This gets into:

• Students are not employees (unless they really are) and,
• We cannot give medical advice. Their doctor has to advise them to act based on the information we give them about the chemicals.
  

Legally, I have no idea what is right, I only know what we had to adhere to. Glad I am retired.....

S-

The US Supreme Court made it clear in the Auto workers v. Johnson Controls the the employer is responsible for protecting the health of the mother (and not behaving negligently with regard to the unborn child). ... Jim

PS. LSI now has virtual lab inspections, safety program evaluations, document reviews, plus courses and seminars ... all virtual

James A. Kaufman, PhD

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The Laboratory Safety Institute (LSI)

A Nonprofit Educational Organization for Safety in Science, Industry, and Education

192 Worcester Street, Natick, MA 01760-2252

(O) 508-647-1900 (F) 508-647-0062 (C) 508-574-6264 Skype: labsafe; 508-401-7406

jim**At_Symbol_Here**labsafety.org www.labsafety.org Teach, Learn, and Practice Science Safely

On Tue, Feb 15, 2022 at 10:04 AM Samuella B Sigmann <sigmannsb**At_Symbol_Here**retired.appstate.edu> wrote:

I once took an administrator from the Grants office on a department tour. That office had been signing off on grants that we had committees we did not. For whatever reason, he stepped down within 6 months. It is my experience that one issue in the academic world is that people get put into jobs, not based on their qualifications, but on the tag you're it principal.

With pregnancy, all we can do is give students a full list of the chemicals (and their concentrations) that they will work with, the SDSs for those chemicals, and advise them to talk to their doctor. We (or the doctor) cannot tell a student that they cannot take the lab - that is the mother's decision. I probably consulted with around ten students on this over my career and all of them made the decision to drop the lab or they stayed in the course and we provided data so they could perform calculations as a dry lab for the experiments where there really might have been issues (most of the intro labs pose no concerns).

Most students will do the right thing for these issues if we can get them the correct information.

S-

On Tue, Feb 15, 2022 at 5:17 AM Ralph Stuart <ralph**At_Symbol_Here**rstuartcih.org> wrote:

> >I would really like to hear from legal experts on this entire issue. We in the safety profession can make a case for needing the information, but it is up to our legal colleagues to determine if we can legally get the information.

It has not been my experience that the legal staff in academic institutions get involved in operational decisions within the institution. Rather offices that are assigned responsibility to understand and implement ADA (i.e. facility design groups), FERPA (the registrar), HIPPA (the medical clinic) and other requirements develop an interpretation based on their professional understanding of the situation, which may not include any experience inside a laboratory or consideration of teaching issues there. I once took an internal auditor on a tour of a chemistry department I worked with to show her the safety progress we had made and she was aghast at the situations we saw; I considered those situations close to normal.

My point is that there is a much broader set of stakeholders that is involved in these decisions than the legal office. There have been recent CHAS symposia and publications on ADA compliance which have demonstrated that productive discussions and reasonable accomodations are possible in many situations that appear challenging at first. But getting to those accomodations requires significant outreach from the chemistry department and the EHS office to other stakeholders to address their preconceived notions of 'hazardous materials' and the risk they present. Perhaps a course in 'RAMP for non-science adminstrators' could be developed - the UCLA pregnancy policies Craig pointed to recently start down that path.

- Ralph

Ralph Stuart, CIH, CCHO
ralph**At_Symbol_Here**rstuartcih.org

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