Could Employers Fire Women for Being Pregnant?

Imagine Having to Hide Your Pregnancy

Imagine finally landing a job you’re good at. You haven’t done anything wrong. Your boss likes your work.

Then you become pregnant.

Nobody discusses maternity leave. Nobody asks when you’ll return. Instead, your employer tells you that you can no longer work there.

For millions of American women, this wasn’t hypothetical. Some women hid their pregnancies under loose clothing for as long as they could, knowing that once they began to show, they could lose their jobs.

So, here’s the central question of this article:

For much of modern American history — yes.

And even after federal law prohibited pregnancy discrimination, protections developed piece by piece, decade by decade. The full set of protections most workers rely on today is younger than many of your coworkers.

Part I — Pregnancy Was Treated as Incompatible with Work

Start with the assumptions underneath the old rules.

Pregnancy wasn’t viewed as a temporary medical condition followed by a return to work. Employers frequently assumed that a pregnant woman would — or should — leave the workforce entirely.

Teachers were hit especially hard. Many school districts had rules that required women to resign when they married or forced pregnant teachers out of the classroom — sometimes as soon as their pregnancy became visible. Marriage bars and pregnancy rules could stack on top of each other. But the pattern stretched across occupations.

The important distinction: women weren’t always pushed out because they couldn’t do the job. Sometimes pregnancy itself was enough.

A woman could be performing perfectly — and still be shown the door the moment she showed.

Part II — The Strange Legal Problem: Was Pregnancy Discrimination Even Sex Discrimination?

Here’s where the story gets strange.

Congress passed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, banning employment discrimination based on sex. So, you might assume: problem solved.

It wasn’t.

Courts had to figure out a genuinely odd question: does treating pregnancy differently count as discrimination “because of sex”?

Only women can get pregnant. You’d think the answer was obviously yes.

But in 1976, the Supreme Court ruled in General Electric Co. v. Gilbert that an employer’s disability insurance plan could exclude pregnancy without necessarily violating Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination.

The Court’s reasoning was remarkably narrow: the plan divided workers into pregnant and nonpregnant groups — not simply women and men.

Because the nonpregnant group included women too, the Court concluded that excluding pregnancy benefits wasn’t automatically discrimination “because of sex.”

A door Congress had opened in 1964 turned out to have a gap shaped exactly like a pregnant worker.

Congress noticed the gap. And two years later, it closed it.

Part III — Congress Responds: The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978

Congress essentially overruled the Court.

Just two years after Gilbert, Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, amending Title VII to make something explicit that many people assumed the law already meant: discrimination because of pregnancy is sex discrimination.

The law made clear that discrimination based on pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions is a form of sex discrimination. It also required covered employers to treat women affected by pregnancy the same as other employees who were similar in their ability — or inability — to work.

The gap Gilbert exposed was closed.

But another problem remained: protecting a woman’s job because she was pregnant didn’t mean paying her while she recovered from childbirth.

Part IV — But That Still Didn’t Mean Paid Maternity Leave

Now tackle a misconception, because this one confuses people constantly:

The 1978 law said covered employers couldn’t discriminate against women because of pregnancy. It did not guarantee paid time off to recover from childbirth or care for a newborn.

That’s a different thread entirely.

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993 finally gave eligible workers at covered employers up to 12 weeks of job-protected, unpaid leave for qualifying family and medical reasons — including the birth or adoption of a child. But not every worker qualifies for FMLA, and “job-protected” still doesn’t mean “paid.”

And paid family leave? To this day, whether you receive pay during that time can depend on your state, your employer, or both. The United States still has no universal federal paid maternity leave.

Among the 38 OECD countries, the United States is the only one without paid maternity leave at the national level.

That’s worth sitting with. Pregnancy discrimination became illegal. Some workers eventually gained job-protected leave. But the United States never took the next national step that every other OECD country did: guaranteeing paid maternity leave.

Three different ideas. One arrived in 1978. Another arrived in 1993. The third still hasn’t arrived nationally.

The right to keep a job is not necessarily the same as the ability to afford having a baby.

Part V — “Fine, You Keep Your Job — But Can You Do It?”

Firing was settled. Accommodation was not.

Picture a pregnant warehouse worker whose doctor says: don’t lift more than 20 pounds for the next few months. Her employer routinely gives temporary light duty to some workers with lifting restrictions — but refuses it for pregnancy.

