How AI gave employers a new excuse for an old pattern: laying off moms on maternity leave
Earlier this year, a mom from Long Island City, New York shared a story with Moms First that I haven’t been able to shake. The birth of her daughter nearly took her out. Water broke early. Thirty hours of labor. An emergency C-section, then a blood transfusion in a cold operating room, the kind of moment where the language in the room goes quiet and clinical. Motherhood didn’t begin gently for her. It began with survival.
Maternity leave followed. A slow, aching return to work while her body was still stitching itself back together. She told herself the story most of us were raised on: work hard, prepare well, and the system meets you halfway.
A few months later, it didn’t. She was laid off. Her family’s health insurance went with the job. Two months after that, a doctor said the word “cancer.”
She didn’t fall through the cracks because she did anything wrong. She fell through them because the cracks were already there, built into a system that assumes a mother can absorb any shock and keep going.
This week, I want to talk about why that assumption is getting more dangerous, not less, and why the newest excuse for it has a name: AI.
Who These Layoffs Keep Landing On
The layoff wave that’s rolled through the last three years keeps surfacing the same story: pregnant and new moms losing their jobs on or near maternity leave. Over the past six months, we’ve heard from dozens of moms who have shared similar layoff stories.
What’s changed is the cover story. “Restructuring” used to be the word. Now it’s “AI transformation” and that rebrand isn’t cosmetic. Framing a layoff as an AI strategy reads to investors as forward motion, not a warning sign, which makes it the cleanest possible excuse for cutting the workers hardest to defend, including women who are out of the room on leave when the decision gets made.
The scale is real. Companies have announced tens of thousands of job cuts this year explicitly linked to AI investment, a meaningful share of all the layoffs announced in 2026. Boston Consulting Group has projected that up to 15% of U.S. jobs could be eliminated over the next five years.
And now there’s a case file. Twenty-six current and former Meta employees sued the company in federal court on July 14, alleging Meta used a “constellation of internal AI systems” — performance ratings, activity-monitoring data, an internal tool called Metamate — to select roughly 8,000 workers for cuts earlier this year. Nearly half the people who sued had a leave connection. Think about it: a synthetic HR system built to score productivity, by design, can’t credit someone for work she couldn’t do while she was legally absent, on protected leave.
Women already absorb more than their share of the tech market’s cuts. In the last major layoff wave, women made up 45% of those let go while holding roughly 28% of the jobs. At the biggest tech companies — Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google, and their peers — the gap is even wider: women were a third of the workforce but 44% of the layoffs.
No U.S. dataset yet isolates how many of those women were laid off specifically while on leave. Right now, the Meta lawsuit’s own numbers are the sharpest data point we have.
The Loophole
Here’s the part that should make you angry (if you aren’t already infuriated): this is almost always legal. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act, the FMLA, the ADA, and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act all exist to stop someone from being targeted for being pregnant or on leave. But a “company-wide layoff,” with “the role was eliminated” as the reason, has historically slipped past all of it.
Turns out proving intent inside a mass layoff is really hard, and the severance paperwork often quietly waives your right to challenge the timing at all.
The Meta suit is one of the first real tests of a sharper theory. Normally, to prove a layoff targeted moms on leave, you’d need to show a manager made that call on purpose. But the lawsuit argues something different: the AI system scored employees using things like output and activity over the past year. Someone on leave has less output and activity that year, not because she did anything wrong, but because she was legally out. So the system scores her lower and flags her for a cut, automatically, without anyone deciding to target her specifically. No manager has to be biased for the result to be the same. That’s a new legal argument, even if it’s not yet a new outcome — the 26 plaintiffs are still out of their jobs, lawsuit or not.
The Double Blow
A layoff doesn’t just cut income. It cuts the health insurance a new baby, or a new diagnosis, needs most. That’s not a hypothetical for the mother in the story I opened with. Her coverage disappeared two months before the word “cancer” did. Pediatric visits, postpartum care, an oncology appointment: all of it lands right as the coverage does not.
