Even after the 2008 amendments, the ADA at no point defines pregnancy as a “disability.” To end-run this fact, the agency discovers pregnancy’s “impairments.” The EEOC’s guidelines argue, “Although pregnancy itself is not a disability, impairments related to pregnancy can be disabilities if they substantially limit one or more major life activities.” Morning sickness, for example, would become a qualifying impairment under the ADA.

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Thus the EEOC is piling one radical legal interpretation (discarding the ADA’s clear intent to help the truly disabled) upon another (granting protections to pregnant women, who aren’t covered under the ADA).

As one of the two Republican commissioners, Constance Barker, wrote in a May memo to her colleagues, these legal gymnastics represent “an entirely new legal interpretation that is unsupported by Congressional intent or court interpretation.”