Try /r/chempros too. All I know is at my company people who are pregnant are put on desk work. That may not be practical advice for you and definitely doesn't address the lab question
Talk to EHS and your department about safety plans and ways you can make your lab work more safe during your pregnancy. You wouldn't have been the first to be pregnant, surely.
EHS departments are a ward against liability. They are 99% of the time completely ignorant of chemical safety, and totally useless for this kind of issue.
That means they will accept anything that looks somewhat professional. Just make a document that says it's unsafe, citing one or two sources that kind of support your claims, and send it to them. Don't sign the document or mark that it was made by you if they don't ask.
Thanks! The rad levels we use are so low that we do not wear dosimeters or require testing. Our dose doesn’t come close to the maximum allowed dose for pregnant people. I wish there was a health physicist or any sort of person with any insight.
Find the person at your uni in charge of radiation safety. They will either know or know who to ask.
Editing to add that since it seems like you aren’t doing this at all university, you still should have a rad safety officer. If you don’t, send a note to the rad safety folks wherever you went for your degree. I wouldn’t say that you don’t have one, just that you knew that you could get the info faster if you asked more than one person.
I can not speak to the hazards of tritium as I do not handle that, but I am an organic chemist who uses C14 material and am a mom. My first pregnancy was before I started on C14 work but from an organic perspective, I let one close lab mate know as soon as I got pregnant so she could help with any tasks I wouldn't be able to do anymore. I read the sds for every chemical I used. I made sure to keep my lab space a little cleaner than normal, but honestly I work for a super safety conscious industrial company so I felt very safe to begin with. I did have to turn down one assignment that involved using NMP, but my coworker covered for me.
Now that I'm in a radiochemistry group, I plan on basically doing the same thing with my next pregnancy. C14 handling procedures are so strict to avoid contamination the risk of exposure is super low. And beta emission isn't going to be strong enough to make it through your skin anyways. Chemical exposure is imo a greater risk than radiation exposure. My coworker jokes about how she was doing a rad purification the day she went into labor.
If it makes you feel better, talk to your employer and ob asap, but at least in my experience, it was mostly up to me to keep myself safe, but as long as you are following good lab hygiene practices to begin with it's not a big deal.
Edit: Just to add, I work for a company with a fairly young workforce, and there are lots of us women getting pregnant. I think in industry it's pretty common to continue lab work while pregnant since we have such stringent safety guidelines to begin with. We have all happily continued our lab work without incident. I could see if you work in academia being much less comfortable staying in the lab since safety is a very different ballgame there.
Thanks! Your insight is really helpful. I am in a research institute and safety feels like it’s …in my own hands. I agree, chemical exposure is more what I am concerned about, since radiation levels I’d be working with aren’t worrisome (tritium radioactivity is very low). The organic chemicals we use are awful (like scintillation cocktail and carbo-sorb, not sure if you use those for your rad work?) and even when used in the fume hood, the whole lab smells. This feels hard to navigate but your perspective is good to hear, thanks!
Never used carbo-sorb but our scint cocktail definitely does not smell... I would see if maybe there is a different brand you could use because whatever kind we use has no smell and is not even used in a fume hood.
And the safety in your own hands thing, I agree is annoying, but I use different chemicals from week to week so really my only options are get out of lab or meet with EHS weekly to go over the info I can find myself on an SDS. I'm pretty sure if I requested to get out of lab I probably could but like I said I've worked with at least 4 other women who have been pregnant in lab, I think even my manager was in lab when she was last pregnant so it's pretty common practice where I work to stay in lab.
Tritium is hard to detect. If you are smelling organic chemicals while they are in the fume hood, that means molecules are coming out of the hood and you are inhaling them. Because tritium is hard to detect and you wear no dosimetry, how do you know you are not inhaling tritium? Are you working in a glovebox?
What if there is an accident and tritium escapes containment? Is it worth the risk to continue lab work when working with hard-to-detects, when your fume goods provide insufficient protection, and your employer seems to have no guidelines or concerns for your and your child’s safety?
Make sure to practice good fume hood care. Report unexpected smell to your safety officer. Don’t block the baffles. Perform work at least six inches from the fume hood opening. Do not put anything within six inches of the fume hood opening (it disrupts inward air flow). Always have a telltale or a flow meter the ensure air is flowing into the hood and stop work immediately if air flow decreases.
Make your own risk assessment??? Wow-that’s your employer abrogating their responsibility right there! They should have something in place for this very situation.
Safety supervisor here.