The deeper reason her leave and her insurance vanished in the very same phone call is that in this country, both are structured as something an employer chooses to give you, not something you’re owed. When your protection for having a body, having a baby, having a diagnosis all live inside your employment status, losing the job means losing all of it at once. Not by accident. By design.
Where This Leaves Us
If you’re reading this thinking, “wait, how is any of this legal?”, I know. It’s wild. That’s exactly why we’re naming it.
If this happened to you, you’re not imagining the unfairness, and you’re not the only one it’s happened to. We’ve put together an Action Center with what you can actually do right now — before you sign anything. Start there.
We’re also collecting stories as part of our American Motherhood Tour precisely so we can keep putting patterns like these in front of the people with the power to change it, instead of letting them disappear into a headcount spreadsheet.
You Have More Power Than They Told You
A layoff while you’re pregnant, on leave, or just back rarely feels legal.
Here’s what you can do right now:
- Don’t sign your severance agreement right away. Many waive your right to challenge the timing of your layoff. Call A Better Balance first — their legal helpline is free.
- Know what protects you. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act, the FMLA, and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act all exist for a reason. If your layoff came suspiciously close to a leave request, an accommodation ask, or a return date, that timing matters. Write it down while you still remember it clearly.
- Get ahead of your health coverage gap. Losing your job opens a special enrollment window on Healthcare.gov and you don’t have to wait for open enrollment.
- Check Medicaid and CHIP. An income drop from a layoff can newly qualify your family, even if you didn’t qualify before.
- If it’s AI-driven, ask for the paper trail. You’re allowed to ask what criteria were used to select you for a layoff. Get it in writing where you can.
- Tell us what happened: The stories moms send us are how we keep this pattern in the news instead of letting them scroll away in the comments section of social media. Share your experience with us.
Screenings Happening Near You
We’ve surpassed 400 scheduled screenings across the US! Find a local watch party near you, attend a virtual event, or host your own.
- Austin, TX July 29, 5:30-8:45 PM — RSVP
- San Francisco, CA July 29, 5-7 PM at Tillage — RSVP
- Northport, AL, July 30, 5-7 PM at The Venue — RSVP
- St. Petersburg, FL, July 30, 6-8 PM PM at Paloma House — RSVP
- Oakland, CA, July 30, 7-9 PM at East Bay Birth Collective — RSVP
- Jacksonville, FL, July 31, 6-9 PM at Mom Haven Hub — RSVP
- Philadelphia, PA, July 31, 6-8:30 PM at Germantown Mennonite Church — RSVP
- Bentonville, AR, July 31, 6-8:30 PM at 1SELFhealth / Embrace FMO — RSVP
- Prescott Valley, AZ, Aug 1, 9-2:30 PM — RSVP
- Mukilteo, WA, Aug 2, 1:30-4:30 PM at Mukilteo Library – Sno-Isle Libraries — RSVP
Looking for a virtual event? Go to the events page and filter results by “Show virtual events only.”
Now Playing in Five Languages (and Ready to Go Global)
No Country for Mothers just got a lot easier to share.
The film is now available with Spanish, French, Italian, Chinese, and Portuguese subtitles. Sign up to host a watch party and bring more people into the room: your abuela, your best friend from grad school, the coworker who’s never quite felt like American workplace culture was built for her.
This isn’t a small thing to us. Motherhood doesn’t happen in one language, and neither should this movement.
Need a specific language available for your screening? Email us at hello@momsfirst.us and we’ll help you get set up.
And if you’ve been dreaming bigger: moms in Belgium, Nigeria, Canada, Austria, Denmark, South Africa, and the UK have already reached out to host watch parties of their own.
If you want to bring this film to your community outside the US, we’ve got you covered. Just reach out to hello@momsfirst.us and let’s make it happen.
Check out what people are saying about Moms First in the news
None of this is inevitable. We built a system where a mother’s leave gets read as a liability instead of what it is: proof that she showed up for the hardest job there is. Naming it is how we start building one that doesn’t.
For every mother who’s ever gotten that call,
