Pregnant, laid off and unable to find new work: The US moms-to-be with no healthcare and no rights

In the US, maternity rights are few and far between — and entirely dependent on the state in which you live. Hollie McKay, who is pregnant and was recently laid off, reports on a building national crisis

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I sit in my OBGYN’s office for my monthly pre-natal appointment, trying to hold myself together.

“How are you feeling?” the doctor asks.

I burst into an irrational flood of tears, sobbing silently into my hands. I pat my steadily bulging belly, silently apologizing to my baby girl for the upset, riddled with guilt for feeling so wretched when I have so much to look forward to and am so blessed for this tiny, albeit unexpected, miracle of life.

Of course, my problems are barely a blip in the scheme of most of the horrors unfolding in our fragile world today. As a war reporter, I’m all too aware of that. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t important.

Two months ago, at the end of my first trimester and while working in the Middle East, I received that dreaded cold email many of us encounter at some point in our professional lives: My position at a company I was deeply passionate about had been suddenly eliminated, due to downsizing and restructuring. At that point, only one top executive at the company knew I was expecting. Of course, my pregnancy was not the reason for the layoff, as the layoffs also impacted several others. Still, it certainly affected how I felt about it. Job-hunting is hard enough — never mind when you’re pregnant.

And it turns out my situation isn’t that unusual, especially in the US.

Lauren will never forget what happened after she walked into her office a little late following a six-month ultrasound appointment. The memory, she says, still stings.

“HR was waiting for me at my desk to bring me into an office and deliver the news [that I was being laid off]. I was shocked and said, ‘You know I’m six months pregnant, right?’ They ignored me, gave me my paperwork and told me to leave,” the former editorial director of a major publishing house recalls. “Apparently, upwards of 50 people were laid off that day.”

Before the termination, Lauren says she struggled to find clear information regarding the company’s maternity leave policy. And after she left the company, she slipped into a deep funk of depression and devastation. Just days before, she’d been the family’s breadwinner. Now, she felt isolated and afraid.

“When this happened to me in 2014, it was shocking – no one could relate, no one could believe it was legal, and I had no one to turn to or connect with who had a shared experience. I spoke to an employment lawyer, but the stress of going through a lawsuit was too much and likely would not go in my favor,” the now Connecticut-based freelance writer continues. “But today? I hear from women all the time [who want] to connect with me because they are going through the same thing. It’s scary that being laid off while pregnant is suddenly commonplace.”

In recent months, pregnant women in the tech industry have been hit particularly hard. Silicon Valley giants have laid off thousands in recent months – and pregnant employees are no exception.

“Last Thursday in the SF office, really the last day Twitter was Twitter. 8 months pregnant and have a 9-month-old,” tweeted Rachel Bonn, a former marketing manager marketing manager at Twitter, on November 4, 2022. Bonn claimed she had just had her laptop access cut off without warning. She wasn’t the only one. Tweets from other pregnant employees were more bullish, some of them threatening legal action.

Former Meta employee Marnie Thao Nguyen says she lost her job while 30 weeks’ pregnant.

“I was excelling and enjoying my work, so this news came as a complete surprise. The next 10 weeks were supposed to be the most exciting and precious time as I prepared to welcome my daughter,” she wrote on LinkedIn. “Instead, I spent days and nights anxiously job-searching, worried about maintaining legal status as an immigrant worker while taking care of my health and learning how to become a new mom.”

Under the additional pressure of being a worker on an H1B visa, Nguyen stresses that she “did not have the luxury of time” to leave her job search until after she had given birth. Being laid off meant she would soon lose her ability to stay in the US, where she lived with her young family.

“With a growing family dependent on me, I pushed myself to interview up until a week before my delivery, just for offers to get rescinded due to the fast-changing business needs in tech,” she continues. Deprived of paid maternity leave, she started a job at another company when her son was three months old.

Questions over Big Tech’s handling of pregnancy-related job terminations and maternity discrimination appeared before the most recent rounds of Silicon Valley layoffs. In 2019, Chelsey Glasson filed a complaint with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Washington State’s Human Rights Commission. The following year, she sued her former employer, Google, alleging that she had been discriminated against for defending a pregnant co-worker and then pushed out by leaders after divulging her own pregnancy. Google settled with Glasson in February 2022.

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 makes it illegal for a hiring manager to discriminate against an individual based on pregnancy. A pregnant person is not lawfully obligated to inform a prospective employer, and the employer is not allowed to ask if one is expecting. However, companies with fewer than 15 employees are exempt from the Act.

