Raising a newborn was hard enough. Then came a layoff.

This story originally appeared in La Fronde’s July 28 newsletter.

The email came completely out of left field.

In February, Sabrina Malhi was on maternity leave from her job as a national health-care reporter covering infant and maternal health at The Washington Post when she got an invitation to a company-wide video call with The Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray. There, he delivered the grim news: the company was in deep financial trouble and would lay off a significant number of employees (about 30 percent of its entire staff, according to the New York Times). 

Staff received an email following the announcement that confirmed whether they were safe or not. Holding her newborn son and in the throes of postpartum, Sabrina got the dreaded note: her position was eliminated. 

“I’m biting my nails and my fingers are starting to bleed,” Sabrina says in anticipation of the email. “I got that email saying your role has been eliminated and I started crying while holding my baby. I’m six weeks postpartum.” 

The timing couldn't have been worse. Sabrina and her husband had recently decided he would leave his job to start a coffee business while she continued working at The Post. Suddenly, they found themselves without either steady paycheck while raising a newborn son and young daughter.

“I felt a little safe because I was one of the health reporters and they had talked about investing in health and reporting,” she says about The Post’s plans before going on maternity leave. “So that was a shock. It felt like a gut punch. I felt like the wind was knocked out of me when that happened. I did not expect that at all.”

Sadly, Sabrina's situation is one that more pregnant women may have to navigate as media layoffs rise. Gabriella Iannetta was pregnant with her first child, a daughter, in December 2023 when she got laid off from her job at Condé Nast as Glamour’s associate director of audience development. 

She'd already sensed something was wrong. Her boss had left, colleagues were departing, and weeks after emailing HR to ask about maternity leave benefits, she says she never received a response.

"I was just like, 'Something feels off,'" Gabriella recalls. Her severance included COBRA coverage — but not enough paid leave to get through childbirth. Worse, her health insurance expired on her due date.

Her situation felt like the cruelest irony. Just over a year before getting let go, she worked on a big, award-winning editorial package for Glamour advocating for federal paid family leave. Now, she found herself in need of the same benefit that her employer was advocating for. 

“When I fell pregnant some time after that, I thought I was in good hands and was at a place that understood what was going on,” Gabriella says. “I was incredibly sick during my pregnancy. I was throwing up multiple times a day to the point where I lost 20 pounds during my pregnancy.”

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Gabriella was in a race against time to find a job before her due date. After posting about her layoff on LinkedIn, her previous employer, The Sun, reached out about a deputy head of SEO role. 

“They were extremely lenient about my time off,” she says. “They were like, ‘We can't give you maternity leave because you have to be at the company for a year,’ but they said, ‘Take as much time as you want.’ They said it will be unpaid, but don't use your vacation days because you're going to need vacation days when you come back. They were just as accommodating as you could be for an unpaid maternity leave.”

Landing that job was a huge weight off Gabriella’s shoulders. But there was another big hurdle that lay ahead when she gave birth to her daughter in February 2024.

“I got the full bill from [the hospital] and I didn’t pay that shit,” Gabriella says. “We’re still fighting it but it was like $25,000. I'm not paying a dime until I know what the hell is going on because I was technically insured like the week after. She was literally born between this little time that I wasn't insured, and that was tough.”

The whole situation just felt like another personal blow that she didn’t deserve after spending years working tirelessly to move up the corporate ladder. 

“I've worked so fucking hard in my career. I deserved that paid time off,” she says. “I'm not saying that other people don't, but it's just like, I was in a career where that was available to me. I was in a career where I worked for years. I was in a career where I never got fired, that I never got put on discipline. It just still felt like a punishment.” 

Just as humbling for Sabrina was losing a job that felt like a mission rather than just a steady paycheck. Yes, she was a mom responsible for being a role model and provider to her two young kids, but it was important to her that her kids saw her as more than that. 

“I didn’t want my identity to just be a mom,” she says. “I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that, but for me, my identity is multifaceted. I'm a mom. I'm also somebody who is a journalist. I'm also somebody who is a wife. I'm also a daughter. All these different identities are really important to me.”

Sabrina also wanted to send a message publicly that being laid off was nothing to be ashamed of. She took to social media the day she was laid off and received an outpouring of supportive messages from complete strangers all around the world. Sabrina says she and her husband were in a good place financially, so she could take a break before jumping back into the job search. She didn’t disclose how much severance she received from The Post, but says the newsroom’s Guild advocated for the best possible package.

