Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1992

Publication Information

2 Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy 25 (1992)

Abstract

This essay is a response to John Kennedy's defense of Johnson Controls, Inc.'s fetal protection policy which was struck down last year in International Union, UAW v. Johnson Controls, Inc. A unanimous Supreme Court held in the case that the policy, which excluded women from a "fetotoxic" workplace, violated the federal employment discrimination laws. The Court's decision was issued only a day before Kennedy was scheduled to debate the issue of whether Title VII bars fetal protection policies with Professor Elinor Schroeder at the Kansas Journal's first symposium on March 21-22. 1991. The Court's decision rendered the technical statutory issues that might otherwise have been discussed at the symposium essentially moot and freed Kennedy to address, at least in part, some of the more interesting philosophical questions that the notion of fetal protection suggests. Although to some extent this essay reacts to Kennedy's article previously published in this Journal, it results more directly from and responds more explicitly to his oral defense of fetal protection policies generally, and the language in which that defense was couched.

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