The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) plans to propose new limits this month on the federal rules that protect pregnant workers on the job, according to the agency's own entry in the federal regulatory agenda and reporting by HR Dive on November 3. The entry, titled 'Revisions to the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act Regulations' (RIN 3046-AB36), lists November 2026 as the target date for a proposed rule and says the EEOC will revise how it reads the words 'pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions' — the phrase that decides which workers can ask an employer for help.
Source: HR Dive
The text of the proposed rule has not been released, so the exact changes are not yet known. What is known, from the regulatory agenda abstract described by HR Dive, is the target: the regulations that require covered employers to provide reasonable accommodations to a qualified worker's known limitations related to, affected by, or arising out of pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions, unless the accommodation would cause the employer an undue hardship.
What the current law and rule actually do
Congress passed the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) with bipartisan support in December 2022, and the law took effect on June 27, 2023. It generally applies to employers with 15 or more employees. In practice, the accommodations it protects are everyday ones: extra breaks, limits on heavy lifting, a stool to sit on, schedule changes, and time off for prenatal appointments, as Becker's Hospital Review summarised in its report on the planned revision.
Source: Becker's Hospital Review
The EEOC's implementing regulation, finalised in April 2024 and in effect since June 18, 2024, defined the qualifying conditions broadly. As currently written, the rule's list reaches beyond pregnancy itself to conditions including miscarriage, postpartum depression, lactation, fertility treatment, endometriosis and menstruation. The agency said in 2024 that it received more than 100,000 comments on the proposed version of that rule, and that more than half of them asked it to exclude abortion from the definition of 'related medical conditions'.
Why Chair Andrea Lucas wants the definition narrowed
EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas voted against the 2024 rule and set out her reasons in a written statement at the time, which she has referenced again since taking the chair. 'At a high level, the rule fundamentally errs in conflating pregnancy and childbirth accommodation with accommodation of the female sex, that is, female biology and reproduction,' Lucas wrote. She added that the rule 'opens the door to requiring accommodations potentially extending to a myriad of conditions ranging from infertility to menstruation to hormone issues to menopause.'
Source: EEOC / HR Dive
Reporting by The New York Times on November 2, cited by Becker's and based on seven people familiar with the plans, said the EEOC is not expected to remove the core protections for workers who are pregnant, but could drop explicit coverage for conditions affecting women who are not pregnant, leaving employers and courts to decide case by case which conditions qualify. Wider religious exemptions, which would let some employers refuse accommodations they say conflict with their beliefs, are also under consideration, according to that reporting. Those elements are reported plans, not published rule text, and the EEOC has not confirmed them.
The court ruling that already cut one part of the rule
Part of the 2024 rule is already gone. On May 21, 2025, U.S. District Judge David C. Joseph in Louisiana vacated the portion of the rule that required accommodation for elective abortions, in a decision consolidating several legal challenges, and ordered the EEOC to revise its regulations. HR Dive noted that the judge's order did not affect abortions stemming from treatment of an underlying medical condition related to pregnancy. Any new proposal will therefore be written on top of a rule that a federal court has already trimmed.
An EEOC spokesperson told HR Dive the agency does not comment on potential rulemaking deliberations or speculate about future regulatory actions, but emphasised the agency's and Chair Lucas's commitment to pregnant workers. The spokesperson said that since the start of the second Trump administration the agency has taken more than 40 public enforcement actions involving pregnancy-related discrimination, filed 24 lawsuits and obtained $1.6 million in relief for victims of pregnancy discrimination.
Critics say low-wage and hourly workers have the most at stake
Jocelyn Samuels, a former EEOC vice chair who helped write the 2024 rule, told The New York Times that narrowing it could put workers at risk of losing their jobs or facing health crises, particularly those in low-wage hourly roles — the jobs where a worker cannot simply work from home, swap a shift informally, or absorb unpaid time off. Reproductive Freedom for All, an advocacy group, condemned the reported plans in a statement on November 3; its president and CEO, Mini Timmaraju, said it was 'unconscionable to force workers to choose between the care they need and keeping their job.' That is the group's position, presented here as attributed criticism, not as a finding of fact.
There is also research on what the broader rule has done so far. A 2025 University of Wisconsin–Madison study cited in coverage of the proposal found the PWFA was associated with a 3.2 percent increase in births in states newly covered by the law. Supporters of the current rule point to that kind of finding; the EEOC majority's stated view is that the question is not whether pregnant workers deserve accommodation — the statute guarantees it — but how far beyond pregnancy the regulation should stretch.
Why this matters for Punjabi and diaspora workers in the US
A large share of this site's US readers work in exactly the settings where accommodation requests are made face-to-face with a supervisor: hospitals and care homes, warehouses, food processing, retail, trucking yards and dispatch offices. For a pregnant worker in those jobs, the practical difference between the 2024 definition and a narrower one is whether conditions such as fertility treatment, recovery after a miscarriage, postpartum depression or lactation breaks are clearly protected in writing, or become a negotiation — or a court case — each time. State law will also matter more if the federal floor narrows: Connecticut's business association CBIA, for example, reminded employers on November 3 that Connecticut's own Fair Employment Practices Act still requires pregnancy accommodations, including for loss or termination of pregnancy, whatever the EEOC does.
Source: CBIA
What happens next
A proposed rule is not a final rule. The EEOC's filing indicates the proposal should appear in the Federal Register in November 2026, after which anyone — workers, employers, unions, medical groups and the public — can submit comments. The agency expects the comment period to end sometime in January 2027. Only after reviewing those comments can the EEOC issue a final version, and until then the 2024 rule stays in force, minus the abortion-accommodation provisions the Louisiana court struck down in 2025. Workers with a live accommodation dispute do not need to wait for Washington: the PWFA as it stands today, and state laws like Connecticut's, are the rules that apply right now.