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Article

25 Mar 2015

Author:
Lyle Denniston, on SCOTUS Blog (USA)

Opinion analysis: Fashioning a remedy for pregnancy bias

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Dissatisfied with every argument made to it, a Supreme Court majority on Wednesday on its own fashioned a new way to test complaints that employers are discriminating against workers who become pregnant.  The result…was a kind of hybrid remedy, judging intentional bias on the one hand and harmful impact on women workers on the other. It was clear, though, that female workers did not receive legal protection as strong as their advocates sought, but neither did employers get a free pass from claims of pregnancy bias.  The six-to-three decision thus looked like a compromise, landing somewhere in the middle…The majority…declared what the section now actually means…Thus far, the framework is designed to show that the refusal to accommodate was the likely result of intentional bias…Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas, wrote a dissenting opinion complaining that the majority had simply made up an analytical framework that had no basis in the law…