re: Jury awards fired Catholic school teacher $1.9 million

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I don't think the problem is so much their code of conduct as much as their inconsistent application of it with this particular individual. By acknowledging pand approving of time off for the same exact procedure previously, it seems dishonest to fire her for the same procedure. If they held that stance from the beginning, she probably would have had a weaker case.

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This is a good point. However, I think that the response by the Catholic Church is that the teacher received permission from the principal, who apparently was not following Catholic teaching on the matter. When the parish priest found out about it, he then made it clear that the principal was in error and that what the teacher was doing was not consistent with Catholic teaching. Hence the fact that the teacher did this the first time with no sanction was based on an error by the principal in the application of Catholic teaching.

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She violated her contract, which is a fireable offense.

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There are decisions in various courts (both state and federal) that have held certain contract clauses to be simply unenforceable for various reasons (against public policy [contra bono mores], unequal bargaining power, contract of adhesion, etc). Just saying.

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How is it alot of you people are agreeing with the ability of the Church to rule over the private life of an individual with regard to the method of pregancy?

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I may think it's dumb, but the reality is when you sign up to work for a religious institution then you should know there's a good chance you're going to be held to their religious interpretation of standards. We have a decent sized Catholic school system here and everybody is pretty aware of their moral clause in their contracts.

Now it's possible the argument can be made that they aren't enforcing that moral clause for everyone (i.e. Divorcees, extramarital affairs, children out of wedlock, etc) but I don't know legally how they make that stand.