"Pregnant Researchers Often Get No Lab Safety Guidance"

"Pregnant people in labs across the country get conflicting information, if they get any at all. There’s very little good research on the reproductive risks of many lab chemicals. And sometimes what individuals are advised to do could harm their career.

The problem is by no means confined to labs, of course. There is a dearth of research and data points on how all kinds of chemicals and drugs impact pregnant populations and fetuses generally. That’s in part because the ethics of experimenting on pregnant women are so fraught that it's difficult, if not impossible, to perform a large-scale controlled study on a pregnant population. This leaves tons of uncertainty about how various substances affect these people and fetal development...

First, figuring out when and how you want to disclose your pregnancy can be a struggle unto itself. The first trimester is generally thought to be the one with the highest risk—about 80 percent of miscarriages happen in the first trimester, according to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Hazardous chemicals are a concern throughout the pregnancy, but could have an outsized effect at the very beginning, precisely when many people don’t want to disclose that they're pregnant...

The professional risks are particularly high in labs that don’t have a culture that supports pregnancy. In fact, among the women I spoke with, the factor that most correlated with a positive experience was whether or not the head of the lab was understanding."

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evqevk/design-bias-pregnant-science-labs

FB: "The most common resource I was referred to by health and safety representatives at universities was a National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health document from 1999 that cited just six things, including cancer treatment drugs and lead, in its table of “Chemical and physical agents that are reproductive hazards for women in the workplace.” Other universities link to California’s list of chemicals known to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity, which comprises over a thousand entries but doesn’t indicate how much exposure is dangerous."