Via Eric B. Mayer’s Twitter feed, I saw that a few days ago the Wall Street Journal’s blog for working parents, The Juggle, posted on a hot legal issue these days, “Should Pregnancy Be Treated as a Disability?”

A recent study by a University of Dayton law professor, Jeannette Cox, asserts that pregnant women should be covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act, to protect them from being fired or forced to perform labor that could be harmful to mother or child. (The paper is forthcoming in March in  the Boston College Law Review.)

The ADA doesn’t recognize pregnancy as a disability, leaving pregnant women physically and financially vulnerable on the job, concluded Cox, who studies employment discrimination. She found that pregnant women are at risk for losing their jobs when “reasonable adjustments” aren’t made, such as retail workers fired for drinking water at work or pregnant police officers forced to perform rigorous assignments (while injured officers were given lighter duty).

She’s not kidding about “water at work” — I’ve heard of plenty of cases about pregnant women whose employers denied them basic necessities like water or chairs or bathroom breaks. Professor Cox’s idea is eminently sensible, of course, because there’s really no difference between a complicated pregnancy and the types of permanent disabilities covered by the ADA, except that the former is usually temporary.

In general, a woman with an uncomplicated pregnancy is unlikely to need anything more than the types of “accommodations” most of us take for granted, like drinking water when we’re thirsty or sitting down when we need to rest our legs. Pregnancy usually becomes an issue in the workplace in two circumstances: either the employer started imposing extra restrictions on the pregnant employee (sometimes as a means to force the pregnant employee out and thereby avoid Family and Medical Leave Act duties, and sometimes just out irrational prejudice in violation of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA), an amendment to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) or the pregnant employee developed a complication like pre-eclampsia, placenta previa, or gestational diabetes, and so has a weight/lifting restriction imposed upon them by their doctor.

At that point, the employer can either accommodate the pregnant woman, force her to take whatever family leave is available to her (often exhausting it before the birth of her child), or try to fire her. A disturbing number of employers do the latter two.Continue Reading Pregnancy Is (Legally) Like A Disability If Employers Accommodate Temporarily Disabled Workers