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In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, many US private employers enacted foetal protection policies that barred women - that is, women who had not been surgically sterilised - from working in jobs that might expose foetuses to toxins. This text analyses these policies and the ambiguous responses to them by federal and state courts, legislatures, administrative agencies, litigants and interest groups. It poses provocative questions about the implicit links between social welfare concerns and paternalism in the workplace: are women workers or wombs? Placing the foetal protection controversy within the larger societal debate about gender roles, this text argues that government decision-makers confuse sex, which is based solely on biological characteristics, with gender, which is based on societal conceptions. It contends that the debate about foetal 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, it argues, to sidestep the question of whether the foetal protection policies could be justified by the biological differences between men and women. The foetal protection controversy highlights several intersecting issues concerning women's roles 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. This study details the pattern of gender politics in the United States and demonstrates the broader ramifications of gender bias in the workplace.

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Publishers Weekly Review

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. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

Samuels argues that fetal protection policies have allowed employers to bar women from jobs solely out of concern for fetal health and have thus imbued the fetus with rights independent of the mother, thereby undermining women's reproductive and employment rights. Such policies are almost always confined to male-dominated occupations, which pay more and provide better benefits and opportunities for advancement than female-dominated jobs. Moreover, these policies have placed at risk all employees' occupational safety and health by ridding the workplace of women instead of the hazards that prevent them from working there. By giving primacy to the fetus's "right" to be free from exposure to maternally transmitted harm, Samuels argues, such policies have reinforced similar arguments about fetal rights in the abortion debates. Samuels's straightforward presentation of fetal protection policies as undermining the intent of Title VII is both the strength and the weakness of the book. That feminists, as well as the New Right, sometimes hold similar positions complicates the discussion, but Samuels only alludes to this. She also inadvertently leaves the reader with the implication that sex segregation in the marketplace is a result of such fetal protection policies. The book addresses an important controversy, but begs for a fuller discussion. General readers; upper-division undergraduates and above. D. Kaufman Northeastern University