Judge: Railroad Must Cover Birth Control

[Eugene]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/25/AR2005072501122.html

Judge: Railroad Must Cover Birth Control

By KEVIN O'HANLON
The Associated Press
Monday, July 25, 2005; 5:48 PM

LINCOLN, Neb. -- Union Pacific Railroad discriminated against women
by not covering contraceptives in its health care plan, a federal
judge has ruled.

U.S. District Judge Laurie Smith Camp ruled in a class-action
lawsuit that claimed the company discriminated by providing a range
of preventive health benefits _ including impotence drugs _ but no
contraceptive care.

The policy is discriminatory "because it treats medical care women
need to prevent pregnancy less favorably than it treats medical care
needed to prevent other medical conditions that are no greater threat
to employees' health than is pregnancy," the judge wrote.

Union Pacific spokesman Mark Davis said the ruling will be appealed
because, among other things, the decision to exclude contraceptives
in the benefits package was negotiated with the company's unions.

more...

[Wapsie B]

1. Those @#$@##$ librul activist judges.

How dare they let a woman have control over her womb?

:sarcasm:

[existentialist]

2. After all, if you start letting them have birth control, next they might

want abortions.

Um, that is, of course, unless the birth control successfully avoids the pregnancy.

[MSgt213]

3. Even worse they will want the same pay as men with families. We sure

can't have any equal treatment on the railroad.

[existentialist]

5. Railroad.

Actually, a long time ago, I used to work on the railroad. There was, as with a lot of things on the railroad, lip service to equal treatment of women, but not much by way of the reality.

("They say that all those railroad men just drink up your blood like wine.
I said, 'Oh I didn't know that, I only met one yet,
And he just smoked my eyelid, and punched my cigarette.'")

[Wapsie B]

4. But to the fetus lovers,

preventing the joining of the sperm and the egg is the same as abortion.

[goforit]

6. What a funny sounding headline.