Assorted Gender and Women's Studies Stuff

Today you get two weeks of my responses to classmates Current Events stuff. Each one gets separate trigger warnings.

Trigger Warning: Pregnancy discrimination

In response to a report on a proposed act about pregnancy discrimination and another student's response to it:

I think that part of it is the idea that women don't even really belong in the workplace and are just meant for making babies- enough discrimination when we try to have a career and a family, and many women will choose one or the other. (I think they expect us to choose babies. I also think that the ways that pregnant people are prevented from getting abortions is in line with that, since it is essentially an attempt to force anyone who becomes pregnant to choose a family. It's hard to get an abortion, and it's hard to stay in the workforce without one: People who can get pregnant are pushed out.)
Had I been the employer of any of these women, I would have treated their medical needs as, well, medical needs. Pregnancy can cause disabilities, pregnancy can cause medical issues. They need to be treated with just as much respect as ones that didn't come from pregnancy. (Yes, I am suspicious that some of these women could claim that pregnancy caused temporary disabilities, which would then be covered under the ADA, meaning that there would already be two big laws to sue under. The fact that we apparently need a third is unfortunately not a surprise.)

The publicly available article is here. 

Trigger Warning: Homophobia and pregnancy discrimination

This one was on a Catholic school having fired a woman who was in a relationship with another woman and became pregnant using artificial insemination.

When I read the article initially, it seemed most likely to me that the issue the school took was with the pregnancy being out of wedlock, the fact that the relationship was not heterosexual, or a combination of the two, most likely the combination. With artificial insemination not leading to any disciplinary action against a man who used it with his wife, the insemination is not the true root issue- sexism and/or heterosexism must be at play, and that means discrimination.
My stance on artificial insemination is that if the person being inseminated chooses it, then it is fine- I hold that people should be able to do what they want with their own bodies so long as they do not harm anyone else, and that the Catholic Church calling it immoral is similarly archaic to their issues with divorce and abortion. (The issues they take with all of these things may be different, but all seem to be rooted in sexism. Abortion allows a person with a uterus to choose not to have children even when birth control, also considered immoral, fails. Divorce means that the woman is no longer dependent on and needing to obey her husband. Artificial insemination allows a person who can get pregnant to do so without intercourse.)
I do not think that any employer, religious or not, should be able to regulate behavior that is done off the clock while not representing the employer. I do not think religious institutions should get a pass on this separation of work life from personal life, and thus I do not believe that a religious group should be able to make that sort of regulation.

There were actually three articles cited in the student report that was responding too, 1, 2, and 3, plus a federal discrimination fact sheet.
Note that source number 3 is from the Daily Mail UK. Take anything from that article which can't be confirmed elsewhere with a grain of salt.