Maternity Leave and Work Issues
If you are planning to become pregnant, you need information about the policies in your workplace. For instance, your employer must inform you of any workplace hazards that could affect your pregnancy. Possible hazards include lead, ethylene oxide, ionizing radiation, and dibromochloropropane. Your policy manual should state your employer's policies regarding maternity leave and vacation time.
Your health care provider or midwife can tell you if your pregnancy will require extra visits, extra rest, or any work restrictions. Some women fear workplace discrimination regarding pregnancy, such as taking time for childcare and breastfeeding. But it is illegal for most employers to discriminate on these bases. If you develop problems during your pregnancy, your employer is required to treat your pregnancy like any other medical disability. This is part of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.
Under the Family Medical Leave Act, employees are eligible for unpaid leave for illness or pregnancy and birth, and their group health benefits maintained if they:
- Have worked for their employer at least 12 months
- Have worked at least 1, 250 hours over the past 12 months
- Work at a location where the company employs 50 or more people within 75 miles of that location
Eligibility is determined under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Make sure you get the right paperwork from your employer, and bring it to your provider.
Review Date:
8/20/2019
Reviewed By:
LaQuita Martinez, MD, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Emory Johns Creek Hospital, Alpharetta, GA. Also reviewed by David Zieve, MD, MHA, Medical Director, Brenda Conaway, Editorial Director, and the A.D.A.M. Editorial team.
The information provided herein should not be used during any medical emergency or for the diagnosis or treatment of any medical condition. A licensed medical professional should be consulted for diagnosis and treatment of any and all medical conditions. Links to other sites are provided for information only -- they do not constitute endorsements of those other sites. No warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, is made as to the accuracy, reliability, timeliness, or correctness of any translations made by a third-party service of the information provided herein into any other language.
© 1997-
A.D.A.M., a business unit of Ebix, Inc. Any duplication or distribution of the information contained herein is strictly prohibited.
All content on this site including text, images, graphics, audio, video, data, metadata, and compilations is protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws. You may view the content for personal, noncommercial use. Any other use requires prior written consent from Ebix. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, display, publish, reverse-engineer, adapt, modify, store beyond ordinary browser caching, index, mine, scrape, or create derivative works from this content. You may not use automated tools to access or extract content, including to create embeddings, vectors, datasets, or indexes for retrieval systems. Use of any content for training, fine-tuning, calibrating, testing, evaluating, or improving AI systems of any kind is prohibited without express written consent. This includes large language models, machine learning models, neural networks, generative systems, retrieval-augmented systems, and any software that ingests content to produce outputs. Any unauthorized use of the content including AI-related use is a violation of our rights and may result in legal action, damages, and statutory penalties to the fullest extent permitted by law. Ebix reserves the right to enforce its rights through legal, technological, and contractual measures.
© 1997-

All rights reserved.
A.D.A.M. content is best viewed in IE9 or above, Firefox and Google Chrome browser.