Colleges Must Accommodate Pregnant Students Under New Title IX

Lacy Guzman decided to go back to college when she was pregnant with her first child. She and her husband had both lost their jobs around the same time, and they wanted to set their family-to-be up for a more stable future.

By the time she started her associate program, her son, now 9, was 6 months old. Throughout her undergraduate and master’s programs, she had two more children.

Getting even simple accommodations during her pregnancies was frustrating, Guzman says. The semester that she was pregnant with her second child, she notified each of her professors early on that her due date was around finals week and asked if she could take exams early, just to be safe.

But as finals week approached, one math professor who had previously agreed to give her early access reversed course, apparently because she hadn’t yet written the exam.

“She said my options were to pray the child didn’t come out before—or while—I was taking the exam, or take an incomplete and finish her class in the fall,” Guzman said. “At that point, I would’ve been roughly two months postpartum … and algebra wouldn’t have been something I was thinking about.”

Guzman, who is now a career services specialist at Union College in New Jersey, did her master’s research on the experiences of student mothers and found that the challenges she faced were not unique. While Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 has always in theory protected pregnant students from discrimination, the Biden administration’s new regulations, which went into effect Aug. 1, made it explicit that colleges are obligated to provide requested accommodations for all pregnant students, as well as those who have recently given birth and those experiencing “pregnancy-related conditions,” which include miscarriages, abortions, lactation and more.

That is to say, if a case like Guzman’s happened now, the college’s Title IX office would be obligated to intervene—at least in states where the Department of Education is not currently blocked from enforcing the rule.

The regulations also require universities to provide pregnant students with notice of their rights, which experts say is almost as valuable as the rights themselves.

“Students tend to not know their rights until they’re told about them, especially for pregnancy; if you haven’t been a pregnant student before, how would you possibly know what your rights are?” said Dana Bolger, senior staff attorney at A Better Balance, a law firm focused on work-family law, and co-founder of the Title IX advocacy organization Know Your IX. “I hear all the time from pregnant students that have no idea Title IX has anything to do with them, and that has to change.”

Now, if a student discloses a pregnancy to a university employee, the employee is mandated to point them toward resources that outline their rights and to inform them that the institution’s Title IX office can support them.

“So many of the students who end up getting kicked out of their programs say, ‘I asked for help. Nobody knew who could help me. Nobody referred me to the right person. I’ve been trying for months,’” said Jessica Lee, director of the Pregnant Scholar Initiative, a legal resource and helpline for pregnant and parenting students.

New Pregnancy Policies

Some universities have long offered protections similar to the ones now required by law. But for many, the 2024 regulations have spurred the creation of new, expanded or clarified campus policies outlining the rights of pregnant and parenting students.

The University of New Mexico, which has a high population of student parents and a consistently full childcare center, released a Pregnancy Manual when the regulations went into effect on Aug. 1. The manual, which also covers pregnant employees and applicants, states that pregnant students have the right to take a leave of absence if needed and details the accommodations they may be entitled to, such as access to online classes. In clinical rotations, labs and other hands-on and group work, students should work with their professors to figure out “alternative paths to completion when possible,” the manual reads.

“I’m really glad that these new [Title IX] regulations bumped up pregnancy protections for students, because they weren’t really there before. The institution as a whole, I think, struggled with the limited guidance that we had,” said Angela Catena, UNM’s Title IX coordinator. “Now that we have it, we’re putting out a whole policy, because before, there was just a section in our nondiscrimination policy.”

The manual also discourages professors and university employees from taking “unintentional actions” that are actually discriminatory toward pregnant students, such as encouraging them to drop a class.

Guzman recalls that her husband, who was in his first semester of college while she was pregnant with their first child, was also subject to a form of discrimination.

“All of his professors were like, ‘Don’t come next semester because you’re about to have a baby.’ And while that comes from a place of ‘We don’t want you to be overwhelmed,’ he was discouraged from coming back to school because he was going to be a parent,” she recalled. “I think that was a moment that really kind of showed both of us what it means to be a parent in college.”