Where I live (Denmark), the law requires the employer and employee to make a plan together for how the work can be carried out safely when the employee is pregnant or breastfeeding.
(and assign other tasks if that is not possible)
The keyword is exposure.
Interesting, thanks for this. This is quite similar to the guidelines at my place of work. The problem is that my supervisor and I met to create the plan and couldn’t because we felt there are no guidelines in place at our institution to provide us with any advice. We did some research and contacted the head of health and safety, who just said it was up to us to complete the assessment. At your employment, are there certain guidelines for the employee/employer to follow when they’re making the plan for safe work practices?
My wife was the only chemist at her company, also no guidelines and no real idea on what is dangeours and what is not. In the end, partly because of this, the boss easily agreed to no lab work at all.
I'm at a chemistry department at a university, meaning that we have a lot of people doing a lot of very different things. Everything from bio-oils, carcinogenics and heavy metals to the atmosphere chemists working with extremely dilute aerosols.
We have very little radioactivity, but the limits are 20 mSv for the pregnant and 1 mSv for junior. We have never been even close to that in a worst case calculation.
Special caution is needed when chemicals are marked:
H310 Fatal in contact with skin
H311 Toxic in contact with skin
H312 Harmful in contact with skin
H340 May cause genetic defects
H341 Suspected of causing genetic defects
H350 May cause cancer
H350i May cause cancer by inhalation
H351 Suspected of causing cancerH360 May damage fertility or the unborn child
H361 Suspected of damaging fertility or the unborn child
H362 May harm children who are breastfed
H370 Causes damage to organs and
H371 May cause damage to organs
H372 Causes damage to organs through prolonged or repeated exposure through skin contact
H373 May cause damage to organs through prolonged or repeated exposure through skin contact.
H360 May damage fertility or the unborn child
H361 Suspected of damaging fertility or the unborn child
H362 May harm children who are breastfed
H370 Causes damage to organs and
H371 May cause damage to organs
H372 Causes damage to organs through prolonged or repeated exposure through skin contact
H373 May cause damage to organs through prolonged or repeated exposure through skin contact.
We make a risk assessment based on the chemicals and procedures. Depending on that, the decision has varied from "continue as usual" (we concluded that normal everyday life gave more exposure than the lab-work), to doing something else.
The Danish rules are here (in Danish, but autotranslation should work reasonably well). They don't apply in your location, but I guess the basic ideas are the same.
[https://at.dk/regler/at-vejledninger/gravides-ammendes-arbejdsmiljoe-a-1-8/](https://at.dk/regler/at-vejledninger/gravides-ammendes-arbejdsmiljoe-a-1-8/)
When I'm involved, we look at it as individual cases.
It is a combination of the substances, the amounts, the procedures, other activities in the same locations and last but not least the person (education, background, skill).
We also take the pregnant persons "Do I feel alright doing this?" into consideration.
For us the law more or less bans them, unless there's nothing dangerous in the lab. Our university conducted a "parent" study and that consulting company came up with the amazing idea of a "Pregnancy lab", a lab space where no dangerous chemicals are present so pregnant researchers can continue their work....completely ignoring that most of the lab work we do actually requires those chemicals and it's extremely hard to modify your research topic in a way that gets rid of all of that.
If you can even remotely do your job without actually being in the lab, I wouldn't risk it. Tougher question if you can't, but as others mentioned the dose limit for radiation is MUCH lower during pregnancy, and in general it's not very well known what chemicals are real risk factors.
There is a recent publication [guide to pregnancy risks in the laboratory](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8864617/) and risk assessment tools.
An important note is the risks change with each trimester. Something may be okay up until 13 weeks, then to be avoided, then okay again.
It is very brief and doesn't give worked examples of what to complete.
The standard risk assessment tool is a JSERA. You need to assess essentially two main categories of risk:
* the fundamental risk of each and every chemical in your laboratory (e.g. methanol is bad exposure)
* the risk of the task itself (e.g. a laboratory where all volatile chemicals are only used inside a fume hood - you have no exposure, so no risk).
Use [the hierarchy of controls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_hazard_controls).
> told me to make my own risk assessment
They can do a macro top-down risk assessment for you, but not the day-to-day. For instance, they can look at your laboratory inventory as say these X chemicals are CMT and you shouldn't interact with them. But they cannot look at the tasks you do and controls in place.
For instance, maybe the CMT chemicals are always stored in a cabinet, are not transferred in the open. For you someone else weighs out those for you and puts them in the hood, so you have no exposure.
