In today’s New York Times, Natalie Kitroeff and Jessica Silver-Greenberg report on rampant workplace discrimination against pregnant women who work for Planned Parenthood. “Discrimination against pregnant women and new mothers remains widespread in the American workplace,” they write. “It is so pervasive that even organizations that define themselves as champions of women are struggling with the problem.”
Nowhere do they stop to ask if this particular organization in fact merits being thought of as a champion of women. And at no point do they even trip over the possibility that maybe the fact that the nation’s largest abortion provider treats “accommodating expecting mothers as expensive and inconvenient” is not so surprising at all.
Maybe Planned Parenthood embodies a virulent hostility to pregnant women and their children. Maybe it is the deadly knife’s edge of our society’s callous animosity toward them. Maybe its labor practices are uncaring but hardly hypocritical, and not so off-brand after all.