Is that discrimination?

A version of that question reached the Supreme Court in Young v. UPS (2015).

Peggy Young was a part-time UPS driver. During her pregnancy, her medical providers recommended that she not lift more than 20 pounds early in the pregnancy and 10 pounds later. UPS required drivers in her position to be able to lift much more. Young asked for light duty, but UPS denied the request, even though it provided accommodations to certain other categories of workers who couldn’t perform their usual duties.

The Supreme Court did not say every pregnant worker was automatically entitled to the same accommodation given to any other worker. Instead, it gave pregnant employees a way to challenge policies that placed a significant burden on pregnant workers while employers accommodated many nonpregnant workers with similar limitations.

In plain English: an employer couldn’t necessarily point to a policy that looked neutral on paper and end the conversation. How that policy actually treated pregnant workers mattered too.

If your job requires standing for eight hours and pregnancy makes that temporarily impossible, being told “We’re not firing you — you just have to keep doing the job exactly as before” may not feel like much of a protection.

The larger problem remained: protecting women from being fired because of pregnancy hadn’t completely settled what employers had to do to help pregnant workers stay employed.

A woman could keep her job in theory and lose it in practice.

Part VI — The Law Changes Again: The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (2023)

Which brings us to the newest major federal change — and the date may surprise you.

The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA), which took effect in 2023, requires covered employers to provide reasonable accommodations for a worker’s known limitations related to pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions, unless the accommodation would create an undue hardship for the employer.

We’re not talking only about major workplace changes. Sometimes we’re talking about letting a pregnant cashier use a stool or allowing an employee to keep a water bottle nearby.

If you’re thinking, Wait — we didn’t clearly require that until 2023?

Correct.

That’s why this history is easy to misunderstand. People hear “pregnancy discrimination became illegal in 1978” and understandably assume the rest came with it.

It didn’t.

Pregnancy protections didn’t arrive all at once. Laws and court decisions built them piece by piece over nearly half a century.

And This Is Still Being Tested

The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act may be new, but disputes over what employers actually owe pregnant workers haven’t disappeared.

In September 2026, four former Amazon warehouse employees filed a proposed nationwide class action accusing the company of denying pregnant workers accommodations such as seating, additional bathroom and water breaks, and time for prenatal appointments—and of retaliating against some workers who sought them.

Amazon denies the allegations and says it approved more than 99.9% of pregnancy-related accommodation requests in the previous year.

The lawsuit has not established that Amazon violated the law. But its timing underscores something important: the newest step in America’s pregnancy-protection staircase is still being tested in real workplaces.

Part VII — Why This Matters to the 1950s Family Debate

This connects directly to the broader question running through this series: how much choice did women actually have?

It’s easy to look at old photos of suburban families and conclude that women simply preferred staying home. Many did. But those preferences existed inside a system with marriage bars, pregnancy firings, banking rules, credit discrimination, and limited legal protection against sex discrimination.

That doesn’t mean every woman was trapped. It means we shouldn’t confuse what was common with what women freely chose from an equal menu of options.

None of this means staying home with children wasn’t a real choice — or that it isn’t a real choice today. It means choice is easier to measure when saying “no” is also realistically possible.

If a woman can choose to stay home or remain employed while pregnant, those are alternatives.

If pregnancy itself can remove the employment option, the resulting family arrangement tells us much less about what she would have chosen if both doors had remained open.

Sometimes history records the choice people made without recording the choices they didn’t have.

Part VIII — The Bigger Picture

Zoom out, and this article clicks into the series around it.

The question was never “Were women allowed to do anything before the 1970s?” Of course they were.

The better question is: how many independent choices did women realistically have — and what happened when they made a choice society didn’t expect?

But fairness demands the other half of the story. What’s happened since the 1970s?

The fuller story since the 1970s isn’t steady loss. It’s mostly gain — with one genuine reversal, one missing piece, and one unfinished promise.

Pregnancy protections expanded dramatically. Women gained legal protections their mothers and grandmothers didn’t have.

But history didn’t simply move in one direction.

Everything in this article happened within living memory.

Your grandmother may have worked under these rules. Your mother may remember them.

Which raises an uncomfortable question worth sitting with — and one we’ll take up in our next piece:

We’ll look at Iran in 1979, Margaret Atwood, and a 150-year-old law suddenly back in the news, and ask whether history can repeat itself.