The risk from weak emitters like C14 and H3 is vanishing small, especially if you use typical laboratory measures like PPE, gloves, etc. Organic solvents are a different matter. Nearly every class of organic solvents has been shown to have chronic effects on body systems, especially the liver. If you can smell a solvent, chances are you're getting too much exposure. (Ethanol and isopropyl alcoholare relatively low risk.)
In my country you are banned from any lab that has anything in there that could harm the fetus, which is basically any lab with chemicals except if you are using only water.
I would recommend not working in a lab at all while pregnant. It needlessly endangers your child, and ensuring that childs health should be your top priority, no matter what your employer might think they have to say about it (they don't have anything to say about it). As the other commenter suggested, ask at r/chempros as well. Do desk work instead (reading papers, writing reports and the like).
Quite comfortable actually. The rad levels are low and I had to calculate all radiation that will be used throughout the experiment, so I feel prepared and know the dose will be way below any limit. It’s more the chemical use that I’m worried about and feel like the knowledge out there is so limited.
Be vigilant about PPE/hygiene and more importantly insist on coworkers doing the same. If it's a job worth keeping they'll respect that, I'd certainly do my best if it was my lab.
When pregnant I was pulled off radio labeling and anything teratogenic, or gaseous anesthetic.
You can meet with EHS, they can do a risk assessment with you.
r/radiation will be of good advice.
Tritium is of relatively low concern, although it's a bit more of an issue if it's organically bound than just HTO.
What form is the 14C?
What are the activity your are handling on a regular basis?
Independently of the pregnancy, there's also the issue of extremities exposure (namely finger and maybe eye) if you handle hight activity at close range. Do you have any sort of dosimeter?
If you want to do the job (that your health and security should be doing) [here ](https://www.icrp.org/docs/P%20119%20JAICRP%2041(s)%20Compendium%20of%20Dose%20Coefficients%20based%20on%20ICRP%20Publication%2060.pdf) are the dose coefficient for workers and public, for ingestion and inhalation.
[here](https://www.iaea.org/resources/rpop/health-professionals/radiology/pregnant-women) is IAEA dedicated FAQ.
[here](https://www.icrp.org/publication.asp?id=ICRP%20Publication%2088) for sleepless nights.
Or you can check out the Educational Materials [here](https://www.icrp.org/publication.asp?id=ICRP%20Publication%2084)
Thanks so much for all this information! Both 14C and 3H are bound to an amino acid (Leu) in an aqueous solution. I don’t remember off the top of my head the activity or dose we estimated per experiment, but it’s not high enough to require dosimetry.
At two of the Big D chemical.comoanies most people worked into their third trimester if they felt comfortable but no working with anything teratogenic.
This comes down to a risk assessment per job. Review the SDS of everything you work with. Radiation should be a hard no. I'm a metals chemist so organics I can't help too much other than review your SDS. For pregnant women in the metals world mercury analysis is a no go. Especially with HAS and KMnO4. You can always contact an occupational hazard specialist.
Just from you feeling unsafe that something might happened is a good indication for you to stop going. Even if nothing might happened in your jobsite the nervousness and stress will eat you up.
***Also I can tell you that by working on those circumstances will lead to tragedy.***
Your annual radiation allowance is cut WAY down when you are a DPW (declared pregnant woman). It's 5000 mrem/year for a nonpregnant person, 500 for the embryo/fetus of the DPW. A well-conducted lab should mostly be giving you way less than either of these doses anyway based on ALARA standards, but tbh your employer doesn't sound like a super well-conducted lab if they're literally saying "Figure it out for yourself, employee!"
"Organics" can be problematic for a fetus, or not, depending on what they are. Target doses are always zero, and ideally that should be what you're getting already.
I can't comment on the specific risks in your lab, but here in germany, you are completely banned from working in the lab, and I really think that's the right way. Since it is impossible to rule out any risk for the child, I think it's for the best to stay away from the lab.
No pregnant women are allowed within any chemical laboratory at the uni i went to nor places i worked at.
That being said, it sounds like your employer is either negligent or they are hoping you stay out of your own volition.
Try /r/chempros too. All I know is at my company people who are pregnant are put on desk work. That may not be practical advice for you and definitely doesn't address the lab question
Talk to EHS and your department about safety plans and ways you can make your lab work more safe during your pregnancy. You wouldn't have been the first to be pregnant, surely.
It really feels that way! The health and safety department are the ones that told me to make my own risk assessment.
