Although Congress outlawed pregnancy discrimination in 1978, far too many employers still routinely deny pregnant workers the temporary job modifications they need to keep working and have a healthy pregnancy. These requests for “accommodations” — such as more frequent breaks, schedule changes, and reassignment of hazardous tasks — often are denied to pregnant workers, and can result in severe consequences for their health and financial security. Nobody should have to choose between a healthy pregnancy and a job.

The bipartisan Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) would outlaw such discrimination and require employers to provide “reasonable accommodations” to pregnant workers. The PWFA has never been so close to becoming law. The House of Representatives passed the bill earlier this year, and we’re waiting for the full Senate to take it up for a vote.

The ACLU has represented numerous pregnant women who have faced a terrible choice: follow their doctors’ orders or lose their incomes. Their stories illustrate three key reasons why the PWFA is urgently needed –– and long overdue.

1: The PWFA is vital for workers’ health.

It’s generally safe to keep working during pregnancy. But many jobs do pose risks to pregnant workers’ health. Police officers and firefighters face life-threatening dangers. Retail workers and cashiers must stand for hours at a time. Custodial staff are exposed to toxic chemicals. And even for people with desk jobs, the realities of even a “normal” pregnancy — from morning sickness to regular prenatal care visits — can interfere with work. For these reasons, pregnant workers may need to temporarily modify their duties and — where pregnancy complications are more severe — take job-protected leave. Employers that deny such accommodations put pregnant workers in the position of leaving work altogether, or working without the safety precautions they need.

2: The PWFA protects families from serious financial hardship.

Pregnancy discrimination in the workplace often leads to significant financial hardship for employees who are forced to take unpaid leave, or fired because they need job modifications employers aren’t willing to provide. The loss of income imposes costs not faced by other workers who choose to start a family — and could not come at a worse moment for pregnant workers and their families.

“At that point, I was about six months away from my due date. How was I supposed to live for six months without a paycheck? How could I buy what I needed to prepare for my baby’s arrival? How would I support my son after he was born? When I got the leave paperwork from the company, the news got even worse: Rural/Metro’s policy did not allow employees who were on leave to work for another company, either … The reality was that I not only was going to lose my paycheck temporarily; I also was at risk of losing my job forever.”
— Michelle Durham

When Michelle Durham, an emergency medical technician (EMT) in Alabama, became pregnant and was directed by her doctor to avoid heavy lifting, her employer told her that her only option was to take unpaid leave — but capped her time off at 90 days. With months to go until her due date, she was effectively fired. The resulting loss of income meant that Michelle had to move in with her grandmother, and fell deep into credit card debt. Years later, she still had bills to pay after giving birth to her son.

3: The PWFA will help assure equal opportunity for pregnant workers

Since 1978, when Congress outlawed pregnancy discrimination under federal law, pregnancy has become routine in the U.S. workplace. Women now comprise half the workforce, and roughly 85 percent of working women will be pregnant at least once. Census figures show that most workers can and will remain on the job well into their final month of pregnancy. Simply put, pregnancy is a normal condition of employment — and employers should be obligated to treat it that way.

“Though my male co-workers were allowed to come and go virtually without penalty, I kept racking up points due to my pregnancy. If throwing up due to severe morning sickness made me late, I got a fraction of a point. Once, I started bleeding and had to be hospitalized overnight. I accrued a point for that too.” — Katia Hills

Katia Hills, an AT&T Mobility retail sales representative in Indiana, was fired after she accumulated too many punitive “points” under the company’s attendance policy. AT&T deemed Katia’s absences caused by severe morning sickness, prenatal appointments, and ER visits “unexcused,” while co-workers’ absences due to jury duty, bereavement, and other reasons unrelated to pregnancy were “excused” and spared points. As a result, Katia not only lost her job; she lost the opportunity to fulfill her dream of advancing in the company and eventually achieving a management role.

Bottom line: No one should be forced to choose between their job and a healthy pregnancy.

The PWFA assures that pregnant workers can keep working, and earning, while also maintaining a healthy pregnancy. Forty years after Congress acted to outlaw pregnancy discrimination, it is long past time for it to assure that workers get the accommodations they need to stay on the job.

Since European settlers arrived on the shores of what is now known as the United States, federal and state governments, intent on seizing Indian lands, have sought to undermine and threaten the existence of tribes through the forced separation and assimilation of Native children. By severing Native children from their families, tribes, and culture, colonizers believed they could stamp out Indigeneity and erase tribal people altogether. As with any nation, the future ceases to exist if children are prevented from carrying on the languages, traditions, and knowledge passed down from each generation to the next.

This tool of assimilation and genocide has been wielded against tribal nations and Native children repeatedly throughout history, and it is happening again now.

