Fetal Rights, Women's Rights: Gender Equality in the Workplace - Softcover

Samuels, Suzanne U.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0299145441 ISBN 13: 9780299145446

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995

Synopsis

In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, many private employers in the United States enacted fetal protection policies that barred fertile women—that is, women who had not been surgically sterilized—from working in jobs that might expose fetuses to toxins. In Fetal Rights, Women’s Rights, Suzanne Samuels analyzes these policies and the ambiguous responses to them by federal and state courts, legislatures, administrative agencies, litigants, and interest groups. She poses provocative questions about the implicit links between social welfare concerns and paternalism in the workplace, including: are women workers or wombs?
    Placing the fetal protection controversy within the larger societal debate about gender roles, Samuels argues that governmental decision-makers confuse sex, which is based solely on biological characteristics, with gender, which is based on societal conceptions. She contends that the debate about fetal protection policies brought this ambiguity into stark relief, and that the response of policy-makers was rooted in assumptions about gender roles. Judges, legislators, and regulators used gender as a proxy, she argues, to sidestep the question of whether fetal protection policies could be justified by the biological differences between women and men.
    The fetal protection controversy raises a number of concerns about women's role in the workplace. Samuels discusses the effect on governmental policies of the ongoing controversy over abortion rights and the debates between egalitarian and relational feminists about the treatment of women at work. A timely and engrossing study, Fetal Rights, Women's Rights  details the pattern of gender politics in the United States and demonstrates the broader ramifications of gender bias in the workplace.

About this title

About the Author

Suzanne Samuels is assistant professor of political science at Seton Hall University. She is also a lawyer and a member of the New York State Bar. Her research interests include gender and the law, judicial decision-making, interest group litigation, and AIDS & HIV issues.

From the Back Cover

In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, many private employers in the United States enacted fetal protection policies that barred fertile women--that is, women who had not been surgically sterilized--from working in jobs that might expose fetuses to toxins. In Fetal Rights, Women's Rights, Suzanne Samuels analyzes these policies and the ambiguous responses to them by federal and state courts, legislatures, administrative agencies, litigants, and interest groups. She poses provocative questions about the implicit links between social welfare concerns and paternalism in the workplace, including: are women workers or wombs?

Reviews

Some writings on sensitive issues are easy to dismiss because of their stridency and polemical nature, but the trick is to hear the message through the noise. Samuels's work is no exception, for the author presents an academic harangue with some merit: that women's employment rights are eroded by policies protecting the fetus from occupational hazards. That is, when women are prohibited from certain jobs because the health or safety of their fetuses would be endangered, it reinforces sex segregation in employment. Fetal protection policies may appear as "benign measures... to eliminate fetal exposure to occupational toxins,' but in actuality they "undermine [women's] ability to compete effectively in the marketplace." Even though Title VII of the Civil Rights Act bars sex-based discrimination, and the Supreme Court has ruled that fetal protection policies violate this act, nevertheless the practice continues, supported by lower-court decisions that grant the fetus special protection. Such case law only serves to keep women in their childbearing role. Although Samuels's argument is generally convincing, it would have benefited greatly from a discussion of who is responsible for children damaged in utero by exposure to lead, mercury, arsenic or carbon monoxide and to what extent society should pick up the tab.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0299145441
• ISBN 13: 9780299145446
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 248