A British tribunal has awarded Teri Cumlin £12,000 (roughly $19,000), finding that the 22-year-old was wrongfully fired by a fundraising firm after she refused to abort.
Engage Fundraising, which raises money for a variety of charities, was found guilty of unfair dismissal, according to the Daily Mail. The hearing was held in May and the results released last week, Hugo Gye reported.
According to Gye, last July Ms. Cumlin, who was already the mother of a four year old, told her boss she was pregnant. She
was left in tears when her boss Mark Robertson tried to pressure her into terminating her pregnancy.
Robertson
started shouting in my face, telling me how stupid I was and that they wouldn’t be able to keep me on. It was awful.
But Cumlin told Gye that she informed Robertson, “’I’m not going to have a termination.’ I explained that I had had a stillborn previously and there was no way I was having an abortion.”
According to Gye
After she told him that she was expecting her second child, he said that her life was ‘down the pan’, and she was subsequently sacked from her job at Engage Fundraising.
Cumlim was not actually fired until last December, a week after she was suspended “amid claims of misconduct,” Gye reported.
Cumlin explained that Robertson criticized her for taking too many toilet breaks and sent her home saying she was unfit to work. “Ms. Cumlin, who was also demoted from her post as team leader due to her pregnancy, eventually complained to head office about the manager’s conduct but no steps were taken to address it,” Gye reported.
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The subsequent dismissal, Employment Judge Robert Gall said, was “an act of discrimination.”
Adding to her burdens, Cumlin said she not only suffered high blood pressure during her pregnancy but she also delivered Thomas one month early in February by an emergency caesarean section.
“When my baby was in intensive care I kept thinking about what he had said to me,” Cumlin told Gye. “I was so angry. I just kept thinking, ‘My poor wee baby’s not well.’ I kept thinking, ‘How could he have told me to have a termination?””
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared at National Right to Life News Today.
