The Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) is an amendment to the Title VII provision against sex discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Discrimination against pregnant women, women seeking to become pregnant and recent mothers stems from concerns about workplace productivity. In 1932, in the throes of the Great Depression, women seeking employment out of economic necessity were barred by Congress’ enactment of the Federal Economy Act (later amended to 31 U.S.C. § 1535), but the New Deal, workforce deficiencies in World War II and legislation in the following two decades, gradually gave more access to a wider employment opportunities. Various obstacles persisted, nevertheless–one issue of social policy that reached the US Supreme Court on various occasions concerned the application of the Fourteenth Amendment in issues of sex discrimination.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Court ruled in cases questioning the constitutionality of discriminating against pregnant women, women seeking pregnancy, and new mothers under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1971 Reed v. Reed, the Court found that a state statute which preferentially awarded the administrative rights of an estate to males over females was unconstitutional. This case, the first to apply the equal protection clause to a circumstance of sex discrimination, established a new benchmark for evaluating sex discrimination; it was followed by a flurry of other Supreme Court decisions that weighed in on the issue throughout the 1970s.

According to the legislative history, the most important of these cases considered by the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, was a 1976 case, General Electric Company v. Gilbert. This case was important in the sense that it became the flashpoint for legislative intervention on the question of sex discrimination. In Gilbert, the Court ruled that an employer’s health and disability plan for employees, which excluded any pregnancy-related disability, was constitutional and did not contravene any rights to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. Congress’ response indicated otherwise. In 1978, Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act as an amendment to the Civil Rights Act, in recognition of the fact that, like race, sex was an inherent condition of the individual that should not, as a matter of social policy, serve as the basis for workplace discrimination.