Pregnancy Discrimination

On the heels of some important wins for paid leave in the 2020 election, paid maternity leave has found a new supporter. One who you might not have expected: conservative co-host of The View Megan McCain. The challenge is, as Monica Hesse notes, “how we can speed up this process so that it doesn’t require every leave-denier to personally birth a child before they also get on board.”

The Harvard Law & Policy review has recently devoted an issue to the special theme of “The Politics of Pregnancy.” It contains numerous responses to and discussions of myriad political issues of pregnancy in the U.S. and abroad, including increased emphasis on maternal health, abortion access, surrogacy, and state intervention into matters of women’s health, including the effects of incarceration on mothers.

In the era when many office jobs and classrooms have transitioned to video conferencing software and the home/work boundary continues to blur, discomfort around breastfeeding has become a source of major contention. Case in point is a recent story that caught our attention involving a student at Fresno City College, who was publicly called out by her professor for simply asking if she could turn her video off during a lecture to feed her 10-month old.

This week, we’re going to spotlight one of the hot button issues at the intersection of employment and pandemic: how parents are going to cope in a fall without schools.

We’ve all needed one at some point –– a doctor’s note explaining that we’re out for the count on some otherwise necessary aspect of work or school, at least temporarily. Many people are realizing that because of COVID, they don’t feel safe at work due to a disability, and need to modify their pre-pandemic job to accommodate this new reality. In this type of situation, what do you ask your doctor for? What does such a note need to include to help you successfully advocate for your rights?

S.D.N.Y. Judge Paul Oetken invalidated parts of the Department of Labor’s interpretation of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act in a lawsuit brought by New York State Attorney General Letitia James.

We’re now a week into the expiration of the enhanced unemployment benefits of the CARES Act and the news is not good. Congress and the White House remain at least a trillion of dollars apart on a new deal, with the Senate GOP split, though their prized bit of the CARES Act, the corporate bailout, did not have an expiration date, unlike those parts aimed at protecting workers, such as the PUA and eviction moratoriums. Thus, with depressing predictability, there were a spate of alarming stories this week echoing the fears that tenant unions and activists have been voicing for months: by ending employment relief we are hurtling toward a cliff, over which lies massive, nationwide evictions.

Overall, we are beginning to see some patterns in the thematic nature of the complaints. Specifically, plaintiffs seem to be those whose employment has been terminated either after expressing concerns about workplace health and safety (e.g. improper distancing, lack of PPE, and not enforcing CDC-recommended quarantine procedures) and parents whose employment has been terminated because they were unable to locate appropriate childcare or family care.

Since the end of March, we’ve spent a great deal of time talking about the economic and social impacts of coronavirus and the lockdowns on working parents, but today we want to talk about how it’s affecting pregnancy. Specifically, what is and isn’t being done to help pregnant women during this incredibly strange and new time.

Woven Bodies, an inclusive digital practice supporting queer folks + allies from family planning through parenthood hosted Associate Alex Berke to offer training on Paid Family Leave.

This week, the New York Times reports that the temporary setbacks to gender parity in the workplace are in danger of being close to permanent, leaving a whole generation of women behind their male cohort in the workplace. There has been a decade of fragile progress since the Great Recession, and in February, women represented a majority of civilian, non-farm workers employed in the country.

Mounting research demonstrates that child care providers are facing a serious crisis, which will have long term implications for women’s rights and the workforce.