Crime & Safety

Pregnancy Cost Child Welfare Supervisor Her Job: Lawsuit

A Will County woman claims the not-for-profit she worked for fired her for getting pregnant.

By Joseph Hosey

A woman was fired from her job ensuring the welfare of children because she was going to have a child of her own, she claimed in a lawsuit filed in Will County court.

The woman, Natalie Misch, worked as a child welfare supervisor for SOS Children's Villages in Lockport from Nov. 17, 2008, until she was fired on Nov. 28, 2011, the lawsuit said.

SOS Children's Villages is a not-for-profit corporation, the lawsuit said. The SOS Children's Villages Illinois website said the organization started when "a young Austrian medical student named Hermann Gmeiner saw many children orphaned or abandoned."

"Often, their siblings were the only family they had left. To keep them together, Gmeiner started the first SOS Children's Villages," the site said.

The Lockport facility opened in 1993, according to the website.

Misch's lawsuit said she scored satisfactory or better on performance evaluations throughout her time with SOS Children's Villages and "received multiple compliments on her work."

But after Misch told her supervisors during a Sept. 12, 2011, meeting that she was pregnant, her boss "began to significantly increase her job duties, including requiring her to perform some of his duties, and requesting her to perform jobs outside the scope of her responsibilities," the lawsuit said.

Within three months of breaking the news that she was going to be a mother, Misch was fired "without any notice or warning," the lawsuit said. Misch was told the termination was "based on her performance," the suit said, but was actually "on the basis of her sex due to a condition of pregnancy."

The firing resulted in Misch's "loss of wages, loss of future employment opportunities, embarrassment, humiliation, and emotional distress," the lawsuit said.

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