Other institutions, including Michigan State University and Princeton University, also released new or revised policies for pregnant and parenting students in the spring. Most explain how students can apply for accommodations and whom to contact in the event of pregnancy-related discrimination—typically the institution’s Title IX coordinator.

The policies all differ slightly in their details; MSU requires that pregnant students provide medical documentation of their pregnancy, while UNM holds that the institution must not require documentation except under certain circumstances. But for the most part, they all work toward the common goal of making it easier for pregnant students to receive accommodations.

Having a policy at all is a major step in the right direction, said Lee, whose organization has created model policies for universities to reference when crafting their own.

“It sounds silly, but a lot of schools are dealing with this all in a very ad hoc manner, and when you’re doing that, when you’re leaving everything up to discretion, that’s where the discrimination and liability occurs,” she said. “If you don’t have a policy, it means that students don’t know what to expect … We see a lot of students trying really, really hard to plan their pregnancies, to plan their courses, to make sure that they’re able to manage both at once, and without policies to refer to, it makes their job doing that a lot harder.”

Lactation Access

The new regulations also lay out specific requirements for accommodating lactating students. They require colleges and universities to provide lactation rooms for students, and to give them breaks to pump milk as needed.

For many universities, that’s not a huge adjustment, since a federal law was passed in 2022 requiring most employers—including institutions of higher education—to have lactation rooms available for their workers. Even before that, many institutions viewed nursing rooms as essential to preventing discrimination against pregnant students and employees.

But the old rules left room for interpretation, Lee noted.

“We actually saw Title IX coordinators say, ‘We’re not sure lactation is a pregnancy-related condition. We’re not sure that we have to provide lactation accommodations in order to avoid sex discrimination,’” she said. “Now that has been made very, very clear, and the Department of Education has set up standards for lactation spaces, that they have to be clean and private, not a bathroom. And that was another huge win.”

Guzman recalled that one of her colleges only had one lactation room for the entire campus, which required a complicated process to access.

“You had to schedule these times, and it was this really huge pain-in-the-butt process to just try to find a space that wasn’t a bathroom to pump milk for my daughter,” she said.

She hopes the new regulations will inspire universities to weigh whether their existing lactation facilities can be improved to make the lives of nursing students easier still.

What Is Still Needed?

Experts say that while the new federal Title IX regulations are significant, there are still ways they could be enhanced for pregnant and parenting students. For example, the rule contains very little support for parenting students who do not have specific postpartum medical needs, according to Bolger. The “reasonable accommodations” section of the regulations only applies to pregnant students—not parents who may need accommodations to care for their children.

“This is a population that can really excel academically but need support from their schools to do that,” she said. “I would love to see schools adopt attendance policies that include absences” related to having kids, such as staying home with them when they are ill.

Lee concurred, saying that students who call the Pregnant Scholar helpline often say they received great support from the Title IX office when pregnant, “‘but once I gave birth, it was like the rug was just pulled out from under me. There was nothing there.’ So, I think that’s really the next frontier in this struggle.”

Injunctions blocking the Department of Education from enforcing Biden’s Title IX regulations in certain states—resulting from lawsuits filed by conservative advocates who object to the inclusion of protections for transgender students—have also hampered the rollout of new protections for pregnant students.

But according to experts, the injunctions should not prevent colleges from embracing the new protections for pregnant students. Some institutions have opted to move forward with the protections even while halting any other changes to their Title IX policies. In North Dakota, for instance, where the new regulations are currently blocked at universities across the state, the University of North Dakota has implemented a policy mandating that employees direct pregnant students toward the relevant resources.

“I see a lot of folks who are confused right now saying, ‘Oh, should we not implement this student lactation policy?’” said Lee. “It’s enraging. But there is no reason to not move forward with supporting these students.”