Bloomberg Named In Pregnancy Discrimination Lawsuit

As though pregnancy, with its morning sickness, wardrobe limbo, and constant need to pee, was not already enjoyable enough, 58 women who work (or used to work) at Bloomberg LP, the financial services corporation founded by current NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg are suing the company, alleging they were discriminated against for getting knocked up.

The lawsuit also claims the women were paid less when they returned from maternity leave and were demoted and replaced by "junior" male employees.
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Stanford Law School Professor Deborah Rhode said, "It's not uncommon to find employers responding in this way to employees who become pregnant."

Asked how hard it would be to prove discrimination, she replied: "It's not rocket science ... There's usually documentary evidence that shows what was their job before and what was their job when they came back. And is there any other plausible explanation other than discrimination."

Looks like it's time for a quick pregnancy discrimination primer. Gather 'round, chickadees:

It is illegal for an employer to refuse to hire a woman because she is pregnant.

It is illegal for an employer to fire a woman because she is pregnant.

It is illegal for an employer to demote a woman, reduce her hours, dock her pay, or backpedal her seniority because she is pregnant.

It is illegal for an employer to ask a woman about her baby-making plans.

It is illegal for an employer to tie a pregnant woman's eligibility for benfits, like health insurance or parental leave, to her marital status.

More from 'Lect law on what is and is not allowed, how much leave you're entitled to, and what to do if your employer decides to break the law.

Less Birth Control = More Babies + More Families In Poverty

So don't take my word on it. The Washington Post reports that in the Phillipines, high birthrates (and the lack of access to contraception that causes them) are keeping many families in poverty. Low-income Filipino families have extremely limited access to birth control. Federal contraceptive distribution programs have been defunded, and donated contraceptives will no longer be distributed in the government-run clinics that serve poor families. Shocker: family size among the poor is growing, and so is the number of Filipino families in poverty.

In recent weeks, public alarm in the Philippines over the soaring price of rice has focused attention on the fast-growing population and its dependence on rice imports.

Despite steadily increasing rice harvests, farmers here have been unable to keep pace with domestic demand. Economists here have calculated, though, that the Philippines would not need imported rice if it had managed to control population growth -- like its neighbor Thailand.

In 1970, the population of each country was about 36 million people and growing at about 3 percent a year. But with an aggressive family planning program that provides the poor with free contraceptives, Thailand has since reduced its population growth rate to 0.9 percent. In the Philippines, the rate has declined sluggishly to about 2.1 percent.

There are now about 26 million more people in the Philippines than in Thailand.

"It's a no-brainer," said Ernesto M. Pernia, professor of economics at the University of the Philippines.

No kidding, no brainer.

Blog For Choice 2008: Personal Finance and Pro-Choice Politics

A while back I had a discussion with an acquaintance of mine about what he thought was the single best poverty-alleviating measure in the history of the United States. He was a labor organizer, so I shouldn't have been surprised that he said without hesitation that unions were far and away the most important development in that respect. And probably because he was a he, and consequently he'd never had to make diligently remaining NotPregnant a big part of his adult life, he was pretty surprised when I said I suspected readily available family planning information and supplies had had an even bigger effect on the American family's ability to get ahead and stay afloat financially than the labor movement. After all, what good is making the pie bigger if it can't keep pace with the number of people eating it? The ability to decide whether and when to have children is not just a feminist issue, it is also a financial issue. In some families both here and around the world, access to information and contraceptives may be a question of financial survival. Even in my rather comfortable corner of the world, these resources have been key to planning for my future and taking control of my own economic independence.

For all of you who thought you'd never see the day when Roe v. Wade would be commemorated on a personal finance blog, think about it. Roe, and the cases that came before and after it involving contraception access, have ensured in this country a woman's right to control when they have children, or whether they have them at all. That decision is not just about childbearing, it's about a woman's ability to complete her education or to stay in the workforce, to earn a wage, to avoid economic dependence on or permanent and unwanted legal ties to any partner, to avoid substantial medical risks and the attendant healthcare costs of pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood, to provide adequately for the family she already has or hopes to have someday. Think about that the next time you are standing in line at the pharmacy to pick up your birth control prescription.

On a day-to-day basis, I take my ability to control my fertility for granted. I assume that because I do not consider myself ready to have a child that *poof!* I will not have a child. I had accurate, comprehensive sex education years before I ever had sex. I have never had sex without using at least one form of safe and effective birth control, which I have always been able to obtain for a price I was readily able to pay. I have never had an unplanned pregnancy. Because of when and where I was born, if I had unexpectedly found myself pregnant I would have had options about what to do. Once I'm married, my husband and I will be able to wait to have children until we decide our relationship and our finances are strong enough to take on those new responsibilities. In each and every one of these respects I have been spectacularly fortunate, because those are resources not every woman has, and choices not every woman gets to make. And that's just not right. Women who can't control their reproductive life can't control their economic life.

The Outsourced Uterus

I've continued to think about this piece by Judith Warner at the NYT about outsourcing surrogacy to India since I first read it a couple of days ago. Couples in the US who want to have a baby via a surrogate mother are looking at a steep price tag--the article says in the US it may cost couples as much as $80k. Faced with that cost, US couples are increasingly turning to India for women who will gestate and bear children for them for far less--$6k-10k. That is no small amount of money, particularly to these women, for whom that might be equivalent to ten to fifteen years worth of income. Consequently, the women featured in the article seem to enter into surrogacy willingly, even enthusiastically, because it provides them with a way to get a whole lot of much-needed income.

I admit to feeling quite muddy and conflicted about the situation. On the one hand, it seems so wrong to me, not because I think think there's anything inherently bad about assistive reproductive technologies, but because I think there is a point at which relying on another person's extreme poverty to make them willing to do hard, dangerous work for you is fundamentally disturbing. And also because in reading Warner's description makes me think of A Handmaid's Tale multiplied by Battlestar Galactica's The Farm:

Images of pregnant women lying in rows, or sitting lined up, belly after belly, for medical exams look like industrial outsourcing pushed to a nightmarish extreme.

And yet I feel like that's the wrong reaction to have, that as Jill at Feministe points out, this is just another example of the sort of economic exchange that greases the wheels of the global economy:

If we're going to do the surrogacy thing — and we already are doing it — then let's call it what it is: An exchange of money for services. And let's not pussyfoot around the fact that in a whole lot of service industries, the people providing services are poor, female and brown. Think of housekeepers, fieldworkers, childcare providers, elder-care workers — all of these women use their bodies in the service of others. Many of them are exploited, some are abused, and most are under-paid. But we only go into panic mode when the services provided are sexual.

Stick around for some interesting discussion in Feministe's comments.

And then there's the fact that if my pro-choice politics mean anything, they mean that a woman has the right to decide what to do with her body, and whether and when to have children, not just those children that are biologically or legally hers. If an Indian woman thinks she can best provide for her economic wellbeing, and perhaps that of her family, by acting as a surrogate mother for relatively wealthy, privileged folks from developed countries, shouldn't she have the right to make that choice? And the economics of it certainly make sense from the surrogate's end. There are repeated mentions of being able to buy a house with the proceeds of a stint as a surrogate, from women for whom that purchase would unlikely ever be possible without that money.

Of course that begs the question: am I content to live in a world in which the best path to economic independence for a woman--in India or anywhere else--is renting out her body for nine months to be treated in a manner similar to breeding stock? Not especially, no. But until global poverty and racism get dismantled (no short order!), I certainly can't fault Indian women who use the assets other people, rightly or wrongly, seem to value most: their ability to grow babies.

What do you think about this development?