The Oklahoma Bar Journal August 2025

employer for not accommodat ing her lifting restriction and for mandating that she stay home during her pregnancy without pay. 14 The evidence indicated that UPS accommodated non pregnant employees, routinely approving lifting restrictions to employees post-injury but deny ing the requests if they related to pregnant women. 15 The Supreme Court rejected UPS’s accommo dation position, determining that the rejection of pregnant worker accommodations must have “suffi ciently strong” justification. 16 Unfortunately, Young ’s language did not stop pregnancy discrimina tion, nor did it necessarily improve access to justice for working mothers. Courts continue to permit employers to deny pregnancy accommodations in two-thirds of cases. 17 The PWFA is a landmark federal civil rights law. It gives pregnant and postpartum workers the right to reasonable accommodations in the workplace, without discrimina tion or retaliation, for family plan ning, pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions, regard less of how the employers treat “similar” workers. The necessity for these protections – and for employ ers to understand and follow the PWFA – cannot be overstated. Over 80% of working women will have a child in their lifetime, and 20% of these women report they suffered discrimination in the workplace. 18 This article discusses current federal anti-discrimination laws available to pregnant workers and the various gaps in coverage. It also provides a guide to complying with the PWFA and recent case law interpreting it.

Discrimination Act (PDA), an amendment to Title VII that defined “because of sex” to include “on the basis of pregnancy, child birth, or related medical condi tions.” 9 The PDA mandated that pregnant women “shall be treated the same for all employment-related purposes, including the receipt of benefits ... as other persons not so affected but similar in their ability or inability to work.” 10 The PDA represented a great victory in the fight to improve the trajectory of women’s employment rights. In the following years, the Supreme Court renounced Muller as women began seeking more physically demanding and higher-paying jobs. 11 In Johnson Controls , the employer’s “fetal pro tection policy” barred women from holding positions that required lead contact unless they had proof of sterility, as lead was known to cause birth defects. The company did not apply the policy to male employees. 12 The court rejected this policy as “it is no more appropriate for the courts than it is for individ ual employers to decide whether a woman’s reproductive role is more important to herself and her family than her economic role.” 13 While progress continued, a new conflict arose regarding women who needed “light duty” style accommodations for strenu ous job duties that conflicted with their pregnancy. Upon the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, employers began regularly altering job duties to meet disabled workers’ needs but still denied accommodations to pregnant women as they were not “similar” in their “inability to work.” The Supreme Court addressed this issue in Young v. United Parcel Service , wherein a pregnant worker sued her

THE GAPS: HOW OTHER FEDERAL STATUTES DON’T EFFECTIVELY ACCOMMODATE WORKING MOTHERS Pregnancy Discrimination Act The PDA clarified that preg nancy discrimination was dis crimination “on the basis of sex.” 19 While the PDA expanded protec tions granted to other protected classes under Title VII to preg nant people, it only required that employers treat pregnant workers no worse than other “similarly sit uated” employees. This remained a significant legal roadblock for pregnant employees. It was difficult for pregnant employees to identify other employees with similar nonpregnancy limitations who received employer-provided accommodations. Further, some courts refused to consider accom modations granted under the ADA as appropriate comparators when analyzing claims under the PDA. 20 Americans with Disabilities Act The ADA is a federal civil rights law designed to prohibit discrim ination because of disability. 21 Originally, the ADA excluded preg nancy from the list of conditions considered a qualified disability; however, the 2008 amendments expanded the definition of disabil ity to include pregnancy-related impairments arising from a disabil ity. Hence, the application of the definition of a pregnancy-related disability limits the ADA’s scope to only certain circumstances. 22 Restrictions related to pregnancy, like other disabling conditions, must reach the threshold of substantially limiting a major life activity for protection under the ADA. 23 Protection has still been denied when courts find the

Statements or opinions expressed in the Oklahoma Bar Journal are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Oklahoma Bar Association, its officers, Board of Governors, Board of Editors or staff.

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THE OKLAHOMA BAR JOURNAL