Do Pregnancy Accommodations End at FMLA?

A recent EEOC lawsuit against a Florida casino is giving HR teams across the country a reason to revisit how pregnancy accommodations get handled in practice. The case alleges the employer enforced a blanket policy requiring workers to resign if absences exceeded two weeks and the employee didn’t meet FMLA eligibility requirements. The result, according to the EEOC, was pregnant employees being pushed out of the workforce rather than accommodated.

The case highlights a compliance gap that still catches a lot of employers off guard: treating FMLA eligibility as the entire analysis when a pregnancy-related limitation comes up.

It isn’t.

The Accommodation Question That Keeps Getting Skipped

The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act changed the landscape for how employers need to respond when pregnancy-related limitations affect an employee’s ability to perform job duties. Under the PWFA, employers have an obligation to assess whether a reasonable accommodation would allow that employee to keep working. That assessment is separate from FMLA. It doesn’t go away because someone hasn’t hit the hours threshold or tenure requirement for protected leave.

What the EEOC’s complaint describes is a scenario where that entire step got bypassed. A rigid attendance policy took the place of the individualized analysis that federal law now requires. The employer appears to have defaulted to a binary framework: either the employee qualifies for leave, or the employee is out. That kind of policy-first thinking is exactly what pregnancy accommodations under the PWFA were designed to address.

Policies That Create More Risk Than They Solve

Attendance policies and maximum leave caps exist for good reasons. Consistency matters, and employers need structure to manage workforce operations. But when those policies get applied without any flexibility for legally required pregnancy accommodations, the structure itself becomes the liability.

The interactive process that most HR professionals already know from ADA compliance now applies with equal force to pregnancy-related conditions. The PWFA makes that explicit. When an employee has a limitation tied to pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition, the employer needs to engage in that back-and-forth conversation about what the employee needs to stay on the job.

Sometimes the answer is straightforward. Modified duties, adjusted scheduling, temporary reassignment, additional breaks, reduced physical demands. These aren’t exotic pregnancy accommodations. Most of the time, keeping a pregnant employee working is less disruptive than losing that employee entirely and backfilling the role.

Reframing the Question

The instinct for a lot of employers is to start with leave. Can the employee take leave? Does the employee qualify? How much is available? That framing puts the focus on absence rather than continued employment.

A better starting point: what does this employee need to stay in the role?

That shift matters because even when leave turns out to be the right accommodation, the analysis doesn’t stop at FMLA exhaustion. Under the PWFA, leave can still be a reasonable accommodation even after FMLA runs out or when an employee never qualified in the first place. Treating leave as categorically unavailable once a statutory or company cap is reached is the exact kind of rigid application that draws EEOC attention.

The Bigger Picture

The EEOC isn’t treating this as a one-off. The agency has been building a pattern of enforcement that targets employers who default to separation when pregnancy-related limitations come up. The underlying logic is simple: pregnancy ends. The employee is still the employee. The entire point of the PWFA is to keep that person working through a temporary condition instead of letting a rigid policy make the decision for them. When pregnancy accommodations get swapped out for blanket leave rules or automatic termination triggers, that’s where the enforcement action starts.

That framework also carries a cultural component. Organizations that tolerate dismissive attitudes toward pregnancy, whether through offhand comments, jokes, or a general lack of seriousness about accommodation obligations, create an environment where discriminatory outcomes become more likely. When that culture gets paired with rigid leave policies, the legal exposure compounds.

What Employers Should Be Doing Now

This case isn’t an outlier. The EEOC has made pregnancy accommodation enforcement a priority, and the PWFA gave the agency sharper tools to pursue these claims.

Employers should be looking at existing attendance and leave policies to identify any automatic termination triggers that don’t account for pregnancy accommodations. The interactive process needs to be happening every time a pregnancy-related limitation is raised, regardless of FMLA eligibility. And HR teams need to be trained to treat the accommodation analysis as a distinct step, not something that only kicks in after leave options have been exhausted.

The days of treating FMLA eligibility as the whole answer are over. The question now is whether the rest of the compliance framework has caught up.