American Civil Liberties Union

Peggy Young asked if she could be put on "light duty" at her UPS job during her pregnancy. UPS refused and put her on unpaid medical leave instead.

By Emily Herx, a teacher at a Catholic school in Indiana who was fired after the school discovered that she used IVF to try to become pregnant. The teacher filed EEOC charges and later a lawsuit in federal court alleging discrimination on the basis of sex and disability. The ACLU has filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case.

I did not imagine when I began teaching at St. Vincent de Paul School that I would find myself in this position today. I loved teaching, and was devoted to my profession and to my students. When I was fired, I was shocked and saddened.

This week, the Supreme Court ruled, by the all-too-familiar 5-4 margin, that a provision of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) giving workers time off to care for their own serious health conditions — including pregnancy and childbirth — can't be enforced by state employees in damages lawsuits against their public employers. The decision in Coleman v. Court of Appeals of Maryland effectively stripped many public employees — the majority of whom are women — of the right to job protection when they need to take time off while pregnant. The ACLU had joined an amicus brief arguing that the law was written in a gender-neutral way to provide women workers with the time they needed to go through childbirth and pregnancy-related complications, while ensuring that employers wouldn't discriminate based on the assumption that only women will need to take health-related leave from their jobs. While no opinion garnered five votes, a majority of the Court agreed that the law was not justified as a remedy for a pattern of unconstitutional discrimination against women or pregnant workers.

Access to birth control, forced ultrasounds – lately there’s been a lot of news about efforts to roll women’s rights back by decades. Less attention has been paid to the way in which pregnant women and nursing mothers have been stuck in the 1970s, or worse, when it comes to workplace equality.

Yesterday, the ACLU submitted comments to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission – the body that enforces federal civil rights employment law – explaining how courts have been ignoring the basic premise of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, and leaving women in the lurch.