2 Ky. police officers win pregnancy discrimination case
They had been told there would be no more ‘light duty.’
During her first pregnancy, Lyndi J. Trischler switched from her arduous duties as a police officer patrolling the Cincinnati suburb of Florence, Ky., to a desk job. After she got pregnant again in 2014, she learned that the city had a new policy, and that there would be no “light duty”: She could keep working the streets or take time off.
The prospect of unpaid leave and losing her health insurance terrified her — all the more so after she learned that the boy she was carrying had a severe abnormality, which would take his life hours after he was born. So she kept at her usual job for as long as she could, as did a fellow officer, Samantha J. Riley, who got pregnant soon after her.
“I was on patrol on the road until I was about 5½ months pregnant, and the equipment, the type of work we have to do, is not conducive to being pregnant,” Trischler said. “Even putting the equipment on — the gun belt, the bulletproof vest — I was in a lot of pain every day.”
On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced that Florence had agreed to adopt a new policy allowing modified duty for pregnant employees, and to pay a total of $135,000 in damages and lawyers’ fees to Trischler, 32, and Riley, 31, though the settlement requires a federal judge’s approval. It was the first pregnancy discrimination case the Justice Department had intervened in since the Supreme Court handed down an important ruling on the subject last year.
“No woman should ever have to choose between having a family and earning a salary,” Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement released by the department.
Complaints of pregnancy discrimination to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have risen sharply, from about 4,000 per year in the 1990s to more than 6,000 per year, but most are unsuccessful. And very few have involved women in law enforcement, a physically demanding, dangerous profession.