It is amazing that some employers still think it’s OK to fire an employee if she dares to inconvenience them by getting pregnant.

It’s not only wrong — it can be costly.

Yvette Wratten, 26, has just been awarded $20,000 in damages by the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario for “injury to the applicant’s dignity, feelings and self-respect” after she was shown the door just days after Toppers Pizza learned she was expecting.

“It’s toward the high end of the spectrum,” her lawyer, Jean-Alexandre De Bousquet, said of the compensation. “We’re very happy with the decision and we feel that justice was done.”

Wratten thought she had found a career with the pizza company, which has corporate and franchise locations. She had worked at the Georgetown corporate store for almost two years, starting as a delivery driver in March 2012 and then promoted to kitchen supervisor in early 2013. She got a raise in June of that year after a positive evaluation praised her as “very dependable” with “good attitude towards customers.”

In August, Wratten said, they were talking about promoting her to a manager’s position with their Milton franchise. But just a month later, she was terminated — thanks to a positive strip on a home pregnancy test.

Wratten had miscarried three times before, so she confided her results to a colleague who had some medical background. She was shocked when she came into work a few days later and another co-worker congratulated her on her pregnancy. “I was upset,” she recalls. “It was something personal that had spread around the store so quickly.”

On Sept. 14, 2013, she was called into the office by manager Stephen Brown.

“I hear there’s a rumour that you’re pregnant,” she recalls him saying.

She confirmed that she was but being high risk, she hadn’t intended to make it public until she had safely gone through the first trimester.

What happened next completely astounded her.

According to Wratten, he said, “I guess we’ll (have to) part ways.”

“What? You can’t do that,” she responded in shock.

At which, she says, he smirked and said “I think I can” and then walked her out the back door.

“It was a real slap in the face,” says Wratten, who now works for a Georgetown cab company. “I loved my job. I thought there was a future there, that I was going up in the world. It crushed me.”

After sobbing for days, she filed a complaint with the human rights tribunal. “I felt so betrayed. Something had to be done.”

Less than two weeks after her firing, a worrying ultrasound had her dispatched to a hospital emergency room where she learned her pregnancy was ectopic. There was no job and now there would be no baby, either. “It was certainly a whirlwind of a month,” she sighs. “It was a rough go.”

She was diagnosed with depression by her doctor and went on medication.

At her tribunal hearing earlier this year, the store manager denied knowing she was pregnant and insisted he’d let her go for poor work performance. Brown claimed he’d watched a video of her ignoring a customer while talking on her cellphone and that was the “last straw.”

But no, he didn’t preserve the video or document any previous issues.

Adjudicator Kathleen Martin didn’t buy his purported reasons for firing Wratten as “credible or reliable.” Instead, she found that it was her pregnancy that ended the young woman’s career.

She ordered Toppers Pizza Georgetown to pay their former employee $20,000 in compensation. “The respondent’s discriminatory conduct was deliberate and occurred at a very vulnerable time,” Martin ruled. “While I acknowledge that after her termination, the applicant was also dealing with the fact of and recovery from the termination of an ectopic pregnancy, I accept that the impact was severe such that the applicant went on medication for the first time in recent years to address her depression notwithstanding that she had had other miscarriages during those recent years.”

The store manager was also ordered to complete the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s online training program. A spokesman for the company could not be reached.

For Wratten, the decision was vindication at last. “It wasn’t right what they did. Some places will get away with it until you stop them.”

Read Mandel Wednesday through Saturday.

michele.mandel@sunmedia.ca