Earlier this year, a female Amazon warehouse employee informed her manager she was pregnant. Two months later, the company fired her. She filed a lawsuit and soon after discovered a string of similar lawsuits from women who claimed to have been wronged in the same way.
Their stories are indicative of a long-standing and widespread problem: pregnancy discrimination. Indeed, more than 31,000 pregnancy discrimination charges were filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission between 2010 and 2015.
Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren wants you to believe she’s one of its victims. The current Democratic front-runner claimed during a town hall last week that she was fired from her first teaching position because she was “visibly pregnant.”
“By the end of the first year, I was visibly pregnant, and the principal did what principals did in those days,” she said. “Wish me luck and hire someone else for the job.”
Warren’s story about suffering from pregnancy discrimination isn’t unrealistic. It’s just a lie.
Despite huge legal advances for female employees, working mothers are often required to take time off or face pay cuts due to pregnancy, especially if their jobs are physically demanding. But new evidence suggests Warren is distorting her story in an attempt to find solidarity with women who have actually been wronged.
In a 2008 interview, Warren claimed she had been dismissed from her teaching position because she lacked the required credentials.
“My first year post-graduation, I worked — it was in a public school system but I worked with the children with disabilities. I did that for a year, and then that summer I actually didn’t have the education courses, so I was on an ’emergency certificate,’ it was called,” she explained.
By this time, Warren was pregnant. Because she lacked the proper credentials, the Riverdale Board of Education unanimously voted to extend Warren a second year contract for a two-days-per-week teaching job for which she was qualified, according to minutes of an April 21, 1971 meeting obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. This job was similar to her first and offered her the flexibility her pregnancy required. But Warren turned it down, according to minutes from a board meeting held two months later — a decision the board “accepted with regret.”
All of the above suggests Warren’s inability to keep her first job had less to do with her pregnancy than with her lack of qualification. And when the education board tried to meet her halfway, she struck down the offer. But that’s not the story Warren is telling now. Instead, she’s playing the victim card and crying sexism.
And we all know that’s not beyond Warren. She falsely claimed Native American heritage for years, and only when she was confronted by Democrats and tribe members did she walk back her silly DNA test and apologize for the false identification.
This is more of the same but worse. Because she’s not just claiming a minority status, she’s claiming victimhood. And if her story is indeed false, Warren has done a great disservice to the hundreds of working women who have wrongfully been terminated, such as the Amazon warehouse employee who is still in court fighting for her rights. This is yet another crisis of credibility in the Warren campaign and one that demands an explanation.
