation to control and limit these risks as best
they can. Lawsuits and even criminal sanctions have battered
companies that have managed hazardous chemicals irrespon-
sibly. Monsanto Chemical Company, for example, agreed to pay
$1.5 million to six employees because exposure to a chemical
additive used for rubber production allegedly gave them
bladder cancer. Fetal protection policies aren't just dictated by
management, though. "Women who become pregnant," the
New York Times reports, "are beginning to demand the right to
transfer out of jobs they believe to be hazardous, even when
there is only sketchy scientific evidence of any hazard."
But many women were unhappy about the decision of
Johnson Controls. They worried that fetal protection policies
would be used to exclude women from more and more work-
places on the grounds that different chemical substances or
certain tasks such as heavy lifting might be potential causes
of miscarriage and fetal injury. In line with this, the United
Automobile Workers, which represents many of the Johnson
employees, sought to overturn the U.S. Court of Appeals deci-
sion that judged Johnson's policy to be "reasonably neces-
sary to the industrial safety-based concern of protecting the
but only because he believes that letting women assume the
burden of their safety undermines OSHA's responsibility to
mandate workplace safety rules. "The discrimination side of
the issue needs to be resolved," Kinney says. "But the ideal
thing is to regulate lead out of the workplace and any other
toxin that poses fetal damage."
However, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that
the fetal protection policy at Johnson Controls violated the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex discrimination in
employment. 120 Pointing to evidence that lead affects sperm
and can thus harm the offspring of men exposed to it at the
time of conception, the Court stated:
unborn child from lead exposure." The union contends, to the
contrary, that the policy discriminates against women, jeop-
ardizing their hard-won gains in male-dominated industries.
Many women's advocates see the issue in slightly different
terms. They believe policies like that of Johnson Controls chal-
lenge a woman's right not only to control her fetus but to control
her unfertilized eggs as well. In addition, such policies infringe
on privacy. By taking a job at Johnson, a woman was in effect
telling the world that she was sterile. And there is also the fun-
damental question of who knows what is best for a woman.
After bearing two children, Cheryl Chalifoux had a doctor
block her fallopian tubes so that she couldn't become preg-
nant again. Although career advancement wasn't the reason
she made her decision, it did enable her to switch from a fac-
tory job paying $6.34 an hour to one at Johnson's Bennington
plant paying $15 an hour. Still, she says that the policy was
unfair and degrading. “It's your body," she complains. "They're
implying they're doing it for your own good." Cheryl Cook, also
a mother of two who had surgery for the same reason, joined
Chalifoux in leaving the other company to work for Johnson
Controls. She says, "I work right in the lead. I make the oxide.
But you should choose for yourself. Myself, I wouldn't go in
there if I could get pregnant. But they don't trust you."
Isabelle Katz Pizler, director of women's rights at the
American Civil Liberties Union, agrees. Since time immemo-
rial," she says, "the excuse for keeping women in their place
has been because of their role in producing the next genera-
tion. The attitude of Johnson Controls is: 'We know better than
you. We can't allow women to make this decision. We have to
make it for them. And the ACLU has argued in court that
"since no activity is risk-free, deference to an employer's
analysis of fetal risk could limit women's participation in nearly
every area of economic life."
To this the company responded that it has a moral obliga-
tion to the parties that cannot participate in the woman's
decisions-namely, the unfertilized ovum and the fetus. In
addition, the company has an obligation to stockholders, who
would bear the brunt of lawsuits brought by employees'
children born with retardation, nervous system disorders, or
other ailments that lead can cause.
Joseph A. Kinney, executive director of the National Safe
Workplace Institute in Chicago, sides with Johnson Controls,
Respondent does not seek to protect the unconceived
children of all its employees. Despite evidence in the
record about the debilitating effect of lead exposure on
the male reproductive system, Johnson Controls is
concerned only with the harms that may befall the
unborn offspring of its female employees. . . . [The
company's policy is) discriminatory because it requires
only a female employee to produce proof that she is not
capable of reproducing
The Court was divided over whether fetal protection poli-
cies could ever be legally justified. Justice Harry A. Blackmun,
writing for a majority of the Court, declared that they could
not, that the Civil Rights Act prohibited all such policies:
Decisions about the welfare of future children must be
left to the parents who conceive, bear, support and raise
them rather than to the employers who hire those par-
ents. Women as capable of doing their jobs as their
male counterparts may not be forced to choose between
having a child and having a job.
Referring to the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, which
amended the 1964 Civil Rights Act and prohibits employment
discrimination on the basis of pregnancy or potential preg-
nancy, Blackmun added:
Employment late in pregnancy often imposes risks on
the unborn child, but Congress indicated that the
employer may take into account only the woman's
ability to get her job done.
A minority of the justices, however, were unwilling to go so
far, and in a concurring opinion, Justice Byron R. White wrote
that "common sense tells us that it is part of the normal
operation of business concerns to avoid causing injury to
third parties as well as to employees." But he added that, in
his view, a fetal protection policy would not be defensible
unless an employer also addressed other known occupational
health risks.
3. Can there be a nondiscriminatory fetal protection policy?
Is Justice White correct in arguing that companies have
an obligation to avoid causing injury to fetuses just as they
do to other "third parties"?
4. Suppose a company forbids any employee capable of
reproducing from working with lead. Would such a policy
wrongly interfere with employees' freedom of choice?
Would it be an invasion of their privacy? Would it be fair to
employees who are fertile but plan to have no children?
5. Evaluate fetal protection policies from the egoistic, utilitar-
ian, and Kantian perspectives. What rights are involved?
What are the likely benefits and harms of such policies?
6. If they are fully informed, do employees with a certain
medical condition have a right to work at jobs that can
be hazardous to the health of people in their condition?
Or can company policy or OSHA regulations justifiably
prevent them from doing so for their own good?
7. Would you agree with Joseph Kinney that the real issue is
the need to remove toxins from the workplace? Is this a
realistic goal?
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Do you agree that Johnson Controls's fetal protection
policy discriminated against women? Do pregnant
women have a moral—not just a legal—right to work
with lead?
2. Suppose exposure to lead did not affect sperm or the
male reproductive system. Would Johnson's policy still
have been discriminatory? Would it hamper women's
efforts to win equality in the workplace?
Purchase answer to see full
attachment