Abstract
The object of this paper is to highlight and scrutinise the continuing difficulties which characterise national and European judicial efforts to reconcile the apparently conflicting needs of the workplace and its pregnant workers. In particular, the prevailing dominant legal conceptualisation of pregnancy as an aspect of sexual equality generates an unsatisfactory indeterminacy and manipulability in relation to the determination and application of women's legal rights. This is well illustrated in the decision of the European Court of Justice in Gillespie v Northern Ireland Health and Social Services Board [1996]. Both the decision itself and its legal aftermath suggest that the difficulties traditionally associated with the application of the equality principle to the condition of pregnancy are far from resolved.
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