You told your employer you were pregnant and the job you’d been doing well for years suddenly wasn’t good enough. Or you came back from maternity leave to discover your position had been filled and no one could explain why. Or you requested temporary accommodation, something as simple as a stool to sit on during your shift or a modified lifting restriction, and were told the company “couldn’t make that work” and that maybe it was best if you “focused on the baby.” These scenarios happen to Dallas employees more often than the city’s corporate image would suggest, across industries from healthcare and finance to retail and hospitality. Wrongful termination lawyers in Dallas who handle pregnancy discrimination cases know that the legal protections are strong on paper but that employers continue to test them, often by disguising pregnancy-motivated terminations behind performance pretexts that didn’t exist before the pregnancy became known.
Texas is at-will, but the at-will doctrine has never permitted employers to fire someone because she’s pregnant.
The Federal Framework: Three Overlapping Statutes
Pregnancy discrimination in employment is prohibited by three federal statutes that each address a different dimension of the problem. Understanding what each one does, and where they overlap, is essential for building the strongest possible case.
The Pregnancy Discrimination Act
The PDA, enacted in 1978 as an amendment to Title VII, prohibits employers with 15 or more employees from discriminating on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions. It requires employers to treat pregnant employees the same as other employees who are similar in their ability or inability to work. If the employer provides light duty, modified tasks, or alternative assignments to employees with temporary disabilities or injuries, it must extend the same accommodations to pregnant employees.
The PDA’s “same treatment” framework was strengthened by the Supreme Court’s decision in Young v. United Parcel Service (2015), which clarified that an employer’s refusal to accommodate a pregnant employee while accommodating other workers with similar physical limitations creates an inference of discrimination. A Dallas employer that provides light duty to workers recovering from surgery or managing a workers’ comp injury but denies the same accommodation to a pregnant employee with comparable lifting restrictions is treating pregnancy less favorably than other temporary physical conditions, and that disparity supports a PDA claim.
The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act
The federal PWFA, which took effect in June 2023, created an affirmative right to reasonable accommodations for employees affected by pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions. This was a significant expansion beyond the PDA’s comparator-based framework, because the PWFA doesn’t require the employee to identify a similarly situated non-pregnant worker who received an accommodation. The right to accommodation exists independently.
Under the PWFA, an employer must provide reasonable accommodations unless doing so would impose an undue hardship on the business. The employer must engage in an interactive process with the employee to identify an effective accommodation. And the employer cannot force the employee to take leave if a reasonable accommodation would allow her to continue working.
The PWFA applies to employers with 15 or more employees, and the EEOC has issued implementing regulations that provide detailed guidance on what constitutes a reasonable accommodation in the pregnancy context. Accommodations can include modified work schedules, more frequent breaks, temporary reassignment to less physically demanding duties, permission to sit during shifts that normally require standing, and time off for prenatal appointments.
For wrongful termination cases, the PWFA matters because it creates a distinct retaliation claim. An employee who requests a pregnancy accommodation and is fired has a PWFA retaliation claim regardless of whether the employer also violated the PDA. The accommodation request is protected activity, and the termination that follows it is the adverse action.
The FMLA
The Family and Medical Leave Act entitles eligible employees to up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave for the birth of a child, for prenatal care, and for serious health conditions related to pregnancy. It applies to employers with 50 or more employees within 75 miles and to employees who have worked for the employer for at least 12 months and logged at least 1,250 hours.
The FMLA protects the employee’s right to return to the same position or an equivalent one after the leave. An employer that fills the position during the leave and offers no comparable alternative upon the employee’s return has potentially violated the FMLA’s reinstatement guarantee. An employer that terminates the employee while she’s on FMLA leave, or shortly after she returns, faces an inference of FMLA interference or retaliation.
Texas Law: Chapter 21 and Its Limits
Texas Labor Code Chapter 21 prohibits employment discrimination based on sex, which Texas courts have interpreted to include pregnancy discrimination consistent with the federal PDA framework. Chapter 21 applies to employers with 15 or more employees and provides a state-law cause of action that runs parallel to the federal claims.
The practical significance of Chapter 21 in pregnancy cases is primarily procedural. It allows the employee to file a state-court lawsuit after exhausting the administrative process through the Texas Workforce Commission, which some attorneys prefer over federal court depending on the specific facts and the local judicial environment. The remedies under Chapter 21 include back pay, compensatory damages, and attorneys’ fees, with damages caps that mirror the federal Title VII caps based on employer size.
Texas does not have a state-level equivalent of the PWFA. There is no Texas statute that creates an independent right to pregnancy accommodations beyond what the federal PWFA provides. For employees at smaller employers below the 15-employee threshold for federal coverage, this creates a significant protection gap. Texas has no state law that fills it.