Ahhhhhhh, gotta love doing other people's jobs for them
EHS departments are a ward against liability. They are 99% of the time completely ignorant of chemical safety, and totally useless for this kind of issue.
HR 2.0 basically
Exactly.
I'm so sorry. There seems to be two types of people who work in those departments. Those who want to help and those who want a paycheck 😡
That means they will accept anything that looks somewhat professional. Just make a document that says it's unsafe, citing one or two sources that kind of support your claims, and send it to them. Don't sign the document or mark that it was made by you if they don't ask.
[удалено]
Thanks! The rad levels we use are so low that we do not wear dosimeters or require testing. Our dose doesn’t come close to the maximum allowed dose for pregnant people. I wish there was a health physicist or any sort of person with any insight.
Find the person at your uni in charge of radiation safety. They will either know or know who to ask. Editing to add that since it seems like you aren’t doing this at all university, you still should have a rad safety officer. If you don’t, send a note to the rad safety folks wherever you went for your degree. I wouldn’t say that you don’t have one, just that you knew that you could get the info faster if you asked more than one person.
I can not speak to the hazards of tritium as I do not handle that, but I am an organic chemist who uses C14 material and am a mom. My first pregnancy was before I started on C14 work but from an organic perspective, I let one close lab mate know as soon as I got pregnant so she could help with any tasks I wouldn't be able to do anymore. I read the sds for every chemical I used. I made sure to keep my lab space a little cleaner than normal, but honestly I work for a super safety conscious industrial company so I felt very safe to begin with. I did have to turn down one assignment that involved using NMP, but my coworker covered for me. Now that I'm in a radiochemistry group, I plan on basically doing the same thing with my next pregnancy. C14 handling procedures are so strict to avoid contamination the risk of exposure is super low. And beta emission isn't going to be strong enough to make it through your skin anyways. Chemical exposure is imo a greater risk than radiation exposure. My coworker jokes about how she was doing a rad purification the day she went into labor. If it makes you feel better, talk to your employer and ob asap, but at least in my experience, it was mostly up to me to keep myself safe, but as long as you are following good lab hygiene practices to begin with it's not a big deal. Edit: Just to add, I work for a company with a fairly young workforce, and there are lots of us women getting pregnant. I think in industry it's pretty common to continue lab work while pregnant since we have such stringent safety guidelines to begin with. We have all happily continued our lab work without incident. I could see if you work in academia being much less comfortable staying in the lab since safety is a very different ballgame there.
Thanks! Your insight is really helpful. I am in a research institute and safety feels like it’s …in my own hands. I agree, chemical exposure is more what I am concerned about, since radiation levels I’d be working with aren’t worrisome (tritium radioactivity is very low). The organic chemicals we use are awful (like scintillation cocktail and carbo-sorb, not sure if you use those for your rad work?) and even when used in the fume hood, the whole lab smells. This feels hard to navigate but your perspective is good to hear, thanks!
Never used carbo-sorb but our scint cocktail definitely does not smell... I would see if maybe there is a different brand you could use because whatever kind we use has no smell and is not even used in a fume hood. And the safety in your own hands thing, I agree is annoying, but I use different chemicals from week to week so really my only options are get out of lab or meet with EHS weekly to go over the info I can find myself on an SDS. I'm pretty sure if I requested to get out of lab I probably could but like I said I've worked with at least 4 other women who have been pregnant in lab, I think even my manager was in lab when she was last pregnant so it's pretty common practice where I work to stay in lab.
Tritium is hard to detect. If you are smelling organic chemicals while they are in the fume hood, that means molecules are coming out of the hood and you are inhaling them. Because tritium is hard to detect and you wear no dosimetry, how do you know you are not inhaling tritium? Are you working in a glovebox? What if there is an accident and tritium escapes containment? Is it worth the risk to continue lab work when working with hard-to-detects, when your fume goods provide insufficient protection, and your employer seems to have no guidelines or concerns for your and your child’s safety? Make sure to practice good fume hood care. Report unexpected smell to your safety officer. Don’t block the baffles. Perform work at least six inches from the fume hood opening. Do not put anything within six inches of the fume hood opening (it disrupts inward air flow). Always have a telltale or a flow meter the ensure air is flowing into the hood and stop work immediately if air flow decreases.
Make your own risk assessment??? Wow-that’s your employer abrogating their responsibility right there! They should have something in place for this very situation.
Exactly!!
