Today the NY Times published an exposé of sorts about the shabby treatment of pregnant women at Planned Parenthood. The article suggests it’s very strange that a group which considers itself a champion for women doesn’t seem to take very good care of its pregnant employees.

At Planned Parenthood, the country’s leading provider of reproductive services, managers in some locations declined to hire pregnant job candidates, refused requests by expecting mothers to take breaks and in some cases pushed them out of their jobs after they gave birth, according to current and former employees in California, Texas, North Carolina and New York…

In Miami, one current and two former employees said that women at a Planned Parenthood office were scared to tell managers they were pregnant. One of them said that, in conversations with supervisors, colleagues would often volunteer that they were not planning on having children or were gay or single.

“It was looked down upon for you to get pregnant,” said Carolina Delgado, who worked in the Miami office until 2012. “I don’t think that any supervisor had to literally say it for us to feel it.”…

A former hiring manager at a Planned Parenthood in California said that when internal promotions came up, supervisors openly debated whether candidates were likely to get pregnant in the near future and preferred those who were not. They declined to hire one pregnant woman and to promote one new mother, the employee said. (Under the federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act, it is illegal to consider whether a job candidate is or will become pregnant.)…

Tracy Webber, the former director of clinical services in White Plains, sued the organization for pregnancy discrimination in 2009, saying she had been fired four weeks after giving birth. Planned Parenthood settled for undisclosed terms.

A woman who worked at Planned Parenthood’s New Rochelle, N.Y., clinic and who declined to be named said in an interview that, when she got pregnant last year, managers ignored her doctor’s note recommending frequent breaks. Her manager asked her to delay her maternity leave and, after she gave birth, pressed her to return early.

One woman described in the story says her supervisors “brushed off” requests for a full 30-minute lunch and regular breaks to get off her feet. Her hands and feet swelled and she was ordered to take bed rest by her doctor. Finally, a few days after a long shift, she had an emergency C-section at 34 weeks. After 8 weeks of maternity leave, her office started pressuring her to return to week. She quit.

All of this comes as a shock to me. I was under the impression that Planned Parenthood really cared about women, especially pregnant women. I’m stunned to learn that the nation’s largest abortion mill treats pregnancy as a problem in the workplace. Perhaps the most shocking thing of all in this piece is the suggestion that Planned Parenthood would be callous toward the well being of its employees’ unborn children. I don’t think anyone could have foreseen that.

According to the Times, all of this is the result of budgetary pressures. There’s not one hint that the author has even considered any alternative explanations. Is it possible that an organization that ends pregnancies day after day might be a bit jaded toward pregnancy? The only hint of self-awareness in the piece is this line: “Planned Parenthood’s policies, though, can make it hard for employees to scrape by after giving birth.” That sentence is so loaded it could have appeared in the Onion.