How Dallas Employers Disguise Pregnancy Discrimination
What Wrongful Termination Lawyers in Dallas See in Pregnancy Termination Cases
The termination rarely happens the day the employee announces her pregnancy. Dallas employers are sophisticated enough to understand that the optics of firing someone immediately after a pregnancy announcement are difficult to defend. The process unfolds over weeks or months, following patterns that wrongful termination attorneys recognize across industries.
The pre-leave performance campaign. An employee with a clean record begins receiving negative feedback after her pregnancy becomes visible or known. Write-ups appear. Goals are adjusted to be less achievable. A PIP is introduced with a timeline that conveniently expires around the expected start of maternity leave, giving the employer a documented “performance failure” to cite when it terminates the employee before the leave begins. The employer avoids the obligation to hold the position during FMLA leave by removing the employee from the position before the leave starts.
The position elimination during leave. The employee takes maternity leave. While she’s out, her responsibilities are distributed among coworkers or absorbed by a new hire. When she’s ready to return, she’s told the position was eliminated as part of a restructuring. The restructuring affected only her role. The work she was doing is still being performed. The position wasn’t eliminated. She was.
The “different person when she came back” narrative. After returning from leave, the employee is assessed against productivity standards she was meeting before the leave, but her initial ramp-up period is counted against her. She’s told she’s “not performing at the level we need,” despite the fact that a brief adjustment period after a 12-week absence is expected for any employee returning from extended leave. The employer treats the post-leave adjustment as evidence of diminished commitment rather than a normal reintegration process.
The accommodation refusal that forces resignation. The employee requests a temporary modification, perhaps a reduced lifting requirement or a schedule adjustment for prenatal appointments. The employer denies the request, or grants it on paper but creates conditions that make it impossible to use (scheduling pressure, supervisor hostility, public criticism for leaving early for appointments). The employee either resigns because the conditions become intolerable or is fired for the performance consequences of the unaccommodated condition.
Evidence That Builds Pregnancy Discrimination Cases
The before-and-after contrast in the employer’s treatment of the employee is typically the most powerful evidence. Performance reviews, emails from supervisors, project assignments, and promotion trajectory before the pregnancy was known establish a baseline. The shift in tone, expectations, and treatment after the pregnancy disclosure establishes the discriminatory change.
Comparator evidence strengthens the case. Were male employees or non-pregnant female employees who took medical leave, requested schedule modifications, or had temporary physical limitations treated differently? If a male employee who had knee surgery was given light duty for six weeks and the pregnant employee with comparable lifting restrictions was told no accommodation was available, the disparity speaks for itself.
The employer’s response to the accommodation request is directly relevant under the PWFA. Did the employer engage in the interactive process? Did it explore alternatives before denying the request? Did it document its consideration of reasonable accommodations? The absence of any interactive process is evidence that the employer didn’t take its obligations seriously.
Communications about the employee’s pregnancy from supervisors and HR carry significant weight. Comments about the employee being “distracted,” “less committed,” or “probably not coming back after the baby” reveal assumptions that drive discriminatory decisions. These statements are rarely put in writing, which is why Texas’s one-party consent recording law can be a strategic asset for employees who suspect pregnancy discrimination is developing.
Filing Deadlines in Texas
The dual-deadline framework applies to pregnancy discrimination claims just as it does to other discrimination claims. The TWC Civil Rights Division deadline is 180 days from the adverse action. The EEOC deadline is 300 days. FMLA claims have a two-year statute of limitations (three years for willful violations) with no administrative filing requirement. PWFA retaliation claims follow the Title VII administrative framework with the same 180/300-day deadlines.
The 180-day TWC deadline is the most aggressive, and it starts running from the date of the termination, not from the date the employee decides the termination was discriminatory. For a new mother managing recovery, infant care, and the financial stress of sudden unemployment, 180 days is not a long time.
Your Pregnancy Is Not a Performance Problem
Federal law prohibits it. Texas law prohibits it. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act created an affirmative right to accommodation that didn’t exist before 2023. And the FMLA guarantees your right to return to your job after maternity leave. If you were fired in Dallas during pregnancy, while on maternity leave, or after requesting pregnancy-related accommodations, wrongful termination lawyers in Dallas can evaluate your claims under the PDA, the PWFA, the FMLA, and Texas Labor Code Chapter 21 and determine which combination of claims gives you the strongest path forward. The Mundaca Law Firm represents pregnant and postpartum employees throughout Dallas-Fort Worth. Contact the firm for a consultation, and be aware that the 180-day TWC deadline may already be closer than you think.
