Will Trump Usher in a New Wave of Pregnancy Discrimination?

Yahoo

07-04-2025

If you are an expecting parent or have just welcomed a child into the world, the Trump administration is a parade of horribles. You are facing a political climate that may leave you and your child at risk for severe health problems, with childhood vaccines under threat and federal funding for public health getting slashed to the bone. Those same draconian cuts will make it harder for you to support your family should financial troubles arise, forcing you to look toward government assistance. Those financial troubles are now likelier than ever, with the administration's tariffs stoking recessionary pressures and driving up the costs of goods you need to purchase every day. But here's an undersung threat to your livelihood: Political leaders and government officials may also make it harder for many pregnant and postpartum workers to keep their jobs and hold their employers accountable for discrimination.
Advocates for labor and civil rights protections want pregnant people to know that despite the Trump administration's attacks on celebrating any form of diversity in or outside of the workplace, protections for pregnant and postpartum people at work still exist. They come in the form of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, or PWFA—a fairly fresh law that went into effect in 2023 that focuses on ensuring pregnant and postpartum workers receive workplace accommodations without being punished by their employers—and a law that's been in place since the 1970s, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, or PDA, that prohibits discrimination on the basis of pregnancy. The PWFA addresses gaps in protections for pregnant workers that the PDA and Americans with Disabilities Act can't always cover.
'A lot of things [that fall] under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act might look like a person's boss firing them because they are pregnant or they don't want the optics of a pregnant worker working the front desk versus a person who comes to them and says I need a stool to sit at that front desk and it then becomes a violation of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act if they're denied that stool,' said Katie Sandson, senior counsel on education and workplace justice at the National Women's Law Center.
Although many pregnant and postpartum workers still have the law on their side, there are always questions of how the law will be enforced, whether employers will take their chances flouting the law—or are even aware of it. But the current administration's attacks on civil rights issues add another layer of worry and uncertainty about whether workers will have a fair chance of being heard.
After Trump fired two of its commissioners, there is now a lack of a quorum in the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency responsible for enforcing nondiscrimination protections for pregnant workers and ensuring that employers provide accommodations for these expecting or newly-minted parents. That doesn't stop discrimination cases from moving forward. However, it does stop the EEOC from issuing formal guidance and rulemakings. As Timothy Noah noted in a February piece for The New Republic, some of Trump's eagerness to throw a sledgehammer to the federal government may hurt his administration's own agenda to roll back Biden-era regulations.
The acting chair of the EEOC, Andrea Lucas, has stated that the EEOC plans to 'reconsider' parts of the final EEOC regulations for the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act once quorum is re-established. This may mean that Lucas will try to separate accommodations for patients who have had abortions or receive fertility treatments or are breastfeeding longer than she thinks necessary—see her explanation of why she voted against the final rule a year ago—from other kinds of pregnancy-related accommodations. This is a move that legal experts and advocates for pregnant people's rights say will only serve to confuse the workers the law is intended to protect and draw an ideological line somewhere that doesn't make sense for the reality of pregnancy or the purposes of the law.
The New Republic spoke to two women who have children between five months and 18 months of age about their experiences seeking accommodations at work as breastfeeding moms. They said they weren't aware of the PWFA when they first started thinking about how to advocate for their right to breastfeed at work. They eventually found information at the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, a group that describes itself as focused on strengthening legal rights for parents and other caregivers. Both women, located in Ohio, said their employers did not seem knowledgeable on the law when they invoked it at work.
One of the women—Melissa, a police officer—said it was a 'huge relief' when she saw that the law protected her ability to breastfeed at work and seek accommodations to do so. (The New Republic has granted her the use of a pseudonym to guard against workplace retaliation.) She said she wanted to provide breastmilk for her now five-month old baby as she did for her first child but was worried she wouldn't be granted the ability to do the kind of paperwork job she needed to pump regularly and produce enough milk.
'It was literally a godsend that I was able to talk with somebody that was fully understanding what I was saying and trying to help me not get so much pushback on my job,' she said. She said she would love to pump for two years if she could.
However, it's unclear whether Lucas, as acting chair of the EEOC, would support that length of accommodation under her plans for the PWFA regulations once a quorum returns to the agency. When Lucas complained that 'there is almost no bounds on what 'condition' any female employee or applicant could attempt to point to,' in her 2024 statement on the PWFA, she asks if these conditions include 'The dehydration and corresponding need for additional water breaks experienced by a mom who still is breast-feeding and pumping for her three-year old.'
Sharita Gruberg, vice president for economic justice at the National Partnership for Women & Families, said attempts to draw certain lines for different kinds of experiences pregnant and postpartum workers have doesn't make sense for what the law is trying to achieve.
