At Johnson Controls, Inc., a car battery manufacturer, the assembly process entailed exposure to high levels of lead. After discovering that six of its female employees became pregnant while maintaining blood lead levels more than those thought safe by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Johnson, in 1982, barred all its female employees, except those with medically documented infertility, from engaging in tasks that required exposure to lead. Johnson Controls’ decision was rooted in the occupational health practices of the 1950s. In the 1950s automobile manufacturers began instituting their own sex-based labor policies, beginning with a fetal protection policy that prohibited fertile women from working with lead. Neither women nor men in the automobile industry protested these policies in the 1950s. In the next twenty-five years, however, the United Auto Workers (UAW) confronted company fetal protection policies on behalf of their female and male members. The UAW filed the suit against Johnson Controls, which resulted in a 1991 Supreme Court decision disallowing such policies. This paper will examine how fetal protection policies were justified by various parties, how notions of acceptable risks (and for whom) developed and were animated by the growing number of women entering the industrial workforce and the increased medical scrutiny they received. It will also highlight the debates amongst regulatory agencies, employers and the courts that were underpinned by data on the effects of lead on women’s reproductive health but did not account for the effects on men’s reproductive health.
