Protecting The Unborn At Work Case Study

This is a review of a case study titled Protecting the Unborn at Work. This will address the issues of “do companies have not only a legal right, but a moral right to protect its employees as well as employees, potential, future children from hazardous work environments?” ("Protecting the Unborn at Work," 2013, p. 455). In order to collaboration the work in this essay the Catholic Ethical and Religious Directives was referenced, as well as the Civil Bill of Rights. The question at hand is; does a company, such as Johnson Control’s, have a right to have a fetal protection policy that is designed to protect the unborn fetus or is it discrimination against women; or does the legal right of women to work with a hazardous toxin overshadow the moral …show more content…
Intimately related to human dignity and to informed consent is conscience, as underscored in Directive 28 (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2009, p. 20). Some might claim that with such guidelines as the fetal protection policy, the company is providing the information needed to prevent a situation of immoral behavior such as not safeguarding the life of the unborn child. In part four of the Directives the teaching is that we must commit to the sanctity of life from the moment of conception until death; in respect to what “involves the good of the whole person” (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2009, p. 27). Informed consent is an expression of respect for human dignity The moral issue of sterilization is addressed in this case study being that if a woman has been advised of the risks, then she has an obligation to avoid working within such a toxic environment that may lead to direct sterilization according to my interpretation of the Catholic Ethical and Religious Directives number …show more content…
If the evidence indicated that there was no harm to the reproductive system of either the male or female the company’s policy would be even more discriminatory in a legal sense from this writer’s perspective. Obviously, any policy that separates men and women creates an inequality issue legally. Woman may have a legal right to work in the environment that has high levels of lead; however in my opinion the moral obligation falls on that of a pregnant women or women of childbearing age would be to avoid anything that would be a danger to her unborn child. My opinion stems from my, Catholic Christian, believes that life is begun at conception and thus to choose to work in an unsafe environment after being informed of the hazards is an immoral act against said unborn child. Nonetheless, from a moral standpoint, Johnson Control’s fetal protection policy it would be a feasible course of action with respect to the fact that the CDC