Pregnant worker laws and other family-based labor protections are a baby step toward giving working-class women the kinds of choices that have historically been concentrated among affluent professional women, despite the fact that the poor need these protections more. Andrew Cherlin, a social policy professor at Johns Hopkins University, tells The Nation via e-mail:

Working-class women are less likely to have the kinds of jobs that accommodate to pregnancies and to child care responsibilities. Yet given the declining wages of working-class men, the need for working-class women to work is greater than ever…. But the lack of workplace flexibility that working-class women often face makes it very difficult to combine wage-earning with pregnancy or childcare.