Pregnancy Discrimination

Passed over, replaced, or let go while pregnant or on leave: is it legal?

By Bruce Weisenberg · Published July 31, 2026 · Last reviewed July 31, 2026 · 10 min read

It rarely starts with a firing. It starts with the project that gets "covered" a few weeks early, the client meeting you hear about afterward, a performance conversation — your first in years — scheduled soon after you announced. California law follows this whole arc, and it keeps asking one question: was the pregnancy a substantial reason this happened? The women below are how courts learned to ask it. Their cases are a map of what employers actually do.

The week after the announcement

Wynona Harris was a probationary bus driver for the City of Santa Monica with a couple of minor dings on her early record. She told her supervisor she was pregnant. Within days, her name appeared on a list of drivers "not meeting standards," and she was fired. Her case went to the California Supreme Court and produced the standard that now governs every discrimination claim in the state: the employee must show the protected trait was a substantial motivating reason for the decision — substantial, not sole (Harris v. City of Santa Monica (2013)). Notice what she did not have to prove: that anyone at the city disliked pregnant women. The question is whether the pregnancy substantially moved the decision — and the jury gets to read between the lines. The city argued her driving record justified the firing anyway; the Court held that this kind of same-decision proof trims the remedies but does not erase the finding of discrimination itself. The white-collar version of Harris's week is familiar: the promotion front-runner whose "readiness" is suddenly in question, the re-scoped role, the review that discovers problems no prior review saw. The closer the turn follows the announcement, the more the sequence itself has to say.

Sometimes the answer to an announcement is not a firing but a demotion. Rosario Juarez was an AutoZone store manager when she became pregnant. It was suggested she "step down" from management — and when she didn't volunteer, the demotion arrived anyway. She challenged it, and was then fired, for reasons a jury later found were pretext: a cover story. That jury returned one of the largest individual employment verdicts in American history (Juarez v. AutoZone (S.D. Cal. 2014)). A formal demotion is a documented adverse action — a concrete harm, on paper. Complaining about it is protected activity. An employer that answers the complaint by firing you has turned one claim into two.

"Bring a note that says no restrictions"

When a Michigan nursing home learned Jennifer Latowski was pregnant, it required a doctor's note stating she had no work restrictions. Her doctor, sensibly, gave her a lifting limit instead. She was fired for it. The Sixth Circuit let her claim go to a jury: a "no restrictions" policy, it reasoned, can work as machinery for pushing out pregnant workers (Latowski v. Northwoods Nursing Center (2013)).

In California, the duty runs the other way by statute: employers must accommodate the restrictions a pregnancy brings — modified duties, adjusted schedules, seating, a transfer to a less strenuous position where one is reasonably available (Gov. Code § 12945(a)(3)). An employer that treats any restriction as disqualifying isn't enforcing a standard. It's usually building a file.

Fired on bed rest

Ana Sanchez worked for Swissport at LAX. A high-risk pregnancy put her on doctor-ordered bed rest. When her four months of Pregnancy Disability Leave ran out — months before her due date — the company fired her, arguing it had given every week the leave statutes required and had therefore "satisfied all of its obligations." The Court of Appeal revived her case. The leave laws set minimums that sit on top of FEHA, not in place of it. A woman still disabled by pregnancy when statutory leave ends is entitled to reasonable accommodation like any other disabled worker — including more leave, unless the employer proves undue hardship (Sanchez v. Swissport (2013)). The termination letter that recites "your leave has been exhausted" is one of the most common documents in this field. It is often the strongest piece of evidence the employee will ever hold. It announces, in writing, that the employer stopped thinking at exactly the point the law keeps going. How the transition is supposed to work is covered in the leave guide and the interactive-process guide.

Terminated mid-leave, over paperwork

Leticia Bareno, a community-college employee recovering from a medical procedure, emailed her recertification for continued leave. Her employer said it never received it, treated her absences as unexcused, and deemed her to have voluntarily resigned. The Court of Appeal reversed. Once an employee gives notice that her leave is medical, an employer cannot spring a termination on a form it claims never arrived — the leave statutes require it to ask and to give the employee a real chance to fix the problem (Bareno v. San Diego Community College Dist. (2017)). Mid-leave firings built on technicalities — a form, a date, a portal submission — sit poorly with judges. The whole structure of these laws assumes the person on leave is, by definition, dealing with something larger than paperwork.

The position that dissolved while you were out

Then there's the quietest version: no discipline, no paperwork fight, just a restructuring that happened to swallow your role while you were on leave, and an offer of something smaller "given the changes." Being pregnant or on leave doesn't make a layoff impossible — that isn't how it works. It depends on who chose the people, what they knew, and when the list was made. Because return from pregnancy leave is to the same position, an employer claiming the job disappeared has to prove it would have disappeared even without the leave — a genuine reorganization that would have swept the role away with you sitting at your desk.

That is usually the whole case. A reorganization genuinely decided before the leave, on paper, stands. But a recurring scene in discovery is the "long-planned" restructuring whose earliest dated version turns out to be from three weeks into the employee's leave. At that point the case is less about corporate strategy than about arithmetic.

Working pregnant: the doctor's note is the load-bearing document

Because so many of these firings dress themselves up as accommodation disputes, the mechanics deserve precision. California's pregnancy-accommodation right (§ 12945(a)(3)(A)) turns on a request made with the advice of your health care provider. The jury instruction lists that as an element — which makes the doctor's note the load-bearing document. The strongest notes state the limit and the fix: no lifting past a threshold, a schedule window for appointments, a remote stretch for severe nausea, seating for a standing role. A 2023 Court of Appeal decision, Lopez v. La Casa de las Madres, adds a caution: the employee must show the requested accommodation would have let her perform the job's essential functions. So vagueness is the enemy on both sides of the exchange. Stated as specific working conditions rather than open-ended relief, these requests are hard to refuse and expensive to punish. What an employer may not do is turn the request into an ultimatum. In 2025, California's prison system paid a multimillion-dollar settlement over claims that a large class of pregnant officers had been forced to choose: work without accommodation at their own risk, accept a demotion with a pay cut, or go onto unpaid leave. The accommodation duty exists precisely so that no one has to pick from that menu.

The fertility edge

The law here is genuinely unsettled. Federal courts have held that firing a woman over time off for fertility treatment can be sex discrimination. One employer told its employee the firing was in her "best interest" given her condition; the Seventh Circuit let the claim proceed. The EEOC has sued and settled over the same pattern. California's statute, though, keys to pregnancy, childbirth, and related conditions. In Paleny v. Fireplace Products (2024), the Court of Appeal held that elective egg retrieval and freezing — with no pregnancy and no underlying pregnancy-related condition — fell outside FEHA entirely, even though the manager's hostility to the procedures was the alleged reason for the firing. When a termination sits near this line, which law applies and how is a sorting question for a lawyer, not intuition. The same facts can fail under one statute and live under another.

Paper the file while you still have the badge

Across every story above, the evidence that mattered was made in ordinary moments. The announcement in a dated email rather than a hallway. Medical notes submitted with proof of delivery, and copies kept at home. The performance record as it stood before the announcement, saved while access still exists. A short note after each meeting where the job changed shape — who said what, and when. The timeline is the story: there's a point where things went from fine to off the rails, and proving it coincided with the announcement is what these documents do. Through all of it, stay in the job while things get sorted. Quitting in the middle of the storm usually hands back the very claims these women spent years in court to establish.

Common questions

Bruce Weisenberg represents employees — only employees — across California (State Bar No. 260521). More than seventeen years in employment law, on his own since 2014, working on contingency. Read about Bruce →  ·  Tell me what happened →