Pregnant workers at risk.

Last year, before the Republicans won control, Congress passed a bill supposedly protecting the health of pregnant workers.

Called the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, it requires employers to provide “reasonable accommodations” to those who are pregnant.

The problem with the law is that there is way too little known about what work conditions represent a threat to the health and safety of pregnant people on the job.

You see, the research overwhelmingly have been centered on men, and so have the health and safety standards based on those studies.

“Occupational health really assumes a neutral body worker,” said Swati Rayasam, a public health scientist at the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California-San Francisco. By concentrating on this “neutral body worker,” occupational health as a field has overlooked the other stressors workers can face, either internal stressors, such as pregnancy, or external stressors, such as psychosocial stress due to racism or food insecurity, Rayasam said. (KHN)

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ guidance for employment considerations during pregnancy says:

Although more than 100,000 compounds are used in diverse occupational settings, very few have been sufficiently studied to draw conclusions about potential reproductive harms.

For most pregnant workers, working while pregnant is not a choice.

In the past, Kaiser Health News points out, women were frequently forbidden from working while pregnant.

The world is different now and the research must reflect that.

A federal law intended to protect pregnant workers when little is known about the risks those workers face is a law with a hole big enough to drive a truck through it.

Research on the risks pregnant women face on the job ought to result in more protective regulations that would protect all workers.