Similarly, employers are not allowed to fire an individual for taking maternity leave, which would be legally considered retaliation. Yet an employer can terminate an employee while on leave while arguing that the leave has nothing to do with the layoff or firing. This is seen by many as an insidious loophole that allows bad behavior to continue unchecked.

According to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, approximately 54,000 women lose their jobs in the US annually due to pregnancy discrimination.

“Sadly, it is not uncommon for pregnant workers to be laid off. Some cases are bad timing, but many others are calculated, unlawful decisions,” says Elisa Filman, a Massachusetts-based employment lawyer. “The key element of the standard of proof for proving pregnancy discrimination is that the termination decision was based on the fact that the employee was pregnant. It is always difficult to prove intent, especially when there are other factors. Without a smoking gun, it is up to the judge or jury to determine whose explanation is more credible: the pregnant employee who was terminated or the employer.”

Filman notes that the United States “definitely does not have enough legal protections for pregnant people or those on maternity leave.”

“Pregnant workers experience discrimination during their pregnancy, their leave and after returning to work, all of which can have long-lasting implications both professionally and personally,” Filman points out.

When I found out I’d lost my job at the beginning of my second trimester, I immediately felt like a deadbeat mother, unable to provide, wrapped in a choking blanket of stress and worry I could not escape. I hated being engulfed with panic while this beautiful little life blossomed inside me. While I’m immensely grateful for the support of my incredible partner, he is in grad school, so our immediate financial future is far from secure. And the more I willed myself to calm down about the situation, the worse I continued to feel.

“I was freaking out,” concurs Haley Longman, a writer for a New York-based publication that folded six years ago when she was 20 weeks’ pregnant with her first child. “It meant I only had health insurance for another two weeks and was concerned about finances afterwards. My husband and I had just bought a house in New Jersey a couple of weeks earlier and put the down payment on it, so we couldn’t back out.”

Further, the Family and Medical Leave she had banked on to keep things afloat while caring for her newborn suddenly dissipated.

When you do begin interviewing for jobs as a newly laid-off pregnant person, it creates a flood of worry about how much to say and not say during the interview process. Is it better to keep your pregnancy a secret or disclose it? Is it wrong to accept an offer and then reveal the news? What about if you are already showing — is the bulging belly the elephant in the room? With a new baby on the way, how can you demonstrate your commitment to your career to a potential employer?

“People don’t talk about it, but it was really awkward when I was interviewing for jobs. I was very much pregnant at the time,” Longman says. “I always brought it up because I just felt weird not bringing it up.”

Longman turned to freelance writing and editorial work before returning to the full-time swing when her son was around eight months old. Still, she describes that period as “one of the most stressful times of our lives.”

And part of that stress emanates from the unspoken stigma we sadly still know exists.

“The truth is that I wouldn’t hire a pregnant person, knowing that they will want a chunk of time off shortly,” admits a friend who owns a small business. “Employers can’t legally say anything, but they still know.”

However, several such stories do have optimistic outcomes.

“It was 100 percent the best thing that happened to me,” emphasizes Rachel Stevens, who gave birth after being laid off from her advertising job in Seattle, Washington, in her first trimester. “I realized it was a toxic place for me, and even though I was making good money, I was running myself into the ground.”

Yet the relief didn’t come immediately. Stevens recounts the “gut-wrenching” moment when her boss told her that the firm had lost a major client; thus, her job no longer existed. She’d defined herself through her job for so long that she felt like she’d lost her identity as well as her role at the company.

“My first reaction was that I needed to get a job before I started showing,” Stevens says. “Because employers aren’t allowed to ask and aren’t allowed to discriminate.”

Although she didn’t end up resuming full-time work as a radio station producer until three months after her son was born, Stevens says the generous benefits offered to expectant working women in Washington state helped her through the woes and worries until the next offer came along.

“I’m very grateful to the universe that it all happened the way it did,” she notes.

If you live in a state that chooses not to provide such benefits, however, you can easily be left with nothing. “While some states have expanded leave laws to include more workers, and some even provide state-sponsored pay,” Filman says, “at the federal level, existing leave laws do not cover every employee, and the leave is unpaid.”

In many states, pregnancy is legally considered a “disability” and pregnant women with nowhere else to turn are given disability benefits. However, it’s important to point out that pregnancy is not a disability. It is a unique and natural state of life — and it deserves proper acknowledgement by the federal government, lest we continue to see women suffer discrimination when they need financial security most.

Google, Meta and Twitter were approached for comment but not respond.