Justice Alito's rosy view of pregnancy in America is fantasy
Among the many shocking elements of the leaked draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, this one jumped out at me: the rosy picture of pregnancy painted by Justice Samuel Alito, who has never been pregnant. Alito lists a string of what he calls “modern developments” that lessen the financial toll exacted by pregnancy. “Federal and state laws ban discrimination on the basis of pregnancy,” he writes. “Leave for pregnancy and childbirth are now guaranteed by law in many cases,” and “costs of medical care associated with pregnancy are covered by insurance or government assistance.” The implication is that Roe has outlived any role it once played in improving women’s economic security.
But anyone who has been pregnant — or cares to understand — knows that the reality in the United States is not rosy at all. At best, pregnant Americans must navigate a patchwork of leaky protections, a labyrinth of financial costs and penalties, and a health-care landscape that threatens the lives of the most vulnerable.
Let’s start with Alito’s claim that pregnant workers have nothing to fear because federal and state laws ban pregnancy discrimination. His claim that workplace protections insulate pregnant employees from harm is particularly rich given the origins of the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, a rebuke to a 1976 Supreme Court decision, General Electric Co. v. Gilbert, which wrongly concluded that workers could be penalized for being pregnant.
Fortunately, Congress stepped in to right that wrong, but there remains a persistent gap between the letter of the law and the lived experience of pregnant workers. That’s certainly been our experience at the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, where we routinely represent women fired or forced into unpaid leave for being pregnant. These women aren’t anomalies. In the nearly half-century since 1978, pregnant workers have been continually denied reasonable accommodations they need to keep working safely or are outright fired for being pregnant, leading to more than 50,000 charges of pregnancy discrimination in the last decade alone. Because most incidents of discrimination aren’t reported, that number represents a fraction of the problem. These trends persist even though women now make up a majority of the workforce, and 85 percent of female workers will become pregnant at some point, with most continuing to work through their pregnancies — and beyond.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/05/06/alito-pregnancy-abortion-paid-leave/
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