The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) — a law that aims to protect Native children from forced removal from their families, tribes, and culture and preserve tribal sovereignty — is currently under attack and at risk of being overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. Congress passed ICWA in 1978 to address the nationwide crisis of state child welfare agencies tearing Native children from their families and placing them in non-Native homes, in an attempt to force Native children to assimilate and adopt white cultural norms. Before ICWA, public and private agencies were removing 25 to 35 percent of Native American/Alaska Native children from their homes, and 85 percent of those children were placed in non-Native households.

Overwhelming evidence has found that being removed from homes and disconnected from culture, tradition, and identity profoundly harms Native children. The Indian Child Welfare Act requires state courts to make active efforts to keep Native families together and to prioritize the placement of Native children within their families and within tribal communities — where their cultural identities will be understood and celebrated.

This November, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Brackeen v. Haaland, a case that challenges the constitutionality of ICWA. If the Supreme Court rules ICWA unconstitutional, it could have devastating consequences for Native children, families and tribes while simultaneously putting the existence of tribes in jeopardy. That’s why the ACLU and the ACLUs of Northern California, Alaska, Arizona, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington and Wyoming filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court today urging the court to uphold the constitutionality of ICWA.

ICWA aims to address the forced separation of Native children and families and represents a small step toward acknowledging the centuries of genocidal violence that underpin this case. Beginning in the early 1800s, the architects of the Federal Indian Boarding School Program designed the program to erase the Indigenous identities of Native people. The government snatched children as young as four years old from their families and sent them to militarized boarding school institutions designed to destroy their Native identities and culture, often hundreds of miles away from their tribal homelands.

Any markers of their Indigeneity — language, clothing, traditional hairstyles, and even their names — were prohibited in these institutions. Indian boarding schools were not simply places where Native youth were stripped of their culture: many children died at these schools from outright neglect, malnutrition, untreated illness, and as a result of physical violence carried out against them.

While boarding schools were largely shuttered by the mid-1900s, the philosophy lived on: Native children were better off living with white families, even at the expense of their mental, physical, and spiritual wellbeing.

In 1958, the Bureau of Indian Affairs created the Indian Adoption Project. The project’s explicit goal was to assimilate Native children into white culture through adoption and the intentional destruction of Indigenous family units and tribal communities. During this era and continuing today, practices rooted in ethnocentric stereotypes operating under the guise of “child protection” resulted in the baseless separation of thousands of Native children from their families and homelands.

It is incomprehensibly heinous that — in order to build the country we all live in today — federal and state governments targeted Native children, robbing those children, their families, their communities, and their tribal nations of everything it meant to be Indigenous.

Brackeen v. Haaland is the largest threat to Native children, families, and tribes before the Supreme Court in our lifetimes. If ICWA is overturned, states would once again be allowed to tear Native children from their families, tribes, and culture while simultaneously threatening tribes’ very existence. The legal arguments made by the plaintiffs challenging ICWA in Brackeen undermine key tenets of federal Indian law, and threaten many other laws upholding tribal sovereignty.

Tribal sovereignty is the right of tribes — 574 currently recognized by the federal government — to make and be governed by their own laws. This sovereignty is inherent, as Native Nations existed long before the creation of the United States. Hundreds of treaties have guaranteed tribal nations the right to self-govern. Through these treaties, Native Nations gave up their right to millions of acres of land that would become the United States in exchange for promises to tribes, including the guarantee that lands “reserved” for tribes would be governed by the tribes in perpetuity. The outcome of Brackeen v. Haaland could put centuries-long legal precedent upholding tribal sovereignty — including tribes’ right and ability to preserve their unique cultural identities, raise their own children and govern themselves — in jeopardy.

Native families have a right to stay together, to care for their children, and to preserve tribal culture by ensuring access to their cultural identity, language, and heritage. The Supreme Court must protect this right and uphold the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act.

The civil rights of transgender people are on the ballot this November. That’s why it’s so important that trans people exercise their right to vote, despite the fact that intimidation in their communities and confusion about voter ID rules can decrease turnout among this vulnerable group.

Let’s be clear — trans people have the right to vote, regardless of their gender identity or their current gender presentation. Yes, you can vote -- even if you haven’t updated your ID to match your gender. And if you have recently updated your photo ID, it’s important that you check your voter registration at IndianaVoters.com to make sure that your registration matches the current name on your photo ID. Election Day is November 8.

Check out our “Yes! You Can Vote!” campaign site for more information about your rights at the polls, and for important dates and resources to make sure your vote counts. Join us on social media where we’ll be sharing stories of transgender voters as we #TRANSformThePolls.