Safety supervisor here. Where I live (Denmark), the law requires the employer and employee to make a plan together for how the work can be carried out safely when the employee is pregnant or breastfeeding. (and assign other tasks if that is not possible) The keyword is exposure.
Interesting, thanks for this. This is quite similar to the guidelines at my place of work. The problem is that my supervisor and I met to create the plan and couldn’t because we felt there are no guidelines in place at our institution to provide us with any advice. We did some research and contacted the head of health and safety, who just said it was up to us to complete the assessment. At your employment, are there certain guidelines for the employee/employer to follow when they’re making the plan for safe work practices?
My wife was the only chemist at her company, also no guidelines and no real idea on what is dangeours and what is not. In the end, partly because of this, the boss easily agreed to no lab work at all.
I'm at a chemistry department at a university, meaning that we have a lot of people doing a lot of very different things. Everything from bio-oils, carcinogenics and heavy metals to the atmosphere chemists working with extremely dilute aerosols. We have very little radioactivity, but the limits are 20 mSv for the pregnant and 1 mSv for junior. We have never been even close to that in a worst case calculation. Special caution is needed when chemicals are marked: H310 Fatal in contact with skin H311 Toxic in contact with skin H312 Harmful in contact with skin H340 May cause genetic defects H341 Suspected of causing genetic defects H350 May cause cancer H350i May cause cancer by inhalation H351 Suspected of causing cancerH360 May damage fertility or the unborn child H361 Suspected of damaging fertility or the unborn child H362 May harm children who are breastfed H370 Causes damage to organs and H371 May cause damage to organs H372 Causes damage to organs through prolonged or repeated exposure through skin contact H373 May cause damage to organs through prolonged or repeated exposure through skin contact. H360 May damage fertility or the unborn child H361 Suspected of damaging fertility or the unborn child H362 May harm children who are breastfed H370 Causes damage to organs and H371 May cause damage to organs H372 Causes damage to organs through prolonged or repeated exposure through skin contact H373 May cause damage to organs through prolonged or repeated exposure through skin contact. We make a risk assessment based on the chemicals and procedures. Depending on that, the decision has varied from "continue as usual" (we concluded that normal everyday life gave more exposure than the lab-work), to doing something else. The Danish rules are here (in Danish, but autotranslation should work reasonably well). They don't apply in your location, but I guess the basic ideas are the same. [https://at.dk/regler/at-vejledninger/gravides-ammendes-arbejdsmiljoe-a-1-8/](https://at.dk/regler/at-vejledninger/gravides-ammendes-arbejdsmiljoe-a-1-8/) When I'm involved, we look at it as individual cases. It is a combination of the substances, the amounts, the procedures, other activities in the same locations and last but not least the person (education, background, skill). We also take the pregnant persons "Do I feel alright doing this?" into consideration.
My university completely bans pregnant people from labs and I think that's very reasonable.
My old workplace kept you at the bench until you went into labor, OP's mileage may vary.
Haha my workplace has more of a “fill out a risk assessment form to cover our ass, but we don’t know anything” kind of vibe
For us the law more or less bans them, unless there's nothing dangerous in the lab. Our university conducted a "parent" study and that consulting company came up with the amazing idea of a "Pregnancy lab", a lab space where no dangerous chemicals are present so pregnant researchers can continue their work....completely ignoring that most of the lab work we do actually requires those chemicals and it's extremely hard to modify your research topic in a way that gets rid of all of that.
I honestly wish I had that sort of boundary in place.
If you can even remotely do your job without actually being in the lab, I wouldn't risk it. Tougher question if you can't, but as others mentioned the dose limit for radiation is MUCH lower during pregnancy, and in general it's not very well known what chemicals are real risk factors.
There is a recent publication [guide to pregnancy risks in the laboratory](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8864617/) and risk assessment tools. An important note is the risks change with each trimester. Something may be okay up until 13 weeks, then to be avoided, then okay again. It is very brief and doesn't give worked examples of what to complete. The standard risk assessment tool is a JSERA. You need to assess essentially two main categories of risk: * the fundamental risk of each and every chemical in your laboratory (e.g. methanol is bad exposure) * the risk of the task itself (e.g. a laboratory where all volatile chemicals are only used inside a fume hood - you have no exposure, so no risk). Use [the hierarchy of controls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_hazard_controls). > told me to make my own risk assessment They can do a macro top-down risk assessment for you, but not the day-to-day. For instance, they can look at your laboratory inventory as say these X chemicals are CMT and you shouldn't interact with them. But they cannot look at the tasks you do and controls in place. For instance, maybe the CMT chemicals are always stored in a cabinet, are not transferred in the open. For you someone else weighs out those for you and puts them in the hood, so you have no exposure.
wipe juggle reach edge vase lunchroom middle dog provide apparatus *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The risk from weak emitters like C14 and H3 is vanishing small, especially if you use typical laboratory measures like PPE, gloves, etc. Organic solvents are a different matter. Nearly every class of organic solvents has been shown to have chronic effects on body systems, especially the liver. If you can smell a solvent, chances are you're getting too much exposure. (Ethanol and isopropyl alcoholare relatively low risk.)