Gabriella also says her husband and family were a crucial support system during her maternity leave. Still, the stress of mounting bills was hard to ignore. 

“I wanted to do stuff with her but I had to watch every dime,” she says. “Some of these music classes are like $40, and it’s like, well, okay, so I can't get you into a weekly thing. I just wanted to take her places. I wanted to buy her cute outfits. I wanted to actually not just spend time with her, but spend that time not working, just being out there and doing stuff. I didn't feel like I could do that.”

Generally, it’s not illegal for companies in the U.S. to lay off women who are pregnant or are on maternity leave. But what if you have a hunch that your job might have laid you off because you were pregnant? Proving discrimination is incredibly difficult to pull off, according to women's workplace rights attorney Jack Tuckner. 

“The employee has all the burdens in court — the burden of production, persuasion, and the ultimate burden of proof. And it's a lengthy, expensive, public process,” he says. “But what's so important to understand if you're a woman dealing with some type of discriminatory animus related to pregnancy from the moment you tell them is that it's not black and white. It's not a ‘Boston Legal’ episode. It's not about all or nothing, going to trial five years from now and a jury hands you the keys to the city. Ninety-nine percent of cases don't come to that. What it's really about is leverage. What it's really about is knowing upfront, for example, when and how do you tell your employer you're pregnant.”

Jack, who has been working on pregnancy cases for nearly 30 years, encourages women to document their pregnancy to their employers as soon as they’re ready to share the news.

“When you’re ready to announce, you put it in writing to your company. It could be a friendly note to HR — ‘just looking to find out about this company's maternity leave policy, I'm thrilled to announce I'm pregnant and this is my due date.’ Put it in writing. This way you have a formal timestamp, a paper trail of when you told the company. Because if things go south as a result of that, it's presumptively discriminatory. It's differential treatment.”

If you’re pregnant and do get laid off, Jack encourages women to consult with a lawyer before signing any severance agreements to get the best possible deal and understand what legal recourse they may have. 

“One should probably consult with an employee rights lawyer, a plaintiff side employment lawyer,” says Jack. “Most of us on the plaintiff side are members of the National Employment Lawyers Association, based in San Francisco. Every state has a local affiliate. We are the civil rights employment lawyers for employees. You want to get a consultation. Many of us give free consultations.”

While progress toward greater protections for pregnant women has been slow, there have been some notable strides made in recent years, including the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act that was passed in 2023, which requires employers to provide accommodations to employees who are pregnant or sick who don't qualify for the Family and Medical Leave Act. Even with that law in place, Jack acknowledges some real shortcomings in how the law treats pregnant women. 

“If men could get pregnant, the FMLA would be 12 months long and fully paid, and everybody knows that,” he says.

For Gabriella, rebuilding her life after the Condé layoff took a bit of a backseat after she was laid off again nine months after taking The Sun job. She says she got the same amount of severance as what Condé gave her despite working there for a fraction of the time. And it helped her get through a few months of unemployment until she landed her current job as a senior editor of audience development at Realtor.com. She says the layoffs, and becoming a new mom, gave her a different perspective about work from her Condé days. 

“I used to want to be the editor-in-chief of the newsroom. I wanted to be on top, and be the right-hand person to all this stuff. And now I'm just like, I love my baby. I love that I have a job that lets me go be with her,” she says. 

Gabriella’s advice to other women is to not feel guilty about jumping right into it if they don’t have the financial means to take a break from work. For women who are able to take a beat to rest, like Sabrina, the extra time with her kids was an unintended blessing that came from her layoff. 

“My kids will be this age for just a short amount of time. I know it's really hard to sometimes be present and enjoy whatever's going on around you when you're suffering inside, because you lost your job, but if there is a way to find those moments of peace and find those pockets of hope and joy, hold on to those a little more,” she says. 

Gabriella and Sabrina both say that sharing their stories on social media helped them get opportunities faster. After Sabrina shared her story publicly, an editor reached out with a freelance opportunity. It was one bright spot in a challenging job search to find another full-time health reporting role. And while she’s yet to find that role, she hasn’t lost hope that she’ll be able to do the same work she did at The Post that meant so much to her. 

“I had family members reach out to me saying they're not big news people but they read my work. People who have reached out and said because of my story they have taken steps to protect their kids or have advocated or asked for more. That's why my biggest goal in my journalism career has been to provide a service to people. I really do want to provide information to people who otherwise wouldn't be reading the news.”