The EEOC filed two pregnancy-accommodation lawsuits on 30 September that put the same question to employers: what happens to a pregnant worker’s job when leave is the only tool offered.
In the first, the agency alleges that a Delray Beach, Florida medical call center denied childbirth leave to several employees in 2023 and 2024 because they did not qualify for leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), then required them to resign and reapply once they were medically cleared. According to the EEOC’s release, the company never separately considered whether the leave was a reasonable accommodation under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA). “An employee does not have to qualify for FMLA leave to be entitled to a reasonable accommodation under the PWFA,” said Kristen Foslid, regional attorney for the EEOC’s Miami District.
In the second, the EEOC alleges that a Missouri disability-services nonprofit refused a pregnant employee’s temporary 20-pound lifting restriction, although it routinely gave light duty to other staff with similar restrictions. It placed her on leave guaranteed for 12 weeks and fired her when the leave ran out, the suit says. The agency says the PWFA makes it unlawful to force leave on an employee when other accommodations are available. Both are allegations in complaints, and neither release carries a response from the employer.
For HR teams, the practical question is how leave requests are routed. A case workflow that branches on FMLA eligibility and stops there never reaches the second test the EEOC describes. That is our reading of the two suits, not the agency’s. Recently we covered how disability suits now begin at the offer stage and a suit over offers pulled after medication disclosures; the pregnancy cases extend the same interactive-process logic to a different protected group.
The original insight is about sequence: ask what accommodation exists before asking what leave the employee qualifies for, and record both answers.