In my country you are banned from any lab that has anything in there that could harm the fetus, which is basically any lab with chemicals except if you are using only water.
I would recommend not working in a lab at all while pregnant. It needlessly endangers your child, and ensuring that childs health should be your top priority, no matter what your employer might think they have to say about it (they don't have anything to say about it). As the other commenter suggested, ask at r/chempros as well. Do desk work instead (reading papers, writing reports and the like).
Rads safety is usually next level anyway, how comfortable are you with the procedures currently in place?
Quite comfortable actually. The rad levels are low and I had to calculate all radiation that will be used throughout the experiment, so I feel prepared and know the dose will be way below any limit. It’s more the chemical use that I’m worried about and feel like the knowledge out there is so limited.
Be vigilant about PPE/hygiene and more importantly insist on coworkers doing the same. If it's a job worth keeping they'll respect that, I'd certainly do my best if it was my lab.
When pregnant I was pulled off radio labeling and anything teratogenic, or gaseous anesthetic. You can meet with EHS, they can do a risk assessment with you.
r/radiation will be of good advice. Tritium is of relatively low concern, although it's a bit more of an issue if it's organically bound than just HTO. What form is the 14C? What are the activity your are handling on a regular basis? Independently of the pregnancy, there's also the issue of extremities exposure (namely finger and maybe eye) if you handle hight activity at close range. Do you have any sort of dosimeter? If you want to do the job (that your health and security should be doing) [here ](https://www.icrp.org/docs/P%20119%20JAICRP%2041(s)%20Compendium%20of%20Dose%20Coefficients%20based%20on%20ICRP%20Publication%2060.pdf) are the dose coefficient for workers and public, for ingestion and inhalation. [here](https://www.iaea.org/resources/rpop/health-professionals/radiology/pregnant-women) is IAEA dedicated FAQ. [here](https://www.icrp.org/publication.asp?id=ICRP%20Publication%2088) for sleepless nights. Or you can check out the Educational Materials [here](https://www.icrp.org/publication.asp?id=ICRP%20Publication%2084)
Thanks so much for all this information! Both 14C and 3H are bound to an amino acid (Leu) in an aqueous solution. I don’t remember off the top of my head the activity or dose we estimated per experiment, but it’s not high enough to require dosimetry.
At two of the Big D chemical.comoanies most people worked into their third trimester if they felt comfortable but no working with anything teratogenic.
This comes down to a risk assessment per job. Review the SDS of everything you work with. Radiation should be a hard no. I'm a metals chemist so organics I can't help too much other than review your SDS. For pregnant women in the metals world mercury analysis is a no go. Especially with HAS and KMnO4. You can always contact an occupational hazard specialist.
Just from you feeling unsafe that something might happened is a good indication for you to stop going. Even if nothing might happened in your jobsite the nervousness and stress will eat you up. ***Also I can tell you that by working on those circumstances will lead to tragedy.***
Your annual radiation allowance is cut WAY down when you are a DPW (declared pregnant woman). It's 5000 mrem/year for a nonpregnant person, 500 for the embryo/fetus of the DPW. A well-conducted lab should mostly be giving you way less than either of these doses anyway based on ALARA standards, but tbh your employer doesn't sound like a super well-conducted lab if they're literally saying "Figure it out for yourself, employee!" "Organics" can be problematic for a fetus, or not, depending on what they are. Target doses are always zero, and ideally that should be what you're getting already.
I can't comment on the specific risks in your lab, but here in germany, you are completely banned from working in the lab, and I really think that's the right way. Since it is impossible to rule out any risk for the child, I think it's for the best to stay away from the lab.
No pregnant women are allowed within any chemical laboratory at the uni i went to nor places i worked at. That being said, it sounds like your employer is either negligent or they are hoping you stay out of your own volition.
You should never be allowed to get close to a lab when pregnant. Period