'The reality of a worker's experience with pregnancy doesn't start at a certain date and end at a certain date. That's not the reality and so lawmakers were very careful to craft a law that recognized these realities,' she said. 'The goal is that nobody should lose their job because of discrimination, because they're pregnant. And if that's your goal, you need to make sure that the protections reflect the full range of experiences that a pregnant worker is having where they could face discriminatory treatment.'
Conservatives are pushing back on the rights of pregnant workers, including litigation targeting the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, as they also work to undermine reproductive healthcare more broadly. States with abortion bans have put pregnant people in the position to carry non-viable pregnancies to term. Women with ectopic pregnancies have had to watch their health worsen as they begged doctors to provide emergency care. The 16 states with the most restrictive abortion laws as of December 2024 also had weak fair pay laws and no state paid family and medical leave laws, according to a National Partnership for Women & Families report. Not only are many people who can get pregnant navigating a healthcare environment that is making it more difficult for doctors to provide care, but they're being pushed into increasingly harsh economic circumstances, Gruberg said.
'These are folks who are juggling the impossible—the increasing cost of necessities and precarious economic situations, needing to keep these jobs as costs skyrocket, and also making sure that they can do what they have to do to be safe and healthy,' she said. 'We have seen time and again just the relief from these folks knowing that they're protected and it's one less thing that they have to worry about. It's one less threat to their economic security and well-being as they are walking this tightrope that we force women in this country to walk on.'
Pregnant and postpartum workers have long experienced what is known as 'the motherhood penalty,' where their careers are often derailed by having children. One 2017 study found that the earnings gap between a father and a mother doubled between the two years before their child's birth and the year after the birth. The financial challenges many parents already face at this crucial time in the development of their families could only be magnified by chaos caused by Trump's sweeping tariffs and the possibility of major changes from Republicans to SNAP and Medicaid.
There is also some risk that workers could end up getting confused about their rights under the PWFA and PDA long before the return of that quorum because they may expect the current EEOC not to enforce the law—particularly the heavily litigated PWFA and its regulations—in the face of Trump administration attacks on reproductive rights, its hostility to basic civil rights issues, and its disrespect of the law.
The PWFA is also a fairly new law, which means that many pregnant and postpartum workers may not even know it exists. Advocates at places such as the National Women's Law Center, National Partnership for Women & Families, and A Better Balance have been working to spread awareness of the law and how it works. But many are concerned that the new administration could undermine some of those efforts. If the EEOC loses funding, it's less effective for workers who want to make real use of the laws protecting them against workplace discrimination.
'We know this administration is planning on cutting the EEOC down even further and those cuts equal workers' rights being whittled away,' Gruberg said.
Elizabeth Gedmark, a vice president at A Better Balance, said further federal funding cuts would be 'devastating' for the EEOC and enforcement of civil rights laws to 'ensure that employers are not emboldened to think they won't be held accountable.'
Sandson said that it's too early to tell whether there will be as much litigation from the EEOC affecting pregnant and postpartum workers, but noted Lucas' history on stances that were critical of the agency's PWFA rule.
Looking at the previous Trump administration's track record, it's clear that the EEOC deprioritized some civil rights enforcement, including some age-discrimination cases, and reversed collection of employee pay to better enforce equal pay laws. In March, the EEOC dismissed six of its cases that defended trans workers alleging gender identity discrimination.
'Generally, we know that in the first Trump administration, there was just a general impact on the EEOC's litigation and enforcement efforts and the scale and we saw less litigation generally under that administration,' she said.
This doesn't mean that pregnant and postpartum workers shouldn't pursue their rights under laws protecting them from discrimination and a lack of accommodations at work. Workers are still advocating for themselves with the help of their unions and legal helplines.
Beth, an Ohio teacher whose child is 18 months old, told The New Republic she has been denied accommodations and been accused of insubordination for pumping at work, for which she was put on leave. (As above, The New Republic is using a pseudonym to forestall any further work-related retaliation.) She hasn't ruled out the possibility of filing an EEOC charge and hopes that the lack of quorum will delay changes at the EEOC that she worries could hurt pregnant workers.
'I feel like the timeliness of my circumstance might be beneficial for me if the changes in the EEOC take a while to be implemented. I might manage to get my way back into my job or reach some kind of settlement with my district for these violations,' she said.
Legal experts say pregnant and postpartum workers still have a good chance of winning legal fights in this climate.
'In attacking our civil rights broadly, the Trump administration is increasing the risk that employers will ignore all forms of civil rights laws, but I think it would be foolish to do so,' said Liz Morris, co-director of the Center for WorkLife Law. 'The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act is still the law … In almost all cases, the law is enough to help a person to get what they want by working with their employer, but of course weakening civil rights agencies does make it harder to seek justice in that very small number of cases where the employer continues to resist despite the law.'