That was to protect the company from future lawsuits over possible birth defects.
In 1978, women production workers at the American Cyanamid chemical plant in Willow Island, West Virginia, learned that they would soon have to make a distressing choice. In a series of meetings with small groups of women, company officials announced a “fetus protection policy.” They were told that doctors and lawyers at American Cyanamid’s headquarters in Wayne, New Jersey, had long been at work on a plan to protect any potential fetus from exposure to a range of chemicals produced at the factory, located on the southern bank of the Ohio River. After May 1, 1978, any woman between the ages of sixteen and fifty “whose ability to become pregnant has not been precluded by surgical means” would be “out the gate” and unemployed, in the words of Glenn Mercer, the superintendent.1 Some of the women cried. Others angrily demanded an explanation. A few offered to sign waivers freeing the company from liability if they should give birth to a disabled child. Some volunteered elements of their sexual and medical history, bargaining that birth control pills or a husband’s vasectomy might exempt them from the edict. It did not.
Four women ultimately underwent tubal ligations. Two others refused sterilization and were demoted to janitorial positions at a lower pay rate.
[...]
Ultimately, the fetus protection policy applied only to the lead pigments department—though one woman who worked in another division underwent the procedure after the plan was articulated in an early, expansive form.
[...]
After enduring a year of abuse from coworkers and supervisors alike, the women who opted for sterilization to maintain their jobs in the pigments once again found themselves buffeted by a cruel corporate calculus: In late 1979, American Cyanamid shut down its Willow Island pigments department.
Labor
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